Filinkov is formally accused of belonging to a terrorist organization, part of a sprawling case against nine young men in St. Petersburg and Penza, a town four hundred miles southeast of Moscow, who, to varying degrees, identify as anti-Fascists or anarchists, or have overlapping friends in those communities. Those detained, according to the F.S.B., have been planning a violent uprising, aimed at “stirring up the masses for further destabilization of the political situation in the country.” The F.S.B.claims the group calls itself Syet, or the Network.
All records regarding the case are sealed, which means that the details of the investigation remain unknown, but the little information that has leaked suggests a plot as fantastical as it is unlikely. The F.S.B. claims that Filinkov and his co-conspirators were planning to set off bombs ahead of Russia’s Presidential election last March, and also during the World Cup, which starts on June 14th and will be held in eleven Russian cities, including St. Petersburg and Saransk, ninety miles from Penza. Among their alleged targets was the Lenin mausoleum, on Red Square.
Human-rights groups, in addition to friends and supporters of the defendants, dismiss the purported plot as a fiction, and say several of the young men were brutally tortured. They believe that overzealous F.S.B. officers essentially invented the Network as a way to impress their superiors, as Russia prepares to host a safe and secure World Cup designed to dazzle a half million foreign visitors and billions of viewers worldwide. Several of those who know the defendants told me that, naturally, those interested in anarchism—along with anti-Fascism and leftist economics—were liable to discuss revolution as a political process, but to suggest that those arrested formed some sort of coherent underground cell, let alone one dedicated to an armed coup, is nonsensical. “I can’t imagine an anarchist who doesn’t talk about some future revolution,” one friend told me. “But to say they wanted to blow up the Lenin mausoleum—it’s a K.G.B. accusation. It’s silly, embarrassing even. What could this possibly have to do with revolution in 2018?”
When I spoke with Vitaly Cherkasov, Filinkov’s lawyer, he wholly rejected the idea that the young men were plotting to overthrow the Russian state. (Equally unlikely, he added, is the F.S.B.’s claim that they wanted to establish an “anarchist government,” a paradoxical impossibility to most anarchists.) If they had some discussions, he said, they represented nothing more than young people debating ideas and sharing utopian fantasies. Cherkasov reached for an analogy from Russian history to explain the case: “The country went through something like this in the nineteen-thirties, when the special services uncovered all sorts of cells supposedly plotting to overthrow the state, and these people were imprisoned and shot—and then, later, it turned out that most of them were innocent, and were rehabilitated.” It is an overly dramatic and, thankfully, not all-that-fitting comparison, but the notion of a number of people being picked up off the street and tortured to admit membership in a revolutionary cell that may well not exist has the ring of secret-police tactics of a century ago.
When I met Cherkasov in St. Petersburg, he told me about visiting Filinkov in the pretrial detention facility that abuts the city’s F.S.B. building. At that meeting, Cherkasov said, Filinkov pulled down his pants, revealing his right thigh, which was covered in dozens of ruddy keloid spots, a spray of burn marks left by repeated strikes from an electric stun gun. Cherkasov said that Filinkov told him that the F.S.B. agents first took him from the airport to a polyclinic, for a checkup. It was a grim moment of pseudo-concern: the reason, Filinkov came to understand, was to make sure his body could withstand the tortures to come. Back in the van, Filinkov was handcuffed. One agent pulled his wool cap over his face; another began to strike him with heavy blows. Filinkov panicked—at which point his body was jolted with the first electroshock.
Over the next five hours, Filinkov was driven around the outskirts of St. Petersburg, while being beaten and repeatedly shocked with the stun gun. He later described the ghoulish process in a jailhouse diary entry, which he publicly released: “They asked questions. If I didn’t know the answer, they hit me with electric shocks. If the answer didn’t correspond to their expectations, they hit me with shocks. If I tried to think or formulate, I was hit with electric current. If I forgot what they said, I was hit with the current.” Some of the questions were impossible to answer (“Where are the weapons?”), but others he tried to answer factually (basic details about his wife and friends).
In addition to his lawyer, Cherkasov, Filinkov was visited in jail by two members of St. Petersburg’s public monitoring commission, an independent body whose members visit detention facilities and check on prison conditions. Yekaterina Kosarevskaya, who is twenty-six, and Yana Teplitskaya, who is twenty-seven, are both mathematicians; their work on the commission is formally a volunteer pursuit, but it has grown into a kind of civic duty that takes up much of their time.
I met Kosarevskaya and Teplitskaya in a café along one of St. Petersburg’s many charming canals, which wind languidly through the center of what is known as Russia’s northern capital. The World Cup will be held during the city’s famed “white nights,” when, because of the northern latitude, a spectral twilight lingers in the sky until well after midnight. They told me that Filinkov showed his wounds to them, too, and that he added more details to what he had told Cherkasov. He spoke of how he was visited in jail by one of the F.S.B. agents who tortured him, who alternated between apologizing for using force (“You know, I don’t like this myself!”) and making further threats. (He suggested that Filinkov could be moved to a worse jail, where “your cellmate will beat you to death, and no one will even hear.”) The F.S.B. agent at one point alluded to prison rape, asking Filinkov, “Is your asshole raw yet?” At night, Filinkov would have nightmares of his torture and remember new details: the license plate of the car that drove him around St. Petersburg, how the seats inside were arranged, bits of conversation among the F.S.B. officers.
When we spoke, Kosarevskaya said that she was struck by how Filinkov said he was tortured to extract a confession during the first minutes of his detention, and then he was tortured to produce the exact formulation of that confession, which was provided to him by F.S.B. agents.
It was Kosarevskaya and Teplitskaya who brought Filinkov’s torture to public attention, by posting the allegations online and speaking about them to the press, making the Network case something of a cause célèbre, at least in the limited but vibrant circles of Russian activists and independent journalists. Some of the strongest reporting on the Network case has been done by MediaZona, an independent Russian news site, founded by two members of Pussy Riot, focussed on the criminal-justice system. In Penza, where relatives and lawyers of the accused had previously kept quiet, a number of mothers of those arrested emerged to say that their sons, too, had been tortured in custody.
The F.S.B., apparently, had not expected such public attention. The agency has not directly answered questions from local journalists and activists about the alleged tortures, and did not respond to a request for comment.
“We quite obviously weren’t quite sure what to do or how to handle this, but it seemed F.S.B. itself didn’t, either,” Teplitskaya told me. One night, Kosarevskaya was followed home; a man paced around her building’s courtyard, watching as she finished her cigarette. Teplitskaya and Kosarevskaya were also accosted by film crews from NTV, a state-controlled television channel known for sensationalist programming, which aired a thirty-minute, darkly conspiratorial documentary about the Network case. (In Penza, an F.S.B. agent cajoled a mother of one of the defendants into sitting for an interview with NTV producers.)
Filinkov is not the only suspect in the Network case who has apparently endured torture. On January 25th, Igor Shishkin disappeared while walking his dog in St. Petersburg. Shishkin is twenty-six and has friends in the city’s anti-Fascist and anarchist circles. He is a vegan and runs an online store specializing in vegan food and nutrition products. “He is a vegan because he simply can’t imagine that you could relate to animals any other way,” his wife, Tatiana, told me, when we met for coffee near St. Petersburg’s central train station. Shishkin was missing for two days and then turned up in jail, charged with the same crime as Filinkov: membership in a terrorist organization—that is, the supposed Network cell.
Shishkin’s hearing was declared closed by the presiding judge at the last minute, and bailiffs rushed him past waiting journalists. One friend who caught a glimpse of him later said that he saw bruises under Shishkin’s eyes; his head was covered by the hood of his jacket, and a black mask obscured much of his face. Kosarevskaya and Teplitskaya called it a “special operation” to keep likely signs of abuse from becoming public. When the two volunteers went to see Shishkin in jail, they could see he had been badly beaten, with one eye dark and swollen. Shishkin said that he had injured himself during a training session. When they spotted what looked like burn marks on his left hand and, on a later visit, his back, Shishkin told them that he didn’t remember what happened. They didn’t press. “He knows that we understand, that the prison staff understands, that everyone understands,” Teplitskaya told me. Neither Shishkin nor his lawyer have filed a complaint alleging physical abuse.
Ilya Kapustin, a twenty-eight-year-old man from St. Petersburg, told me how, on the same night Shishkin disappeared, he was detained by five men in black clothes and masks. They ran up to him, near his apartment building in St. Petersburg, and, without saying a word, threw him on the ground, put his arms in handcuffs, and tossed him onto the floor of a waiting minivan. They asked about a friend and colleague who had been arrested, in January, on suspicion of carrying low-grade gunpowder, and who only later, this April, was added to the Network case. It turns out that Kapustin was simply unlucky—he had called the friend’s phone when he was being arrested, thus arousing suspicion. After detaining him, the five men asked why he had called his friend. “They said he was being held, that he was suspected of serious crimes,” Kapustin said. He recalled being in shock and completely disoriented. “I told them everything I knew—that is, practically nothing—but they were convinced I must know something else, that we are participating in some kind of plot together.”
The F.S.B. operatives then started to administer electroshock jolts to Kapustin. “They triggered the electric current and asked about something, and, when I didn’t have information they were after, they shocked me over and over, five or ten times in a row. Each shock felt like it lasted an eternity.” The pain was terrible, he told me. All he could do was gnaw at his teeth and wait for it to end. The agents threatened to take him into the forest, break his legs, and leave him there to freeze. “I could only think about how to end this, any way at all—let them come up with a fictitious case, or they could kill me. Any option was better than what is happening.”
After three hours, the agents drove Kapustin to a building in the center of town, which he later realized was the St. Petersburg headquarters of the F.S.B. There, he was subjected to an official interrogation, which was carried out formally, without threats or physical violence. But, when Kapustin was alone with one of the agents, he told him that he should coöperate—otherwise, they could arrange a “second round.” Finally, agents drove him to his apartment and searched it, hurling papers and books and clothes. They demanded passwords for his phone and laptop; when he refused, they grew angry. One F.S.B. agent suggested aloud that they could hide a grenade somewhere in the apartment, with the implicit suggestion that the F.S.B. would return and find Kapustin in possession of a weapon.
The next day, Kapustin went to a trauma center, where a doctor recorded burns on his body, cuts on his wrists from the handcuffs, and bruises to his shoulders, knees, and face. Kapustin told his story to the Russian press and filed a formal complaint against the F.S.B. with Russian investigators. Yet he wasn’t formally under suspicion in the case—he was technically a witness—so he could come and go from Russia as he pleased.
In February, Kapustin fled to Finland, a few hours from St. Petersburg, where he asked for asylum. When I spoke with him by phone, he was staying at a dormitory and waiting for his application to be processed. Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, investigators rejected his complaint: they ruled that Kapustin had resisted arrest and that the F.S.B. officers were right to electrocute him. In any case, the burn marks on his stomach and groin, they said, were actually bites from bedbugs.
The allegations of F.S.B. torture in the Network case are not new for Russian counterterrorism investigations. Last year, two brothers, born in Kyrgyzstan, who were arrested in connection with a bombing in the St. Petersburg metro in April, 2017, which left sixteen dead, said that they had been held in a secret F.S.B. prison for several days and tortured. They claimed they were subject to waterboarding, electroshocks, and severe beatings. The allegations caused little public outcry or response. “Unfortunately,” Cherkasov told me, many Russians “see a guy with a beard and think he probably wasn’t arrested for nothing.”
Social attitudes in Russia toward anarchists and anti-Fascists are not much different, which suggests why they may have been considered easy targets—and why attention to the Network case is highly felt in leftist and activist circles but largely absent in society as a whole. “There is a prejudice to think of anarchists as aggressive: ‘they can’t really be peaceful, maybe these guys actually did do something,’ ” one friend of the accused told me, summarizing public perceptions. “But that doesn’t fit with what I know about them.” Several people in St. Petersburg told me of how one of the suspects was mostly known for organizing a barter flea market, where people exchanged goods at no cost.
Since the arrests, a certain paranoia has descended over the city’s leftist community; dozens have fled the country. “I also consider myself an anarchist,” another friend told me. “Does that mean if the F.S.B. shows up and finds a copy of Kropotkin”—a Russian philosopher and proponent of anarcho-communism, who died in 1921—“it’s enough to send me off to prison?”
The first World Cup match in St. Petersburg will be played on June 15th, between Morocco and Iran. The city will host seven games during the tournament, including the third-place playoff, on July 14th. No doubt Russia, with a history of suffering attacks from Islamic militants and ISIS-linked terrorists, is right to worry about security.
Before high-profile events like the Presidential election and the World Cup, Russian officials—from Vladimir Putin on down—send out informal directives, calling on the security organs to ensure order. Nothing should disturb the image of a proud and successful celebration. For a particular F.S.B. unit or officer, being seen as active and effective in preventing would-be plots from materializing is a way to earn bureaucratic favor, in turn leading to promotions and increased resources. Cherkasov, Filinkov’s lawyer, put it simply: “The state wants to see a certain kind of picture, and the security services give it to them.”
In February, in a speech before a gathering of high-ranking law-enforcement officials, Putin said that the country must host the World Cup “at the highest level and, above all, ensure the maximum safety of both athletes and fans.” He went on to issue a plea: “Your efficient and competent work will directly determine how this event takes place, and the image of our country.”
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Joshua Yaffa
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