“Exposing the reception” of the investigation

Political scientist Ekaterina Shulman about the Network case*

All counter-extremism units need to constantly fight with someone. And our citizens do not strongly add up to extremist organizations - this is not our national passion. But you need to report, so you have to design something in order to expose it later.

The Network case is more exotic than other politically motivated trials. The “Moscow case” was preceded by elections to the Moscow City Duma and mass rallies, there were informational occasions that could not be completely ignored. With the case of the "Network" is more difficult: there were no previous noticeable episodes, noticeable even at the level of the imaginary "Maltsev revolution". The participants did not make any high-profile action, they were not previously visible in the information field. "Became famous", let's say, thanks to the process itself.

In such cases, it is important to consider who starts it and conducts the investigation. The criminal cases of the "Network" and "New Greatness" appeared and developed, because it was necessary to demonstrate "intensification of work in the youth direction" after the Arkhangelsk terrorist attack (* 17-year-old Mikhail Zh. on October 31, 2018 committed a self-explosion near the building of the Arkhangelsk FSB. - * Ed. ). Although the Network case had arisen a year earlier, its public promotion was supposed to show how the special services work with young people with the potential to create extremist and terrorist cells.

In fact, the worst thing about terrorist attacks is that after them there is an increase in the activity of the special services and they have a need to report on the work done.

So there are divergent circles of victims who had nothing to do with the terrorist attack itself, but who suffer from it.

It is important to understand such a seemingly paradoxical thing: it would be more convenient for the investigation and the court if no public attention was drawn to these cases. They liquidated the cell in due time, put a tick and reported that the work had been done and there were no more juvenile extremists. From the point of view of this ultimate goal, public attention is not useful, but harmful, it makes work difficult, publicity creates risks. Thanks to public attention, high-quality defense and competent lawyers appear, there is a space for interagency competition, when other administrative and political actors may want to interfere in the process in order, for example, to compromise or weaken the agency leading the investigation.

But it's one thing to want minimal public attention, it's another thing to shut down a process. Procedurally, this is not so easy to do after public publicity, when many eyes are already on the case. With this success, we can congratulate the defense, the press and civil activists who made the process loud.

It must be understood that the organizers of the process are important for their own departmental reporting. If the verdict is guilty (and it will be guilty, we have no other verdicts), it can be written down as one's own success. But there are disadvantages: the process was dragged out, made it loud, they managed to arouse public sympathy for the accused. In addition, in the course of the process, the mechanism for preparing such cases was revealed and became clear to the public: the role of provocateurs in them. The process glorified "Ruslan D." ( a secret witness in the case of "New Greatness", the defense considers him a provocateur of the special services. - Ed . ): The point, of course, is not in him personally, but in what is called "exposed reception" in literary criticism. This is not so much a sign of the quality of the investigation, rather the opposite. It is possible that after publicity and pressure, it will be possible to release someone or minimize the punishment.

Another success of public pressure is that the case is not expanding. After all, why are political processes dangerous?

The fact that they can unwind, expanding like a funnel in the sand, and capture new defendants.

If there is a central politically qualified episode - riots or an extremist organization - an unlimited number of people can be attached to this central episode or object. This is the outline of the great political trials of the 1930s.

Neither in the case of the "Moscow case", which is not a single case at all, nor in the case of the "Network" and "New Greatness" cases, it was possible to expand the circle of those involved. In the “Moscow case”, the central episode fell out in general - riots, and in the “Network” and “New Greatness” no new defendants appear. For comparison, let's recall the case of the organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, recognized as a terrorist organization, which has been developing exactly according to the funnel principle: since 2016, new people have fallen under it.

As far as the stated goal of such cases is to prevent the radicalization of young people, the radicalization of both young and old is facilitated by the lack of a legal political space in which to participate. Young and elderly people want to take part in the life of their country, they want to speak “for” or “against” something, go to rallies and not be beaten, see their candidates on the ballots and vote for them. This is a natural civic instinct. When there is no such legal possibility, people look for other ways and other channels of manifestation of their political activity, which are much less socially useful and more dangerous.

* "Network" - an organization recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in the Russian Federation.