Grigory Skvortsov, a photographer from the town of Perm, who was arrested by the FSB in November, is being held in the infamous Lefortovo prison, accused of high treason.
The FSB did not disclose any details, but it is known that Skvortsov loved to photograph industrial plants in the Perm region. Several years ago, he won an award for a collection of such works.
Some of his images of abandoned Soviet factories were posted on his social media accounts. It’s possible, Putin’s Russia being what it is, that this kindled the FSB’s suspicions.
"Mr. Putin has fu*ked all sane people to death"
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 23, 2024
For these words, a criminal case for state treason was opened against Perm photographer and musician Grigory Skvortsov. pic.twitter.com/lzzLI3JtNw
In theory, treason is a crime involving someone with access to secrets who has links to a foreign intelligence agency. In Russian reality, the FSB feels sufficiently confident to make this serious accusation against a photographer. To be clear. Skvortsov has never had any security clearance, i.e. no access to any secrets, and there is no mention in the charges of links to a foreign intelligence agency.
This case is far from unique.
According to the data provided by the FSB’s First Department, a Russian charity providing legal assistance to treason defendants, the FSB opened more than 200 criminal cases of high treason in 2023.
Dozens were arrested for an “intention to join the Ukrainian Army” and fight against Russia. Many others had simply provoked the FSB in some way.
For instance, the FSB has a fake Telegram bot designed to look like a channel of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a paramilitary group of Russian citizens fighting on the Ukrainian side.
FSB operatives seek to entrap young men through discussion about opportunities to join the Legion, which is designated as a terrorist organization in Russia. When one shows a desire to join, he is arrested by the FSB for preparation to join the enemy (the high treason element), and for supporting a terrorist organization.
FSB agents also approach a designated victim asking for advice – on how to change sides if one is mobilized and sent to the frontline. Once the victim gives any advice, or, better, provides a link to any source online, the FSB has its case.
It is a significant and strange feature of the current crop of spy cases in Russia, a country with a long record of foreign espionage obsession, that in most such cases there are no foreign spies at all. There are only helpless Russian citizens, accused of the most serious crime against the state, which seeks to jail them for decades.
This odd anomaly has a reason; the real purpose of the FSB operation is not to catch spies, but to reeducate Russian society.
Of course, there are real spies in modern Russia. Many foreign intelligence agencies are active in Russia, seeking to recruit assets, and there are also always those willing to spy, mostly for Western intelligence agencies, the so-called “walk-ins.”
These people are rare, and the best and brightest of the FSB, the officers of the DKRO (Department of Counterintelligence Operations) in Moscow are tasked with hunting them down.
But there is a second category of people the FSB and the Kremlin call spies. They are far more numerous and can be found almost everywhere — at research facilities in Siberia, or editorial offices in Moscow, or among students and photographers.
Their arrests come in waves and are the result of a coordinated campaign directed from the second floor of the Lefortovo prison, which also houses the Investigative Department of the FSB.
The FSB has operated the system to coordinate nationwide spy hunts since 2004 when the First Section of the Investigative Department of the FSB was tasked to oversee the FSB’s regional branches.
Ever since, the officers of the First (Spy) Section have acted as mentors of the regional branches, sometimes directly intervening in their operations. The main objective is very far from protecting government secrets, catching spies, or identifying traitors.
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, state-sponsored spy mania became one of the Kremlin’s most-used tools for governing societal behavior.
For instance, for most of the first two decades of the 21st century, the Kremlin wanted to reeducate the vast Russian research community, which was trying to catch up with the world via massive exchange programs, from the US to China.
For the KGB-trained Putin, the risks posed by that international technical cooperation to his idea of national security massively outweighed the benefits for the economy, thus the FSB was told to put the fear of God into Russian researchers and scientists. Dozens were sent to jail.
The lesson was learned. Even before the all-out war on Ukraine, Russian scientists accepted the need to seek FSB approval before engaging in any international project.
The ambition this time is much greater. The country waging a huge war and the regime seeks to make impossible any conversation about the conflict. Thus the focus is on provocation.
The FSB now hopes for additional legal support. It aims to criminalize those seeking to avoid deployment to kill Ukrainians. The maximum punishment would be death.
It is also deemed useful to pick up a random victim, now and then, like a photographer wandering around the wrong places, to send a message that nobody is immune from the state’s unpredictable wrath.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
