Devoted without flattery

Tomorrow, a new deputy prosecutor general will be introduced to the staff of the Office of the Prosecutor General for the North-West.
Last Friday, the Federation Council approved Alexander Gutsan for this position, replacing the retired Ivan Kondrat. Before that, he worked for two years as deputy director of the Federal Bailiff Service. The FSSP was part of the structure of the Ministry of Justice, which was headed by the current Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, and it is not surprising that he is gradually placing his own people in key positions. But Gutsan, in addition to the experience of working together with Chaika, also has almost 20 years of prosecutorial experience: from 1987 to 2005, he worked in the prosecutor’s office. And he even gained fame - albeit of a somewhat specific nature...

FSB above all
The new Deputy Prosecutor General is 47 years old, he studied at the Faculty of Law of Leningrad State University together with the current First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his current wife Natalya Gutsan. Let us note that she now also holds a fairly high post - deputy chairman of the Statutory Court of St. Petersburg, so that the merger of judicial and prosecutorial powers takes place within the same family. However, unlike Medvedev and his wife, who came to Leningrad State University straight from school, Alexander Gutsan before the University managed to work for two years as a toolmaker at the Leningrad Electromechanical Plant, serve in the army for three years, and then study for a year at the preparatory department.
Immediately after University, Gutsan ended up in the prosecutor's office, and by 1996 he took the post of prosecutor of the department of the City Prosecutor's Office for supervision of the implementation of federal security laws. His active participation in the “Alexander Nikitin case” dates back to this period: it was the junior counselor of justice Alexander Gutsan who was the state prosecutor at the trial in which Captain 1st Rank Nikitin was accused of “treason to the Motherland” and “divulging state secrets” for participating in the preparation of the report environmental organization Belluna about submarine accidents in the Baltic and the environmental hazards posed by decommissioned nuclear submarines of the Northern Fleet.
The shameful “Nikitin case” dragged on for three years - and ended with the caperang’s complete acquittal on all charges: all the materials allegedly “disclosed” by him were declassified long ago. State prosecutor Alexander Gutsan could not have known about this - and nevertheless he demanded a punishment of 12 years in prison for Nikitin and protested the acquittal pronounced by the City Court.
“Such a “case” has not happened since Soviet times,” noted the famous lawyer Yuri Schmidt, who defended Nikitin. “It was a gross provocation, for which, I would like to believe, you will have to take a personal response. We name the main “heroes” known to us: from the FSB Directorate - Cherkesov (then he was the head of the FSB Directorate, now he is the head of the State Drug Control Service - B.V.), Milushkin, Utkin, Maksimenkov, from the city prosecutor's office - Sydoruk, Popov, Gutsan." Now, commenting on Gutsan’s appointment, Schmidt says that it will “strengthen the influence of the special services, as well as increase the president’s capabilities,” since “Gutsan belongs to Putin’s team, is closely connected with the FSB, and through his participation in the Nikitin case has proven that the requirements of the law mean less to him.” than the interests of the FSB”...

Welcome to the snitches
In the summer of 2000, Alexander Gutsan again became a “hero”. Then a well-known story broke out with the expulsion of two students from BSTU “Voenmekh” - Dmitry Barkovsky and Konstantin Suzdal, who were “offended” solely by refusing to provide the FSB with information about the activities of the St. Petersburg branch of “Yabloko”. The students worked on the presidential campaign of Grigory Yavlinsky, and immediately after it they were summoned to the FSB and threatened with expulsion and military service in Chechnya if they refused to inform Yabloko. Barkovsky and Suzdal refused and made information about the recruitment public.
After this, Barkovsky was expelled, and Yavlinsky sent an appeal to Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov and FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, saying: “The country should not be returned to an atmosphere of surveillance, snitching and political repression - this is shameful and unconstitutional, and therefore, sooner or later, punishable.” Barkovsky was summoned to the prosecutor's office to check the legality of the deduction. However, Gutsan began, according to Barkovsky, to convince him of the “legality and correctness from the state point of view” of the recruitment and expulsion from the university for refusing to cooperate with the FSB. At the same time, he tried, as Barkovsky said, “to obtain information about the internal structure of the Yabloko faction, the activities and private lives of its individual deputies, as well as Yabloko activists”...
All this, in turn, became public - and Alexander Gutsan quietly moved to the less public position of assistant to the deputy prosecutor general for the North-West “on special assignments,” where he worked for five years. In 2005, he was appointed deputy director of the FSSP, and now - to the post of deputy prosecutor general.
...Last year, during the confirmation of several deputy prosecutors general in the Federation Council, Yuri Chaika was asked: what will you base your selection on when selecting personnel - professionalism or personal loyalty? The Prosecutor General replied that he values ​​most of all the fact that “a person is reliable,” and said: “For me, this criterion is even more important than professionalism.”
Apparently, Chaika has no doubts about the reliability of his new deputy. Well, the professionalism demonstrated by the cases mentioned above is, as already said, less important for him.

Boris VISHNEVSKY