I don’t know what terrible things were supposedly done to Fatima Tlisova http://newsru.com/russia/12mar2007/fatima.html, but I did once have an encounter with political asylum seekers. About a year ago, when I was serving as chief of staff for Moscow’s YABLOKO (a Russian liberal political party), a letter arrived from the U.S. State Department. Or from the embassy—I don’t remember anymore. The letter asked us to confirm whether certain individuals were members of YABLOKO. These people were seeking political asylum in the United States, and their main argument was that they were members of YABLOKO and were being persecuted for it. Attached to the letter was their appeal to the State Department. What I remember was this: after I joined YABLOKO, the FSB (Russia’s security service) and the police started persecuting me; my wife is also a party member, and because of that she was fired from her job and beaten repeatedly; we are being intimidated and pressured to leave YABLOKO; plainclothes security service officers wait for us outside our apartment building. We checked this guy and his wife through all the YABLOKO databases. Nothing. He had never been a member, was never listed anywhere. I was so amused by the literary, almost artistic descriptions of the repression that I was even tempted to reply, “Yes, those people are indeed members.” And really, why not help the man out: he probably got some kind of invitation, came over, doesn’t want to go back, and immigration has him in a tight spot. So he quickly made up a bunch of nonsense, figuring no one would check. But it was still an official document. With a seal. So we replied that no such people had ever been in the party. I don’t know how the story ended, but whenever I hear about various PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) reports, I immediately remember that letter. That asylum request probably ended up in some statistic on human rights violations in Russia.