Control Over Society: The Kremlin's Anti-Crisis Package

Ezhednevnyi Zhurnal and Agentura.Ru begun an investigation of the government's campaign against extremism, which was unveiled today, in our opinion, in order to gain control of civil society and strengthen the government's police services.

In recent years, the Siloviki have often applied pressure on political activists and public figures, citing the struggle with extremists; however, it always affects people who interfere with the government.

But now the government has attached such resources and powers to extremism countermeasures that they will inevitably affect people far removed from politics as well.

Blacklists of alleged extremists, which currently include 10,000 Russians, will grow to include hundreds of thousands, and the freedom to make critical statements online will become a thing of the past.

Massive investments in systems for the electronic monitoring of citizens will make all group movements in Russian cities impossible, and, in consequence, eliminating not only unsanctioned meetings, but also flash mobs. And the “non-conformist youth” are marked for surveillance in the capacity of one the goals.

For the first time in 18 years, the government, citing the need to fight the "destabilization of the situation" against a backdrop of world crisis, has openly tasked the special services to ferret out politically unreliable citizens, from soccer fans to separatists.

The lead role in this campaign was not given to the FSB, which in principal is tasked to defend the constitutional order in Russia, but to the MVD.

Resources

The establishment of the Interior Ministry’s Department to Combat Extremism, which took place in September of 2008 and was based on the Department to Combat Organized Crime and Terrorism (DBOPiT), may be considered the starting point of the far-reaching campaign to control the politically unreliable.

On 23 April 2009, Yurii Kokov, the commanding General of the Department, announced that the new structure is fully prepared to be deployed.

It is asserted that organized crime in Russia has decreased considerably and that the criminal investigation and economic crime departments can manage it. It is also asserted that extremism represents a threat to the constitutional structure in Russia, especially against the backdrop of a financial crisis when all social groups may become active.

This explanation does not stand up to scrutiny. First of all, extremist crimes are not considered to be serious as opposed to the activities of criminal organizations. In Russia, public utterances inciting racial, social, or other forms of hate are considered extremism - that is words, and not actions. Secondly, the organized crime rate in our country is tens of times higher than the number of Extremist crimes. According to data from the MVD’s Main Information Analysis Center, the number of crimes investigated in 2008 that were committed by members of criminal organizations number 36,601. Extremist crimes that were registered in the same time period number at 460. One can hardly consider them to represent a serious threat to the state, even if their number increases several times.

It seems that the government is mobilizing the structure of the former Department to Combat Organized Crime and Terrorism, which earlier included the Directorate’s Bureau of Special investigation, “T” Centers, and even regional departments to Combat Organized Crime and Terrorism, in order to combat an insignificant number of minor crimes.

Centers for Combating Extremism (So called “E” Centers) were established throughout the country by the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs and the Directorate of Internal Affairs, based on the former Department to Combat Organized Crime and Terrorism. Throughout Russia there are thousands of experienced and efficient operatives, which have in the past dealt with true bandits and terrorists and have developed well defined methods in the course of this struggle.

A legal chain of command has been established under the struggle with extremism: it is made up of the extremism departments in the public prosecutor’s office and the investigative committee. Of course, all of these people will need something to do in order keep them busy – at least, nobody avoided accountability to the MVD. And it is obvious, that half a thousand crimes a year will be clearly insufficient for the established mechanism, not to mention, that almost half of the extremist cases die in court.

Nobody is hiding the fact that there are plans to use the units to combat extremism for the repression of popular demonstrations. Yurii Kokov, the chief of the new department, did not exclude the department’s participation in suppressing social protests.

The government recently invested a massive amount of resources in the program for suppression and repression of popular unrest. Two main steps were made in this direction.

In June 2008, the Center for the Protection of Public Order was established in the MVD, the task of which is to coordinate the activities of the internal affairs agencies and internal security troops during the public events. We are reminded that the planned decrease in internal forces (VV), which number nearly 200 thousand, was put off until better times.

By order of the country’s leadership, at the end of last year, a situation center was established by the MVD and the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS) to monitor the state of affairs in the social sphere and the sphere of migration. Information from the network of centers throughout the country will converge there. The aim is to monitor the public mood and to control situations on-site.

Technology and Intentions

Judging by the MVD Chief’s announcements, the main focus is assumed to be efforts to suppress extremist crimes. "The Functions of the Department for the Struggle with Extremism is, other than operative-agent work, aimed at the discovery and suppression of crimes, and the prevention and monitoring of what is going on in the sphere of extremist activities," – Rashid Nurgaliev, MVD chief announced in one interview.

Of course, many methods of controlling public order were used during the Soviet era, but since then, technology has advanced greatly. Now, the MVD is prepared to utilize all modern developments in the sphere of electronic surveillance in order to establish the identity of malcontents and to track their movements. These are, for example, facial search and recognition programs assisted by cameras installed in train stations and airports.

The MVD has been setting up an electronic complex which incorporates all data banks, including video surveillance data, data from the purchase of plane and train tickets, and all possible sorts of records into one system for the entire country. As a result, the number of citizens entering into the databases and beginning to have their freedom of movement and other rights limited is continuously increasing. The reason that people are entered into the database remains an internal matter within the MVD and the special services – but this procedure does not involve judicial decision. The way such a system may work in theory can be seen in the movie the Bourne Supremacy. Jason Bourne boards a train headed from Berlin to Moscow, his image is captured by a camera, after which the CIA determines his itinerary and sends his information to Russia, where agents try to arrest him.

Naturally, in practice, such a system may fail. However, the arrest of political activists en route to other cities has been recorded repeatedly, and it has been established that they were possible thanks to the police quickly receiving information from ticket sales systems. All of this has occurred even prior to the unified electronic system of the internal affairs agencies.

The MVD’s orientation on suppressing extremist crimes, and not disclosing and transferring the cases to the courts suggests ample possibilities for agential work in the field, and for all types of intelligence surveillance – wire taps, the opening and inspection of email, and internet surveillance. As far as may be understood from the announcements from the chiefs of the police and from departmental records, the flowing are designated target groups of the anti-extremist campaign:

• Islamists – all associations and communities, independent of the Religious Administration of Muslims (DUM)
• Non-systematic parties and public associations – such as the outlawed National Bolshevik Party, and even the Red Youth Vanguard, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the United Civil Front, Environmentalists, and Human Rights Activists.
• Informal associations: from Soccer fanatics and neo-Nazis to associations of lovers of Pagan cults.
• Professional Unions
• Non-politically motivated dissenters – such as defenders of the Khimkinskii Forest and opponents of high-rise development.
• Sectarians of several public figures of the Russian Orthodox Church, including Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.

Other than these, ordinary people that are participating in anything may become victims of this struggle: the more lists, records, and databases there are, the higher the probability of mistakes.

Having allotted powerful resources for the prevention of extremism, the government has allocated separate budgets for the purchase of technologies which may come in handy in the chance that a crisis takes place. They are developing new domestic techniques for dispersing meetings and demonstrations which have not been worked on since the end of the 1980s. Three types of water-jet machines based on the Gazel, Kamaz, and the Ural are already being purchased by the MVD, and the Special Police Forces (OMON) and the Specialized Designation Police Detachments (OMSN) are training for new crowd dispersal techniques.

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We are beginning a series of material about the features of the anti-extremism campaign. We are also planning to organize a social discourse among experts in Russia and abroad.