Society has understandable suspicions

The trial of the murder of lawyer Stanislav Markelov is an example of good investigative work. However, due to low trust in the authorities and numerous examples of abuse of anti-extremist legislation, many do not trust its results.

The director of the SOVA information and analytical center, Alexander Verkhovsky, spoke in an interview about how the trial of Nikita Tikhonov and Evgenia Khasis was perceived by society, about whether it will affect trust in law enforcement agencies and the fate of the far-right movement.

– In January 2009, it seemed that Markelov’s murder was another high-profile case that would not be solved. What helped to avoid this?

– When Stanislav Markelov was killed, there were too many potential options. And some of them are difficult to investigate: for example, the version about the military acting in retaliation for Sergei Lapin or Yuri Budanov. Such military men would have high patrons, and it would be difficult to investigate. But it was not so. I don’t know whether the investigation initially had a version involving Tikhonov, but there was a Nazi version, and they began to develop it. As far as I understand, the case was investigated quite seriously.

Coincidentally, work on the neo-Nazi underground in recent years has, in principle, been carried out much more seriously than before. And more seriously than neo-Nazis are accustomed to counting. Their level of secrecy, which historically developed in the mid-2000s, turned out to be insufficient.

Roughly speaking, if Tikhonov had killed Markelov several years earlier, he would not have been caught.

Investigative bodies do not very often work as well as we saw in the Markelov trial. Firstly, the operational work was well done. Secondly, the prosecution managed to bring this to court with a minimum number of violations, and the case did not fall apart. And this fate befell many cases in which normal operational work and arrests were carried out, but the investigators simply did a poor job of collecting evidence and processing it.

– Does this reflect the authorities’ efforts to investigate hate crimes?

- Undoubtedly. Over the past five years, the government has been intensively forcing law enforcement agencies to work in this direction. This gives results. Of course, it is uneven and there is a long list of complaints to be made. But, nevertheless, even in terms of quantitative indicators, an incredible difference is visible. More than 300 people were convicted of violent hate crimes in 2010—double the number the year before.

Such numbers would have been impossible to even imagine a few years ago. It should be noted that the legal classification of crimes is also improving: investigators and prosecutors are studying and working better.

– Why was the process perceived very ambiguously?

– You don’t even have to touch on the views and beliefs that are distributed in our society in such a way that the results of this case could not be perceived unambiguously. In any case, the idea that the authorities are deliberately falsifying the process, if there is some political connotation in it, will have a priori popularity among us. This also affected here.

There were people with far from nationalistic views who doubted the case from a procedural point of view. They felt that the evidence was insufficient, that it was falsified, and that the jury was under pressure. I can't know for sure, but I think that very few people really start to doubt from the procedural point. If they get into procedural details, it means they had initial doubts. On the part of non-nationalistically oriented people, it has a general reason and a more specific one. The common reason is that authorities are generally trusted very little. Private - everything related to anti-extremist legislation has been very much discredited in recent years by numerous and completely ugly stories about how it was abused.

By the way, radical nationalists themselves actively take advantage of this.

– Could this case, on the contrary, affect the attitude towards the investigation and the trial?

– Yes, potentially, it can. This is the case when law enforcement agencies need to somehow explain to people the differences between a successful trial and an unsuccessful one. Apparently, this is difficult for them, because they need to give negative examples so that they have something to compare with. Unfortunately, the prevailing idea in law enforcement agencies is that no criticism should be accepted. But society has understandable suspicions.

At one time, AZHUR journalists seriously suspected that the wrong people were imprisoned in the case of the murder of the Tajik girl Khursheda Sultonova in St. Petersburg. Precisely because of the extremely poor quality of the investigation. Allegedly, the real killers were later identified, but they did not look into the matter. It is unlikely that anyone will ever prove this. But such stories are remembered, so suspicions cannot but arise.

It’s difficult for me to give advice in the field of PR, but definitely both the police and the prosecutor’s office need to take care of this. 316 convictions last year – that’s 91 trials. There are not so loud, but convincing examples of how they found, proved, and did everything right. But no one knows much about them, and law enforcement agencies do not consider it necessary to advertise their successes.

– How will the outcome of the trial affect the right-wing radical movement?

– I think the consequences will be ambiguous. Those people who are already active members of the relevant groups feel themselves to be part of a “holy racial war”; in theory, they should respond to each such verdict with additional mobilization and some kind of actions. On the other hand, the problem is not with the “hardened wolves”, but with the fact that every year new hundreds, if not thousands of teenagers join this movement. A signal may reach them that this is not ending well. I understand that this is a rather primitive method, simple intimidation, but this is one of the functions of criminal punishment.

It works and I think it will work in this case too. After all, life imprisonment is such a thing that it is very difficult to try on oneself.

– Will the testimony of the convicts’ associates play a role here?

– Oh yes, figures of a serious level participated here. The fact that Ilya Goryachev gave evidence led to a serious crisis in the relations of the Russian Image with the rest of the nationalist movement. This crisis has not yet been overcome and it is unclear how it will develop further. It also soured Russian Image's relations with many small neo-Nazi groups. There was also another character in court, Sergei Golubev, nicknamed Opera, the leader of the now not so noticeable, but symbolically significant Blood & Honor group. These were classic fighters for the “white revolution”. The fact that this man - not arrested, we note - came to testify is a heavy blow to the movement. Still, he is a very authoritative figure. No single episode solves anything, but in principle, this is how a radical environment is usually destroyed. There is no other way.

“Aren’t they simply being driven deeper underground by this?”

– There are three categories of people. Public figures cannot go underground (Demushkin, DPNI leaders, etc.). Behind-the-scenes figures like the Opera are also known. The third category is all sorts of small youth groups that have already learned that there is no need to shine. But since they are not very deep yet, they have a chance to tie up. Arrests plus this demonstrated moral decay should contribute to the fact that some of these young people will simply quit. There is no one left to go deeper underground.

Will attempts to legalize the ultra-right continue?

– The trick is that DPNI or “Russian Image” are only at first glance distanced from violence. Behind the first row of activists are people who are already directly included in it. So this is only a semblance of legalization.

Groups that are truly not associated with violence are small and uninfluential, they are capable of little, at least for now. What stopped someone from saying after Manezhnaya Square: “We condemn this action, since it included violent actions”? Nobody decided. How can they then engage in political activities? To do this, you need to contact not only 10-20 thousand young militants, but also wider circles.

– So the story heard in court about interaction with the presidential administration does not mean any prospects in this regard?

– If there was a political organization - and it doesn’t matter whether people from the administration would communicate with them or not - that would be engaged specifically in political activities, then we would look. But so far this is very bad. In the foreseeable future, apparently, a political movement will not be able to be created from this environment.

Sources

• Verkhovsky A. “Society has understandable suspicions” // Gazeta.ru. 2011. May 10.