French lessons

Emmanuel BERARD, press attache of the Consulate General of France in St. Petersburg:

French citizen Maxim Filandrov, detained on the day of the Dissent March in St. Petersburg, filed an official statement demanding “to find those responsible for what happened to him and punish them.” The victim of the actions of the riot police, by the way, is a former representative of the European Union in the North-West region and a representative of the OSCE - therefore, what happened to him, without any exaggeration, can be considered an international scandal.
The methods of teaching a French subject police manners must now be assessed by the prosecutor and governor of St. Petersburg, as well as the Minister of Internal Affairs and the President of Russia.


Lesson one: “you’re standing in the wrong place”
Riot police grabbed a French citizen near Smolny without understanding it. Frankly speaking, in the heat of the moment. It’s also good that they didn’t grab the Englishman at the same time: he simply didn’t have time to approach. Maxim Filandrov on Sunday at about five o’clock in the evening on the Proletarian Dictatorship Square (it so happened that, in addition to the city and regional governments, the St. Petersburg British Consulate was also located here) was waiting for his friend from Foggy Albion, Mark de Mauny. Citizens of France and England wanted to have a snack together in a cafe. However, only the Englishman got the set lunch. Maxim lost his appetite that day in the literal sense of the word.
“Suddenly, people in camouflage uniforms ran into me from behind and knocked me to the ground,” Maxim Filandrov, who at that moment was being transported in a riot police bus to the 76th police department of the Central District, said two hours later in an interview with Novaya Gazeta (see No. 27 of 2007). “They beat me with batons and twisted my arms. No explanations, no demands, nothing...
“After a series of blows with batons,” a quote from a statement by a high-ranking international figure to the prosecutor, governor, minister, president, “I was dragged to the chain of the road fence and thrown onto it. Two of the attackers fell on top, pressing my chest, and my breathing stopped. This lasted for about a minute. Then I, almost unconscious, was carried along the ground a few more meters and raised in front of a man of about thirty, who was also dressed in camouflage uniform. This man asked for my documents. I took out my consular card and asked him to introduce himself too. He reported: “Police Major Vladislav Vyacheslavovich Komarov,” but rudely refused to show supporting documents and explain the motives for the attack. Instead, he pulled the consular card out of my hands, saying that “this is not a document,” and gave the order to “take me away.” They knocked me off my feet and dragged me somewhere by my arms, twisting them along with my shoulders. At the same time, I had to raise my head all the time,
so as not to break your face on the asphalt. I have been in Russia for a long time and often, but such a thing – where my face hits the asphalt – has never happened to me before. I shouted that I was in unbearable pain and that I was ready to go on my own. There was no reaction. I was dragged about 200 meters across the entire square of the Proletarian Dictatorship and thrown into a bus...”
The broken head hurt and was dizzy, the applicant recalls. My chest also ached. The dislocated arms and shoulders hardly moved. There was only one answer to requests for help: “Be silent!”


Lesson two: “whistle wrong”
Three more were riding next to Maxim Filandrov in the police bus. One met a girl in an “unfortunate place” in the city center, the second was fishing on the Neva embankment, the third was simply breathing the air in the park...
The French citizen’s guilt turned out to be the “heaviest” of all: he had a camera with him. True, without a memory card, without a battery... But these are already details. After all, he was! A camera... although they are not charged (not punished) for this - it is not provided for. Therefore, Maxim and his random companions were accused of something else.
“When I felt better,” says the foreign citizen, “I asked the man in police uniform in charge of the bus who he was and what was happening. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Vitaly Aleksandrovich Leonov from the Pushkinsky District Department of Internal Affairs, showed his identification and said that we were detained for “disobedience to police officers”... At 18.10 the bus took us to the 76th police department on Mytninskaya Street, 3. And then, - Filandrov is amazed, - already without the participation of the people who beat me at the beginning, a report was drawn up stating that I allegedly “expressed obscene language in public place."
It's time to make a retreat: at least in a few words about the detainee. Maxim Filandrov is the son of dissidents (his grandmother is the famous human rights activist Raisa Lvovna Berg), who left our country in the early 70s (at that time Maxim was not even a year old). Until the age of 19, he lived and was raised in France (today he has dual citizenship). He returned to Russia in 1995 to study, received diplomas from Moscow State University and MGIMO. In 1999, Maxim Filandrov interned with the NATO Secretary General. He collaborated with Anna Politkovskaya in 2000, when he opened branches of the organization Doctors Without Borders in Moscow and Ingushetia. He was the representative of the European Union in the North-West region until the representative office itself was closed. He was an OSCE observer in Albania, a speaker in Macedonia, an adviser in Tajikistan, and until 2007 he worked at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Internationalist and sociologist Filandrov knows at least seven languages: Russian, French, English, Italian, Macedonian, Turkish, Tajik...
“I still haven’t had any use for swear words,” states the French intellectual of Russian origin. Alas, the St. Petersburg police, in addition to Russian, are mostly familiar with this dialect...
Filandrov still hasn’t figured it out: what exactly was obscene in his extremely correct, well-delivered speech? And what was his “disobedience to the police”? Should I have rested my face on the asphalt (turned to face the asphalt)?..
Law enforcement agencies have not yet been able to prove the French citizen’s guilt in any way. His trial has been postponed for the second time. Now on April 25th...

End of lessons
Maxim Filandrov was released around midnight. This required the personal intervention of the French Consul General in St. Petersburg, Michel Aubry.
“I managed to contact the consulate,” the detainee describes the outcome of the incident. “Later, Michel Aubry told me that he himself called the 76th police department directly several times... They deceived him, saying that they returned my consular card and released me. In fact, during these calls, the head of the 76th department, police captain Vladimir Yuryevich Artamonov, spoke to me, who threatened to keep me “48 hours in a cage”...
While Maxim was locked up (several long hours of unpleasant waiting and humiliation), he was amused by one episode.
“There were clearly few officers present at the police department that evening,” noted even Filandrov, a man generally not particularly familiar with the work of the police. – Apparently, everyone was busy on the march: “ensuring order”... A young intern (later it turned out that he was still a student) registered our data and communicated “on the record.” It was already about nine in the evening, when the bosses left the building, he came up to me and said:
-Are you really French?
- Yes, really...
“You know, French citizen, I’m so sick of everything here.” This chaos and rudeness... How can I leave for France?..

Nina PETLYANOVA
Photo by Sergei ERMOKHIN

Direct speech:

“We were aware of what happened from the very beginning. Immediately after his arrest, Maxim Filandrov called the consulate and reported where he was and what happened to him. The task of the consulate is to provide support. Since Filandrov is a French citizen, we took actions that are standard when detaining and arresting our compatriots. Consul General Michel Aubry contacted the law enforcement agencies of St. Petersburg in order to find out where Maxim was being held, in what conditions, and what charges were brought against him. Mr. Filandrov is due to appear in court soon. We will ensure that he is provided with the services of a lawyer and that all rights of defense provided for by Russian law are respected.

Post-march:
Maxim FILANDROV, French citizen, OSCE staff member (2002–2007)
– The government’s response to the actions of the opposition is inadequate. I came to two conclusions. First: it seems that the authorities are really afraid of open, expressed, expressed protest, which reveals its weakness and wrongness. Second: the people who now lead the country are clearly not themselves. They don't really understand what they are doing. They have no idea about political ethics. Each blow with a baton to the head of one “dissenter” is a new indignation of ten people supporting the beaten one. Those in power themselves are multiplying the protest many times over in this way today. Perhaps they are subconsciously trying to create an enemy for themselves, since the open field of political struggle has disappeared. In any case, from my point of view, today's events in Russia are the most serious protest in the last fifteen years. But it's deep. And while it’s only ripening...