#6 - JRL 8149 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
April 2, 2004
Reviving the Lubyanka Method
By Yevgenia Albats
Yevgenia Albats hosts a prime-time political talk show on Ekho Moskvy on Sundays. She contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

People do change their views. However, when they change those views 180 degrees from being in harsh opposition to the regime to calling on others to be loyal to the sovereign, i.e. President Vladimir Putin, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky did in his open letter earlier this week, and when they perform such a volte-face not from the comfort of their office but from a prison cell (in anticipation of being sentenced to years in a labor camp, where tuberculosis etc. are rife), such a recovery of sight comes across as a little bit suspicious, doesn't it?

It sounds more like a plea or an entreaty to be pardoned, as opposed to the free expression of the views of a successful businessman, one-time political dissident and one of Russia's most powerful personalities -- as Khodorkovsky used to be.

It matters little whether the letter was written by Khodorkovsky himself, as his lawyer claims, or whether there were co-authors. We now know that those people who used to write Khodorkovsky's speeches were not involved in the endeavor. We also know that everything which came out of his prison cell in Matrosskaya Tishina first went through severe scrutiny and often did not reach its intended destination, while at the same time several drafts of the letter were circulated back and forth for some time, and one was even leaked to a web site. However, the Justice Ministry, under whose jurisdiction prisons are, publicly acknowledged that the letter's publication in a Moscow newspaper came as a surprise, and it is going to conduct an investigation as to how it happened. Oh, really? Maybe we should help Justice Ministry officials and provide them with the address, or are they capable of finding it themselves?

What really matters in this whole saga, however, is the method used to bring closure to this dead-end case which has been damaging Putin's reputation as a modern, enlightened leader for quite a while now; and the real goal behind selecting public self-condemnation as that method. There can be no doubt that Khodorkovsky's trial will not now produce any scandal and that the president's once fierce opponent will get a lighter or suspended sentence.

The closure may even coincide with or occur before the G-8 summit that will be held in the United States in late June, making it easier for President George W. Bush to once again look into Putin's eyes, see his soul and endorse the Russian president's vision of democracy at home.

For scholars of Soviet politics, the method used is not a new one. It was successfully developed by Josef Stalin during the show trials of the 1930s and, with the help of The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, it was accepted as valid by Western public opinion. However, it was turned into an art form by the KGB's Fifth Directorate (for ideological counterintelligence) in the 1970s, when several famous Soviet political dissidents acknowledged their activities against the regime as being wrongful and caused by misleading Western propaganda.

It was standard practice for these "most sincere confessions" to be accompanied by betrayal and/or condemnation of former comrades-in-arms, just as Khodorkovsky accuses Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais (who was one of the few to raise his voice in Khodorkovsky's defense at the time of his arrest) and other liberals of all sins imaginable (including his own), and calls on readers not to be blinded by approaches used in the West but instead to look for Russia-specific ones.

The outcome of such confessions in the 1970s is well-known: Some got freedom right away, others spent years in exile rather than spending time in labor camps (as happened with Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky). Back then confessions came at the time of d tente, when the Soviet Union, along with some 34 democracies around the world, signed the Helsinki Bill of Rights. Public self-condemnation by those formerly opposed to the repressive regime suited the Kremlin's purposes both domestically and internationally.

Domestically the message was: "Watch out, the Lubyanka can break even the strongest, so don't even dare to speak out against the regime." The very same message is broadcast loud and clear by Khodorkovsky's letter.

Internationally it served an important purpose as well: It allowed leaders of Western democracies to accept their Soviet counterparts as equals and to turn a blind eye to Soviet repressions. The same is true now, in view of the upcoming G-8 meeting: An issue raised by top U.S. diplomats in talks since Khodorkovsky's arrest has happily been diluted.

Other G-8 leaders can get a breather and avoid feeling morally corrupted and cynical, when they once again acknowledge Putin as an enlightened democratic leader -- as one of them.

Long live the Lubyanka method -- at our expense ...