The Return of Cold War Spying Paranoia in Putin’s Russia

Masha Gessen

September 27, 2015

In Putin’s Russia, Anyone Can Be A Spy

A middle-aged radio engineer has been sentenced to fourteen years in a maximum-security prison in Russia after being convicted of high treason. His crime: sending a résumé to a Swedish company five years ago.

Gennady Kravtsov, who worked for the Russian foreign-intelligence agency, G.R.U., was arrested in May, 2014; the government claimed that the résumé or the cover letter contained classified information. Kravtsov’s trial, which took place in Moscow this month, was closed to the public, so the only available sources of information about the case are the defendant’s family and his lawyers. According to them, Kravtsov’s security clearance expired in 2011, the year he quit G.R.U. and was granted permission to travel abroad. He sent his résumé out a year earlier, but his defense attorney claims that the information Kravtsov was accused of divulging was not secret. He was apparently charged with making mention of a satellite on which he had worked and with disclosing his job title, which the government claimed could reveal information about the G.R.U.’s staffing structure. As for the satellite, it has been decommissioned andinformation about it is widely available—indeed, it was originally designed and constructed in Ukraine, so foreigners have had access to it all along.

If his lawyers are to be believed, Kravtsov is an innocent man who made the mistake of trying to prop up his ego by seeking a job offer from abroad (the Swedes turned him down). Of course, classified documents that made up the case against him may show that he is not innocent at all. But, ultimately, what matters about a high-treason case in Russia today is the public message it sends. Even pro-government media have portrayed Kravtsov not as a malicious spy but as an accidental transgressor.

Changes to Russian laws on espionage and high treason have been a part of the hardening of Russian legislation, which, in turn, has been a part of the recent political crackdown. In the fall of 2012, the law on high treason was broadened so much that human-rights activists said it could now be used to prosecute anyone who had ever had any contact with foreigners. The new wording is essentially similar to the espionage law from the nineteen-thirties, when people were routinely arrested and charged for as much as writing a letter to someone abroad—or for nothing at all. They usually confessed to being spies.

After Stalin’s death, the law was rarely applied, but it was occasionally used to prosecute dissidents. For example, Natan Shcharansky, a campaigner for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, was sentenced in the late seventies to fifteen years for high treason after he gave a Western associate a list of refuseniks—Jews who were denied exit visas—including their names and places of work. Since some of the refuseniks worked for Soviet defense outfits, the Soviet court, following much the same logic the Russian court seems to have followed in Kravtsov’s case, convicted Shcharansky of divulging state secrets.

High-treason prosecutions, rare in post-Soviet Russia, have increased in number in the past year or two, but they are still relatively few. One case was so bizarre and apparently unfair that it drew public outrage, a highly unusual occurrence in Russia: earlier this year, a mother of seven was charged with high treason for ostensibly passing information to Ukraine which she had overheard on a public bus. The government dropped the charges after a barrage of publicity. Kravtsov’s case has not elicited the same sort of reaction. A couple of Russian bloggers have remarked that his sentence seemed frighteningly excessive, but there has been no campaign in support of Kravtsov, even on the limited scale that Russian activists are capable of organizing. Trying to get a job abroad while still working for G.R.U. can be hard to defend, even if it is not high treason.

Still, if all Kravtsov did was disclose his job title and the fact that he worked on a decommissioned satellite, then his actions do not rise to the level of high treason under the law that was current when he wrote to the Swedes—under that legislation, the government would have had to prove that his actions were detrimental to state security. Under the law’s new wording, however, no harm need be done for the crime to be prosecuted. Legally, Kravtsov would have had to be prosecuted under the old version of the law, but the message sent by his trial fits the spirit of the new law perfectly. Laws that can be applied to millions of people for millions of different reasons—laws that can only, therefore, be applied selectively—are the perfect instruments of state terror. Compared to Soviet terror, the current Russian version is soft. But it is also an experiment in just how little is needed for the government to control its subjects through dread. Whatever the secret facts of Kravtsov’s case, its outcome sends a dire warning to any Russian who has worked for the state and who is now considering selling his skills abroad. These kinds of warnings may prove as effective in instilling fear as the mass arrests of imaginary spies were eighty years ago.