‘They Are Monitoring Our Loyalty’<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\nThe Institute of History is evidently not the only academic institution that has attracted the attention of the FSB. A former ballet dancer who works for the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet says the FSB has never been far from her workplace and that the presence of the security agency increased noticeably when a new director, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, was appointed in 2014.<\/p>\n
“They are monitoring our loyalty,” the instructor, who asked not to be identified, said. “People who are regarded as disloyal are almost immediately fired. That’s why I left — I could just tell that the situation was getting dangerous.”<\/p>\n
In Soviet times, she recalled, the high-profile defections of dancers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalya Makarova, and Rudolf Nureyev had harsh ramifications at her institute and other similar academies.<\/p>\n
“They held meetings,” she said. “Everyone was implicated, tormented, kicked out. There was no avoiding it.”<\/p>\n
“Now, all this has been transferred to the level of personal loyalty to the managers,” she concluded.<\/p>\n
‘Our Country Hasn’t Changed’<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\nInna Saksonova, who recently retired from the Russian National Library, told RFE\/RL that the security agencies had always maintained a presence near the public reading rooms.<\/p>\n
“There’s a room under the stairs where they sat,” she said. “And when I was just starting work there, still a girl, we accidentally opened that door and saw a man there eating a sandwich while monitoring recording machines…. That room is still there. I don’t think the recorders are still there, but the point is still the same. We got used to it because apparently there is nothing to be done. Our country hasn’t changed.”<\/p>\n
Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the Komanda 29 legal-defense NGO, agrees, saying, “Everything is still as it was in the Soviet Union — nothing has changed.”<\/p>\n
“They control everything,” he said of the security agencies. “Beginning with military production and ending with ballet. Now this Soviet structure is being reassembled in the worst possible form, with Soviet-style monitoring of everything and everyone.”<\/p>\n
“Now the FSB is not under any control,” Smirnov concluded. “It is closed in on itself and accounts to no one. In that sense, the FSB now is more frightening and more powerful than the KGB was.”<\/p>\n
Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting from St. Petersburg by Tatyana Voltskaya of the North Desk of RFE\/RL’s Russian Service<\/h6>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Russia \u2014 On December 29, the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences held its annual New Year\u2019s gathering for researchers and other employees.\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,4,23,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6614,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613\/revisions\/6614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}