When human rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko learned that fellow attorney Ivan Pavlov had been detained in Moscow, alarm bells rang.

“This is a real state of emergency,” Moskalenko, who 20 years ago was the first Russian lawyer to speak before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and to win a case from Russia, wrote on Facebook on April 30.

“A lot depends — for him and for us all — on how we act now,” Moskalenko wrote. “For my part, I am sending the alarm to the headquarters of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. And I am asking this global organization to act immediately.”

In a post the same day, journalist and human rights activist Zoya Svetova called the prominent defense attorney “a knight among lawyers.” “Pavlov is an absolutely fearless and professional lawyer who is also sensitive and loyal,” Svetova wrote. She urged “a majority of bold, honest, and professional colleagues” to come to his aid and to the aid of the legal profession in Russia generally.

Pavlov, who specializes in cases involving state secrets, was questioned in Moscow and is under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information about the ongoing investigation of former journalist Ivan Safronov. Safronov is accused of giving classified information about Russian arms sales to the Czech Republic, which he denies.

Also on April 30, law enforcement searched the St. Petersburg office of Pavlov’s legal-aid NGO Team 29, the home of the group’s IT specialist, the apartment of Pavlov’s wife, and Pavlov’s dacha.

At a court hearing the same day, a judge granted a prosecution request that Pavlov be barred from using the Internet or communicating with witnesses in the Safronov case.

‘A Bone In The Throat’

The Telegram channel SOTA posted a copy of the complaint that triggered the case, which was signed by Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Aleksandr Bortnikov and addressed to the head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin.

Pavlov’s lawyer and longtime Team 29 colleague, Yevgeny Smirnov, wrote on Telegram that Bortnikov rarely signs such documents himself.

Lawyer Irina Biryukova made headlines in 2018 when she briefly left Russia because of threats when she was working on a case of alleged torture in a prison in the Yaroslavl region. She told RFE/RL the case against Pavlov was a demonstration of power by the security services aimed at the entire human rights community.

“He has been like a bone in the throat of the security agencies,” Biryukova told RFE/RL. “Any pressure against a lawyer — particularly one involved in political cases — is pressure against human rights as a whole. This is an attempt to show us all that now the security forces can do anything they want without consequences. To show that they can come for any dissenter at any moment. It is pressure not only against lawyers, but against the entire human rights community.”

“And I’m sure this is not the end of it,” she added. “Toward the autumn, we’ll feel all its charms. Things are not going to get any better.”

Russia is preparing for elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, which must be held by September 19. President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party has been polling at historically low levels, and many observers link this to the government’s latest crackdown on opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and his colleagues, as well as on other dissenters and independent media outlets.

Pavlov had a long-running conflict with the FSB, and particularly with Aleksandr Cheban, the FSB investigator handling the Safronov case, Smirnov said. A Team 29 post on Telegram on April 30 quoted Smirnov as saying Cheban had told Pavlov, “You are standing on our throat, and we will do everything we can to put you in prison.”

Team 29 lawyer Maksim Olenichev told RFE/RL that “Ivan was threatened many times, since his human rights activity centered on defending innocent people from state pressure.”

Pavlov, 50, was born in St. Petersburg and graduated from the St. Petersburg University law department in 1997. He immediately became involved in his first major case, defending Russian Navy Captain Aleksandr Nikitin, who was accused of publishing classified information about emergency situations on Russian nuclear submarines. Nikitin was acquitted by the Russian Supreme Court in 2000. Nikitin was the first person in the Soviet or post-Soviet eras to be acquitted of a treason charge.

Freedom Of Information

More recently, Pavlov defended Svetlana Davydova, a woman from the Smolensk region who was accused in 2015 of passing military information to Ukraine the previous year. The charges against her were dropped for lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. In addition, the Prosecutor-General’s Office sent her a written apology.

Also in 2015, Pavlov created Team 29, which was devoted to”attaining justice in cases involving freedom of information.” In 2019, the group won a Supreme Court case that enabled a Russian to get information about his grandfather,who was executed in 1933.

Pavlov also defended physicist Viktor Kudryavtsev, who died of cancer on April 29 while awaiting trial on treason charges. Pavlov was able to get him released from pretrial custody, which he later claimed had “completely damaged his health.”

Pavlov has also been defending Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) against the government’s efforts to have it labeled “extremist.” Some observers believe the case against Pavlov could be connected to his involvement in that high-profile case.

Human rights advocate Pavel Chikov wrote on Telegram that the Justice Ministry had already twice complained to the Petersburg Chamber of Advocates alleging that Pavlov had revealed secret information in connection with the Safronov case.

‘In The Face Of Outrage’

“Both times the Petersburg chamber refused to take disciplinary actions,” Chikov wrote. For its part, the chamber on April 30 published an open letter to Bastrykin, Bortnikov, and other senior officials saying the case against Pavlov “was being created by representatives of the investigative authorities with blatant and intentional violations of Russia’s criminal-procedural legislation.”

“The legal community cannot reconcile itself with the clearly illegal practices of the investigative authorities in forcibly taking confidential information from lawyers involved in criminal defense,” the letter stated. It added that investigators’ actions “will inevitably lead to the destruction of the legal foundations of our state.”

Pskov region legislator and opposition politician Lev Shlosberg told RFE/RL that the cases Pavlov had taken on in his career involving charges of “treason, terrorism, and extremism are usually cases that were initiated by the Russian government to cover up political persecution.”

“They are an attempt to destroy — legally, and sometimes physically — political opponents,” he added. “Defending the accused in such cases is a direct fight against the government in its bid to destroy dissent.”

In 2016, when Shlosberg became the first laureate of the annual Boris Nemtsov Foundation prize, he donated the entire 10,000-euro ($12,070) prize to Team 29. According to Team 29’s annual report, they spent almost all the money defending Natalya Sharina, the former director of Moscow’s Library of Ukrainian Literature, who was accused of purchasing extremist materials.

“These people are real defenders of the law in the face of outrage,” Shlosberg said in his acceptance speech. “They are the defenders of the citizen in the face of the despotism of the state. They are working hard in the name of freedom and democracy in our country.”

Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from Russia by Anna Yarovaya and Svetlana Prokopyeva of the North.Realities desk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Four years ago, a court in the Russian Far Eastern city of Blagoveshchensk watched Kill The Cosmonauts — a satirical music video that proposed murdering space adventurers for “climbing toward heaven”– and was not amused.

The court found that the video, by a hardcore punk group called the Ensemble of Christ the Savior and Crude Mother Earth, constituted “extremist material.” It banned the video, on the basis of a 2002 Russian law, and added it to a federal blacklist of prohibited materials.

“It is hard to imagine that the calls…contained in the text could be taken seriously even by the most radical audience,” the SOVA Center, a Russian research organization, said in a 2018 report that documented how the law was being misused.

As of April 29, that blacklist of materials considered to be extremist includes nearly 5,200 items, including translations of the Bible, videos made by a splinter group of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

If indications are correct, in the coming days a Moscow court will add another organization to the list of “extremist” groups under Russian law: anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny and the network of activist groups that have turned into a major challenge for President Vladimir Putin’s government.

Such an order would effectively order the organization out of existence, Navalny’s allies and outside experts said.

No Concise Definition

Russian authorities’ turn to the ” extremism ” law in their yearslong struggle with Navalny has again brought the measure into sharp focus from rights groups to legal experts who say it is sweepingly ambiguous, possibly by design: a dragnet to be used against anyone deemed a threat for any reason.

Moreover, the law itself, while stipulating what qualifies as extremism, does not concisely define what it is in the first place. Instead, it merely lists a series of offenses that would fall under the law; for example, distribution of extremist materials, preparation of extremist acts, and incitement of hatred against religious or ethnic groups. The list also includes criticism of government officials and politicians, and, more recently, public questioning of Russia’s territorial integrity.

“Anti-extremism has two meanings in Russia: one legal, one political,” said Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the longtime director of the SOVA Center.

Since first passed 19 years ago, he told RFE/RL, “the law has changed, there’ve been lots of amendments, and it’s become significantly much harsher.”

Over the years, Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation have spearheaded a string of scathing, and eye-popping, investigations into government corruption, targeting some of Putin’s closest allies. His most popular one to date, documenting an opulent Black Sea mansion purportedly built for Putin, is among the most watched Russian-language videos on YouTube.

He’s also organized so-called Smart Voting campaigns nationwide, initiatives that aim to sway disaffected voters and siphon votes away from candidates for the dominant, and deeply unpopular, ruling party, United Russia.

In the current case against Navalny, which is expected to result in his organizations being closed down, prosecutors charged that they were “engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans.”

If upheld, the ruling would result in anyone found to be a member of such an “extremist” organization facing up to 12 years’ in prison. Additionally, giving money to such an organization could also result in up to 10 years in jail, and anyone seeking to use the organizations’ logos, banners, or symbols could be banned from running for elected office.

For his part, Navalny, who returned to Russia in January following months of recuperation from exposure to a powerful nerve agent, has his own individual legal problems: He has been ordered to serve about 2 1/2 years in prison for allegedly violating parole conditions. He and his supporters say the case is trumped up, aimed at keeping him behind bars.

Religious Targets

The first law on the Russian books regarding the issue was passed in 2002, the Federal Law on Countering Extremist Activity, which is the main basis for such cases. Other provisions providing for various punishments — misdemeanors or felonies — exist in various other Russian laws as well.

The measure was specifically aimed at terrorism; it was passed at a time when authorities were determined to end all separatist activity in the North Caucasus — and at a time when terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere were becoming more frequent.

Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda were the main targets of the legislation, as were fundamentalist Islamic groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the missionary organization Tabligh.

After a series of anti-government protests in 2011-12, protests that were organized in part by Navalny, the government began to turn the extremist legislation against other religious groups, including, most prominently, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were labeled extremist in a 2017 Supreme Court ruling. More than 250 members of the group have been jailed on extremist-related charges.

“Russia’s anti-extremism legislation has remained vague and susceptible to being arbitrarily weaponized by local authorities,” Jarrod Lopes, a U.S.-based spokesman for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, told RFE/RL. “Russian authorities are making a mockery of the rule of law — both international human rights law as well as Russia’s own constitution, which protects religious freedom.”

But the anti-extremism provisions have also been used against other secular targets. In 2006, a journalist was convicted for publishing statements by Chechen separatist leaders. More famously, the provision on inciting religious hatred served as the basis for the criminal conviction of the performance-art group Pussy Riot after they performed a song criticizing Russian clergy in 2012.

In 2019, a Moscow university student who posted a series of political monologues on YouTube was convicted and given a suspended sentence for inciting extremism.

New Territory

In 2020, the law was amended again to add another item to the list of “extremist activity” — this time to include anyone who questions Russia’s territorial integrity, or rhetoric in support of a region’s secession. That provision appeared to be linked specifically to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a hugely popular move among many Russians.

“Putin has consistently created laws to serve his purposes,” said Maksim Trudolyubov, a former Moscow newspaper columnist who now edits the Kennan Institute’s Russia File.

“This time it’s expanding an existing law — that is conveniently broad — into new territory. The tactic is not new. He’s suspended his Ukraine brinkmanship for now. So, he looks reasonable to his counterparts. He is going after domestic ‘threats’ now,” he told RFE/RL. “Apparently, [Navalny] is a designated threat at this given moment.”

Verkhovsky, of the SOVA Center, argued that the law has been properly applied in many instances of clear extremist activity.

In 2002, when it was first written, it’s likely [lawmakers] didn’t anticipate that it would be used against political groups,” he said.

The problem now, he said, is not only the danger of how the law is defined, but the willingness of authorities to use it against a wider group of people, Navalny, or others — particularly when United Russia’s approval ratings are at record lows ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall.

“It’s very difficult, and we have elections coming up, and the authorities are nervous, and when they’re nervous they start wielding more and more oppressive measures,” he told RFE/RL.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In the week since a wave of protests in support of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny swept Russia on April 21, at least 115 people in 23 cities have been detained by police. At least seven journalists who were covering the protests have also been summoned for questioning.

Immediately after the protests, activists and observers noted the relatively mild reaction of the authorities to the unsanctioned demonstrations, particularly in contrast to similar protests in January and February at which thousands of people were detained, often brutally.

But in recent days, Russian police have unveiled a new strategy, using surveillance-camera footage and other techniques to identify demonstrators and track them down, days after the event.

“I think they are trying a new tactic now,” opposition politician and political analyst Leonid Gozman told Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. Earlier, he said, the police would detain 2 or 3 percent of the protesters at a rally and the rest would go home feeling relieved.

“Now we have a different situation,” he continued. “They are signaling to everyone: ‘Go ahead and march, guys, but a year from now you can expect we’ll come, expect a knock at your door. And we’ll come or not as we wish….’ Now they have placed everyone in that position.”

Making a similar point, Ekho Moskvy editor in chief Aleksei Venediktov posted a warning to his own journalists on Twitter.

“To all seven Ekho correspondents who were working the streets on April 21, get ready,” he wrote.

At the same time, the authorities are proceeding swiftly to proclaim three national organizations tied to Navalny as “extremist,” which would place their employees and donors at risk of arrest and long prison terms. The Moscow City Court on April 26 approved the city prosecutor’s injunction suspending most activities by the organizations, including Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional offices.

The court is expected to rule on the “extremist” designation at a closed hearing in Moscow on April 29.

“Most likely on April 29, they will make that decision. And not in our favor,” said Ksenia Fadeyeva, the former director of Navalny’s office in the Siberian city of Tomsk, who was elected to the city council in September 2020. “We have little hope of a miracle. So we are getting ready for the work of our offices to be shut down completely. The offices will be closed. There will be no meetings of volunteers or staff — who, by the way, are not able to meet anyway. All of them except for me are under arrest.”

Potentially, everyone who has ever donated to any of Navalny’s organizations could be in jeopardy, said lawyer Dmitry Dmitriyev, and could face up to eight years in prison.

“In addition, all of those people will most likely find themselves on the Rosfinmonitoring list of terrorists and extremists,” he said, referring to the state financial-transactions monitoring agency. “That would mean their bank accounts would be blocked and they would only be able to spend 10,000 rubles ($134) per family member per month.”

The assault against Navalny’s organizations and supporters comes as Russia prepares for elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, that must be held by September 19. The ruling United Russia party is polling record-low popularity following its support of a reviled increase in retirement ages and the adoption of a raft of constitutional amendments, including one that would allow longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin to remain in office until 2036.

On April 27, the BBC reported that data about Navalny supporters that was hacked from a website set up to create momentum for protests was being used to pressure employers. At least three companies told the BBC they had received anonymous e-mails informing them that some of their employees were among Navalny’s supporters and that employing them could be considered “support for an extremist organization.”

Aleksei Golovenko, a gastroenterologist, was interviewed by the BBC during the April 21 demonstration in Moscow, although he says he was only on the scene by chance. On April 25, he was detained by police while taking a walk with his wife and children.

During his hearing, prosecutors presented a clip from a surveillance camera. It was one of several reported cases in recent days of officials using Moscow’s newly created “Smart City” surveillance system to pressure demonstrators.

The 15-second clip of Golovenko walking down the street failed to convince the judge, who unexpectedly dismissed the charges.

“I think this might have happened because of the support that suddenly appeared and, to be honest, which I didn’t expect,” Golovenko told RFE/RL, referring to the fact that many of his medical colleagues spoke up on social media and offered other assistance. “I am definitely not the most famous gastroenterologist in Russian and certainly not the best. But most likely it has some effect because most social-media platforms were writing about it. I was stunned by the support from some of my eminent colleagues.”

Golovenko said the support he received and the fact that others were also being held for allegedly participating in the protest made his ordeal bearable.

“I don’t regret one kopeck of the money I’ve donated to OVD-Info,” he said, referring to the independent monitoring group that publicizes police activity around the country. “I regularly send them money and urge all activists to support them. Their slogan is: ‘No one should be left alone against the system.’ And it is true. The frightening thing isn’t that they might beat you…but that you are alone for two days and you don’t know what is happening in your life or what they are doing to your family.

“Repression,” he added, “is very effective.”

Exactly how effective remains to be seen, said political commentator and former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov.

“The demand for an opposition is not going to go anywhere,” he told RFE/RL. “It exists and will grow stronger. After all, the fundamental reasons for it have not been addressed. Standards of living have not improved, Putin hasn’t gotten any younger, and the last 20 years are still with us. The demand for some renewal is only going to get stronger.

“But for some time, the protest movement will be without a leader, more chaotic, and less rational,” he added. “It won’t be able to generate political slogans as effectively, so it will flare up in completely unpredictable places. The authorities have significantly increased the likelihood of a strong protest vote in the Duma elections.”

Opposition politician Gozman said the state’s heavy-handed tactics were having two effects.

“First, it is reducing the number of people who will come out to protest,” he told Current Time. “Second, it is radicalizing those who will come out anyway. That is, they are provoking violent actions, which is something our country has seen in the past.”

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondents Mark Krutov and Maria Chernova. Current Time correspondents Timofei Rozhansky and Ksenia Sokolyanskaya contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.