Let’s talk about villains and lustration. It’s an extremely popular topic in opposition circles, but unfortunately many people write utter nonsense about it because they do not understand what lustration actually is.
For example, you often hear people say about some judge/investigator/official, “we’ll lustrate that bastard later.” But that is exactly the point: you cannot lustrate that bastard (unless, of course, “lustrate” is a euphemism for “line him up against the wall”). Lustration is a class-based, group-based measure: it imposes certain sanctions or rules on many people according to a specific characteristic.
You can ban former FSB and KGB officers from working in the civil service.
You can ban members of United Russia from holding elected office.
You can forbid government members from living in homes larger than 85 square meters.
You can decree that employees of state television may live only in the Evenki Autonomous Okrug (a remote district in Siberia).
You can stipulate that judges from Moscow courts may work only as janitors.
With special legislation, you can do almost anything—but only with regard to groups of people; specific individuals should not be named in it.
At this point, many people will get upset and say: lustration is a controversial measure, and it is not adopted quickly—look at Ukraine, there was a revolution there, and even there proper lustration never really happened. And we would be deeply aggrieved if a particular judge who, for example, gave Ildar Dadin a real prison sentence for solo pickets did not face just—but swift—punishment.
And here is the good news: no lustration is needed for them. Lustration in general, as a way of cleansing the state, is something we do need—but it is not a tool of retribution against those who organized political repression.
Everyone who ought to go to prison can be imprisoned through a fair trial simply because they are committing crimes under the current law.
They:
- abuse their official position; - falsify documents and evidence; - knowingly prosecute innocent people; - exceed their authority; - refuse to perform their official duties; - shield criminals; - carry out censorship prohibited by law; - obstruct citizens’ free expression of will and their right to public assemblies; - obstruct the activities of political parties and associations. and so on, and so forth.
Therefore, our task right now is to maintain a registry of villains. Full name, the violation, and a person who can confirm the violation and knows where to find all the relevant materials.
I often used to write in posts about various unsavory people, “I’m putting him in the Little Black Notebook,” and now we at ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation) have decided to keep this Notebook publicly.
At the same time—and this is very important—we are giving society an answer to the question: how many people need to be imprisoned after a change of power?
People often claim that everyone is guilty, and you cannot imprison everyone. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. That is not true at all: if we record the key villains according to formal criteria, the result will be hundreds of people, not thousands.
I should note separately that in the Black Notebook we keep this registry of villains according to formal, not political, criteria. That means it does not include various Putins, despite their obvious villainy; it includes judges, investigators, prosecutors, officials, and others who personally make criminal decisions.
A judge handed down an unlawful sentence—into the Black Notebook.
A prosecutor backed the charges in a political case—into the Black Notebook.
An operative took part in a search in a political case—into the Black Notebook.
A Justice Ministry official unlawfully refused to register a branch of a political party—into the Black Notebook.
Some guy at Rosreestr (Russia’s state property registry) illegally scrubbed officials’ names from the records so their dachas would not be found—into the Black Notebook.
A bureaucrat from Roskomnadzor blocked a media outlet—into the Black Notebook.
This is a major undertaking, and it will require crowdsourcing; that is exactly why we placed our project in the .wiki domain.
For now, we have filled the Black Notebook ourselves with villains from ACF’s own cases: Kirovles, Yves Rocher, the poster case, the microphone case, and refusals to register the Progress Party. We also added the “Bolotnaya case”.
Judges, investigators, members of investigative teams, Justice Ministry officials, and so on.
So far there are 265 people in total—as you can see, not many at all, and there is no need to stage any mass repression or create judicial “troikas” (summary three-person tribunals).
Going forward, the Black Notebook will be expanded for each of our cases, where there are grounds to do so. You know that all Moscow courts are completely unlawfully refusing to accept our lawsuits against Chaika. Well then, we will enter the specific judges issuing those decisions into the Black Notebook with full legal grounds and moral justification, and later, after the Forces of Good prevail and statutes of limitations are abolished, we will put them in prison for it through the fairest adversarial jury trial.
Let me answer this question right away: who will you allow to add names to the registry of villains? If you give political activists that opportunity, they will put everyone on earth into it.
We will not give political activists access. We proceed from the assumption that this is professional legal work, so we would be glad if organizations like Agora, which provide systematic and professional defense in political cases, gradually help us fill the Black Notebook. In other words, mainly lawyers and attorneys. Perhaps also specialist court reporters who are deeply immersed in the process, such as Mediazona (if they want to, of course).
In any case, we ourselves deal with such cases every day, which means ACF will be updating the content regularly.
The Black Notebook is a small project and, one might say, a niche one—but it is fundamentally important. I am convinced that the “reformers of the 1990s” failed precisely because there was no such notebook. There was no list, and there was no one demanding that criminal officials from the USSR be punished according to that list.
On the contrary: half-finished Komsomol apparatchiks, disgraced party men, and oligarchs alike eagerly rushed to cooperate with those who had jailed and tortured people.
A vivid example is Filipp Bobkov of the Soviet KGB, who organized political repression and sang the praises of socialism and communism, and then after the collapse of the USSR had no trouble getting a job with the oligarch Gusinsky, collecting the very same green dollars he had recently been planting on dissidents.
All that filth should have been eradicated back then, and all those people should have been held accountable. Again: not hundreds of thousands and not millions, but the main dozens and hundreds.
Unfortunately, the prevailing idea at the time was that the main thing was not politics, morality, or justice. The main thing was to carry out privatization as quickly as possible. To create a “propertied class.” And for that, they relied on people like Filipp Bobkov and judges who had imprisoned people for “speculation” (a Soviet-era economic offense). Those same people gradually turned themselves into both the “propertied class” and the political власть.
Another of my favorite examples is Supreme Court chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev. In the 1980s he sent Zoya Svetova’s father to prison for distributing the Bible; in the 2010s he was upholding the sentence against Pussy Riot for dancing in a church.
Anatoly Marchenko was literally worked to death in prison in 1986, after Perestroika had already begun. Two years later, what Marchenko had been saying was being printed in every newspaper. Then Anatoly Sobchak was broadcasting the same message, echoed in a thin little voice by a certain Vladimir Putin—a democrat, a liberal, and a free-marketeer—who demanded that all powers be transferred from the vile USSR to the wonderful RSFSR, and then to Russia.
For many years afterward, the investigators, prosecutors, and judges who killed Marchenko went on working as investigators, prosecutors, and judges, and no one made a single complaint against them.
That is why nothing worked out for Yeltsin, Sobchak, Gaidar, the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies, or the 90 percent of Russian citizens who once voted for a transition to democracy.
Everything worked out for the Filipp Bobkovs, the Vyacheslav Lebedevs, and the various Vladimir Putins of this world, who do not care what they say or what slogans they proclaim, so long as they stay at the state trough.
That’s how it is. The Black Notebook should make its tiny contribution so that if another historic moment ever comes, no one will forget which judges and officials were imprisoning people like Lutskevich and Dadin, shutting down newspapers, and liquidating political parties.
P.S. Thanks to the volunteer Natalia for helping create the website.
Tags