‘Better to take risks than to self-destruct bit by bit’

Lifelong dissident and human rights advocate Oleg Orlov is on trial in Moscow. He wrote an article calling Putin’s a fascist regime.

A major political trial is underway in Moscow. The defendant this time is Oleg Orlov, a well-known dissident, human rights advocate, and co-founder of Memorial, a key civil liberties NGO dissolved by a court decision in 2021 and honored with a Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The formal cause of charges against Orlov is an opinion article he first published in French, posting a Russian translation on Facebook the following day. “They Wanted Fascism and They Got It” is a piece of sharp polemic about Putin’s regime and the causes of its going to war with Ukraine. Although the whole essay is just as outspoken as its title, the prosecution contracted two different sets of “expert witnesses” to prove that it criticizes Russia’s military aggression, violating the Russian law against “discrediting the military.” Meduza’s reporter Kristina Safonova describes the case, how it gained momentum, and how evidence against Orlov is being scraped together from plagiarized undergraduate papers and hired-witness testimonies.

A smartphone. A pin badge with a “No to war” slogan. A sticker pack with logos of Memorial, a human rights organization honored with a Nobel Peace Prize last year. A book whose title reads: Russia–Chechnya. A Chain of Errors and Crimes. These are some of the items seized during a police raid of Oleg Orlov’s Moscow apartment. The search that took place on March 21, 2023, was one of nine police raids conducted the same day, as police came to eight different Memorial staff members, as well as the organization’s Moscow office.

From the moment it was established back in 1989, Memorial was under constant pressure from the authorities. In 2013, they designated its center for human rights a “foreign agent” (under the newfangled discriminatory law), and by 2016 the same designation was attached to Memorial International, the former entity’s parent organization. In 2021, Russia’s Prosecutor General sued for the non-profit’s total dissolution, now on the pretext of Memorial’s violations of foreign agency disclosure laws. Although no convincing evidence had been presented, the court granted the motion. Two months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its key human rights organization was dissolved. The government was just warming up for a concerted offensive on civil liberties that would soon follow.

Memorial’s staff resisted the dissolution by establishing new non-profits to replace the old ones. In spring 2023, the authorities parried their persistence by opening a criminal case against “unspecified” Memorial staff members, alleging they were involved in “rehabilitating Nazism.”

The assertion had a long and convoluted history. The prosecution argued that the Memorial-compiled list of victims of political terror in the USSR contained the names of three men who might, at least potentially, have been complicit in the wartime crimes of Nazi Germany. The three people in question had all been convicted on political grounds, either for treason or “counterrevolutionary activity,” under the notorious Article 58 of the Soviet criminal law. Two of the convicts, Pyotr Dolzhenkov and Pyotr Dvoynykh, were never cleared of their charges later on, and this is why their dossiers are still classified. The third, Rudolf Naimiller, was convicted in 1954. Fifteen years after Memorial added him to its list of victims of terror, Naimiller’s case was declassified, and it emerged that he’d taken part in executing Jews in the German-occupied areas of Ukraine and Moldova, explains Sergey Bondarenko, a historian employed by Memorial.

In the end, no formal “rehabilitation of Nazism” charges were pressed against any of the activists. Oleg Orlov was one of the last people to be released by the interrogators. While at the Investigative Committee’s headquarters, he learned he was about to face a different set of charges.

A reluctant dissident

Oleg Orlov was born in Moscow in 1953. His father was an engineer, and his mother a schoolteacher. As a child, he was breathlessly excited about joining the Young Pioneers. The red scarf (an emblem of the Communist youth organization) had been tied around his neck in a ceremony “right at the Lenin Museum.” But by high school Orlov had transformed into an “anti-Soviet” dissident, constantly caught up in debates with his upstanding Communist father.

In August 1968, the Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring. Oleg was 15 and took the events close to heart: “It felt like being smothered, a very unpleasant feeling when you understand what’s going on but there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The sense of being smothered would ultimately split Orlov’s life in two contradictory halves. On the “official” side of things, he enrolled at the Timiryazev Academy (a Moscow-based school of agriculture), later transferring to the Moscow State University’s biology department and working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plant Physiology. And then, there was an underground, dissident side.

By 1981, Poland had grown ripe for political change. The influence of its Solidarity trade union had expanded, and strikes (as well as hunger strikes) were unfolding across the country. Orlov worried that protest in Poland could be once again crushed by the Soviet troops, and he couldn’t remain a bystander.

Although there was an awareness of the dissident movement in his circles, he didn’t want to join it openly, Orlov recalled later, nor did he consider the dissidents’ methods all that effective. He decided he would engage in his own activism, printing flyers.

To do this, Orlov assembled a hectograph (a gelatin duplicator), since Xerox copiers were only available to a privileged few. Trying to explain what to his fellow Soviet citizens was happening in Poland, Orlov pasted his flyers at night, everywhere he could: apartment building elevators, lobbies, and bus stops. Although the Soviets didn’t send troops to Poland, in December 1981 the country declared martial law, and protesters were thwarted. Orlov realized that printing more flyers would be useless.

Two years later, in the winter of 1983, he started a new campaign. This time, it was about the war in Afghanistan. “That was scary,” he remembered later. “Honestly, I was afraid.” Once again, his efforts seemed to have made no difference at all. The Soviet Union would only withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in February 1989.

Orlov only emerged from the underground during the perestroika. One of his co-workers at the lab mentioned to him that a new movement called Memorial was gathering momentum. What its members wanted was to restore the good names of people who’d fallen victims of the Soviet terror. Until 1991, there was no legislation on rehabilitating people who had been imprisoned on political grounds or false charges. As the rehabilitation movement gained traction, Orlov left science to devote himself to human rights work full-time.

For the next three decades, Orlov tried to clear the names of people convicted on fabricated charges, like those who had tried to defect from the USSR and were convicted of treason. “Under Gorbachev, people convicted on political charges started to be released, but there were still the borderline cases,” the activist recalled in conversation with Meduza. “We started to look into those cases, compiling lists, querying the Prosecutor’s Office, picketing. This became Memorial’s first direction, centered on human rights.”

Under Putin, human rights work also had new problems to address. In 1995, Orlov took part in negotiations with the terrorists in the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis. As a human-rights monitor, he saw a series of armed conflicts: Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, South Ossetia, and southwestern Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Orlov condemned it immediately, taking to the streets with placards that read: “Peace to Ukraine, freedom to Russia”; “Putin has gone berserk and pushes the world into nuclear war”; “Our refusal to know the truth and our silence make us complicit in crimes”; and finally, “USSR 1945: A country that triumphed over fascism. Russia 2022: A country of triumphant fascism.” That spring, Orlov was detained by the police at least four times.

In a November podcast produced by Memorial, Orlov said that “many people are facing the same hard choice” that he himself had faced during the Soviet time. “I think they will make the right choice if they come to the same conclusions that I came to then,” he reflected. “Of course, it’s a risk. But it’s better to take risks than to self-destruct bit by bit.”

‘Semiotic expertise’

In mid-November 2022, the French site Mediapart specializing in political investigations published Oleg Orlov’s opinion article, “They Wanted Fascism and They Got It.” The following day, Orlov posted a Russian translation on his Facebook page. The essay argued that Putin’s administration had turned into a fascist regime, and this had led to “a bloody war” with Ukraine. The terror of civilian killings and “the destruction of that wonderful country’s infrastructure, economy, and cultural objects” had nothing to do with defending Russia’s state interests, he argued. On the contrary, this was sheer “destruction of international law” and “a heavy blow to Russia’s own future.”

According to the court documents, on November 24, Orlov’s post was reviewed by “S. A. Babykin,” a police lieutenant employed by the Center for Combating Extremism (sometimes called simply Center E). The following day, the operative forwarded Orlov’s article to the Interior Ministry’s Center for Forensic Expertise, asking for a linguistic evaluation.

In producing expert reports, the center must follow the Interior Ministry’s guidelines on interpreting evidence under review. Its report on Orlov’s article (dated December 9, 2022) was accompanied by a note outlining the required assumptions: the evaluators had to “presume that Russian federal armed forces are used for the defense of Russia and its citizens, and for preserving peace and security.” On the basis of this guiding assumption, Orlov’s remarks were found to undermine and disrupt the existing political order, by criminally describing the Russian military as “engaged in genocide, killing people and destroying infrastructure, economy, and cultural objects.” Orlov denied the exclusively peaceful aims of Russia’s use of its armed forces, and the center’s experts duly noticed it. Their opinion was forwarded to the Investigative Committee.

The case was assigned to Lieutenant Ilya Savchenko, a detective made notorious by the torture-ridden prosecution of poets who took part in the antiwar Mayakovsky Readings in Moscow in September 2022.

On March 21, 2023, Savchenko ordered a second linguistic examination for Orlov’s article, this time contracting a private company, Center for Sociocultural Expertise, specializing in several lines of expert-witness work, including “semiotic expertise.” The company’s CEO Natalya Kryukova (a former math teacher with an advanced degree in education) and her employee Alexander Tarasov (a political scientist and translator) were commissioned to supply the prosecution with an opinion on Orlov’s article and what it meant.

The would-be experts’ names were already familiar to Memorial and its staff. In the summer of 2022, the two professional witnesses gave an opinion that Memorial’s website contained “linguistic and psychological signs” of justifying international terrorism and extremism. This was mainly because of the guidelines for defining “political prisoners,” developed by Memorial jointly with colleagues from Eastern Europe. The guidelines called for a critical attitude to designations of “terrorist” and “extremist,” when applied to international organizations by state officials. The guidelines pointed to the need for hard evidence when designating an NGO a “terrorist organization.” According to Kryukova and Tarasov, this spelled a dangerous desire to undermine “existing legal norms” and to encourage tolerance for terrorism and extremism.

Despite the attorney Maria Eysmont’s objection that the expert opinion had been partly plagiarized from several websites used by Russian students to download academic papers, the report became the basis of the prosecution’s argument to compel the dissolution of Memorial.

When preparing their expert witness report on Orlov’s essay, Kryukova and Tarasov once again plagiarized academic papers from the same websites. (Memorial has since published its own detailed analysis of the “expert opinion” and its sources.) In her part of the report, Kryukova described Orlov’s article as a “propagandist” opinion piece aimed as “influencing the readers’ consciousness by means of a specially constructed text,” eroding Russia’s “positive image,” and “discrediting” its armed forces. She also claimed that, while completely ungrounded, Orlov’s allegations against the government were effective in sowing doubts, and could potentially discourage readers from supporting the state, or even move them to outright resistance and protest.

In a separate opinion, Alexander Tarasov wrote that Orlov has taken an “anti-Russian human rights position,” by virtue of serving as the president of Memorial. Rather than wait for the court’s verdict, Tarasov took it upon himself to say that Orlov was undoubtedly guilty of discrediting the “special military operation,” by denying the “facts” of Russia’s peaceful use of its military.

After reviewing the two reports, Orlov objected to the ехpert witnesses’ apparent incompetence, asking the lead detective Savchenko to join another document to the case evidence. This was an affidavit issued in 2021 by the Russian Academy of Sciences and its anti-plagiarism committee. This opinion’s authors described Kryukova’s and Tarasov’s earlier work as conclusive evidence that they “don’t meet even the basic requirements of professional qualification.” Neither of the two witnesses for hire had published any meaningful work in academic journals. Kryukova had no academic publications at all. Tarasov had three mutually unrelated articles to his name, one of them published in a journal edited by his father.

Savchenko refused to admit the RAS affidavit, claiming it was irrelevant to the case. But he had no trouble adding two near-identical witness testimonies from Vadim Mironenko and Sergey Bakhonko, two members of Russia’s Veterans, a pro-Kremlin political organization, who have previously testified against Memorial. According to Orlov, it was Mironenko and Bakhonko who set his prosecution in motion when they denounced his Facebook post as a deliberate attempt to “discredit” the Russian armed forces.

Orlov in court

Kristina Kostryukova was appointed a district court judge in 2004, by the president’s decree. Her major claim to fame since then has been the case of the tattoo blogger Polina Morugina, who posed for nude photos in front of an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow. Once again, expert testimony determined the trial’s outcome: Morugina was diagnosed with a “schizotypal personality disorder” and deemed unaccountable for her actions at the time of the photoshoot. Judge Kostryukova decided that Morugina wasn’t guilty of “offending against religions feeling,” and instead ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment. Neither Morugina nor her family objected to the verdict.

In May 2023, Kostryukova was assigned to be the trial judge on Oleg Orlov’s explicitly political case. Orlov is represented in court by Katerina Tertukhina as well as the Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov as a community defender. During the first hearing on June 8, Orlov’s defense motioned to have the case dismissed, arguing that multiple violations had been permitted by the investigators. The court dismissed the motion.

Orlov does not deny his authorship of “They Wanted Fascism and They Got It,” but insists that criticizing the war cannot be a crime. “In my view,” he insisted in court, “it was against Russia’s state interests and the interests of its citizens.”

A final irony

In an effort to mount a better case against Orlov, Center E’s Lieutenant Babykin (the first operative who reviewed Orlov’s article and launched the prosecution) queried the General Staff of the Russian army, asking it for information about Russian casualties in Ukraine. He also asked for clarifications whether “the federal armed forces had invaded Ukraine” and whether Russia “is at war with Ukraine.” Judging by the case documents, his queries remained unanswered.

Reportage by Kristina Safonova. Translated by Anna Razumnaya.