Oleg Kalugin will never return to Russia again. On Wednesday, the 68-year-old retired KGB general was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in a maximum security colony.

The FSB of the Russian Federation regarded Kalugin’s refusal to surrender himself to the hands of the Moscow City Court as “awareness of his guilt before the state and citizens.”

The former “democrat from Lubyanka” was convicted under Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - “high treason.” The prosecutor asked to give Kalugin the maximum sentence under this article - 20 years - but the court considered the episode of Kalugin's identification in an American court of retired US Army Colonel George Trofimoff as a Soviet agent unproven. Although Kalugin repeatedly (including in an interview with Vesti.Ru ) admitted that in June 2001 he testified against Trofimoff, the court found that media reports alone were not enough for a guilty verdict on this episode. The prosecution was unable to provide transcripts of the trial of Trofimoff.

Kalugin’s sentence was based, in particular, on a paragraph from his book “The First Main Directorate,” thanks to which the Americans in 1997 sentenced former Soviet agent Robert Lipka to 18 years in prison. It was indeed not difficult to identify the agent: Kalugin in his book indicated his place of work (US National Security Agency), the nature of the work (destruction of documents on a paper cutting machine), the contents of the documents (communication systems of NATO countries, the deployment of US troops) and the approximate time of recruitment (mid-1960s).

Kalugin has always denied that any former Soviet agent (excluding Trofimoff) was arrested or simply identified because of his memoirs. However, Kalugin's descriptions of Soviet agents in the United States were often so detailed that the lack of names required FBI readers, at best, several hours of work in the archives. For example, Kalugin mentioned as KGB agents " the ambassador of a large Arab country who left Washington in 1966 " and " a female archivist at the embassy of a large European country who came to Washington from Moscow, where she spent two years ."

If we leave aside the fact that Kalugin will not spend a single day in a Russian prison, his sentence - 15 years - is the most severe in cases of high treason in post-Soviet times. American spy Igor Kalyadin was given a year less. Spies Moses Finkel (American), Andrei Dudin (German) and Valentin Moiseev (Korean) received three years less. The last two had their sentences subsequently reduced. Edmond Pope received more than Kalugin - 20 years - in December 2000, but as a US citizen he was tried not for “high treason in the form of espionage,” but simply for espionage.

The Kalugin case will go down in history not only because of the record sentence. Apparently, Oleg Kalugin is the last person convicted in absentia in Russia. On July 1, 2002, the new Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation came into force, prohibiting the consideration of cases in the absence of the accused. It’s as if Russian justice deliberately decided to increase Kalugin’s popularity in his new role as an American tour guide. Kalugin conducts bus tours “to the spy spots of Washington,” priced at $55 per tourist, together with former FBI counterintelligence officer David Major. True, Kalugin, strictly speaking, will no longer be able to introduce himself as a “KGB general”: on June 26, the Moscow City Court stripped him of his military rank.

Vesti.Ru: The battle for Kalugin’s body
Vesti.Ru: Kalugin received a black mark
Vesti.Ru: Trofimoff was not worth a year of Kalugin’s life
Vesti.Ru: Oleg Kalugin testified against himself
Vesti.Ru: Russian spy Trofimoff
Lenta.Ru: Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin was sentenced to 15 years in a maximum security colony

KALUGIN CORRESPONDENT RECORD