It should come as no surprise that Russia, the region’s champion in human rights abuses, is also the leader in opposition-stifling innovation.
In fact, some of its techniques — such as using hard-to-detect poisons to kill political opponents — can be found nowhere else in the former Soviet Union.
Other regimes in the region must think it unfair that, since of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Russians have hogged their difficult-to-trace killer concoctions rather than sharing.Murder is the most visible way to silence political opponents, of course.
But it can get the rest of the world stirred up, and can even upset the citizenry — though God forbid they make their feelings known, for fear of the same.
In addition to murder, the full palette for oppressing political opponents includes beatings, maimings, kidnappings, imprisonment, torture, the filing of bogus criminal charges such as tax evasion, criminal and civil libel actions, lawsuits, deportations and refusal to allow the visits of political opponents living outside the country.
The most high-profile murder in the former Soviet Union in recent years is that of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in February of this year.
The critic of Russia’s participation in the war in Ukraine and other policies was shot four times in the back by unknown assailants while walking on a bridge near the Kremlin. The killing occurred as he was preparing to release a report detailing Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
The report would have embarrassed Russia, which maintains it has no troops in Ukraine, even though there is massive evidence to the contrary, including Russian regulars captured on Ukrainian soil.
Whoever killed Nemtsov didn’t try to hide the fact that the death was an assassination. In some instances, Russia has used stealth to try to kill a political figure it didn’t like. The intent of such a tactic is to limit international condemnation.
A case in point was the dioxin poisoning that nearly killed the pro-Western Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the fall of 2004. At the time, almost no medical centers knew how to detect dioxin. Yushchenko sought immediate treatment in Switzerland, where doctors were able to recognize and treat the poison, saving his life.
He would go on to become Ukraine’s president during the Orange Revolution of late 2004.
Intelligence experts said only one organization at the time would have had dioxin and known it was nearly undetectable: the FSB, or Federal Security Service, the successor to Russia’s KGB. The specter of the Yushchenko poisoning fell over the former Soviet Union again recently.
Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza became critically ill from an unknown source in May of this year after completing and releasing Boris Nemtsov’s unfinished report documenting Russian involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.
Although murder is no laughing matter, some attempts at stealth assassination in the former Soviet Union are comical.
Kazakhstan classified the death of opposition figure Zamanbek Nurkadilov in 2005 a suicide even though he had suffered three gunshot wounds — two in the chest and one in the head — and investigators said a pillow had been used to muffle the sound of the shots.
As for punishment that falls short of murder, Russia is accused of pulling off a trifecta of kidnapping, torture and imprisonment in the case of political dissident Leonid Razvozzhayev.
He fled to Kyiv in 2012 but was kidnapped and spirited back to Russia.
Russian authorities claimed he had confessed to plotting riots and other crimes, but when he was being led out of a Moscow court he yelled: “They tortured me for two days, kidnapped me in Ukraine!”
Beatings are also widely used to stifle the opposition in the former Soviet Union. In the past year or two, Russian oppositionists have been publicizing opulent country homes that Russia’s elite has built on public land.
The publicity has included descriptions of the mansions, photos and video on social media. This wealth-outing tactic has become known as “daching” — a play on the Russian word for a country home, or dacha.
The elites have taken umbrage to being outed, and one result has been the beatings of the outers, sometimes in broad daylight.
When authorities in the former Soviet Union can’t find evidence that a political figure is trying to overthrow the government, and believes that concocting such evidence would generate a backlash at home and abroad, they often accuse him of financial crimes.
One reason is that it’s harder for political opponents and human-rights activists to discredit trumped-up financial-crime charges than it is politically charged accusations such as conspiring to overthrow the government.
Financial crimes can lead to just as lengthy prison terms as conspiracy accusations, so they have the desired effect of sidelining an opposition figure for years while generating less international condemnation.
Kazakhstan filed tax evasion charges against opposition figure Amirzhan Qosanov’s Center for Support of Democratic Reforms in 2003.
There was ulterior motive in the timing of the charges. They were filed just before Qosanov was to fly to the United States and several countries in Europe to discuss Kazakhstan’s political and human-rights situations. Since the charges were felonies, Kazakhstan authorities refused to let him leave the country.In addition to filing charges to chill opposition figures such as Qosanov, authorities in the former Soviet Union arrest them to prevent them from spreading their messages.
Armenia arrested five leaders of the opposition group Founding Parliament on April 7 of this year, three weeks before a commemoration of the Armenian genocide in our capital of Yerevan on April 24. Authorities said the Founding Parliament leaders planned to try to turn the commemoration into street protests against the government.
A court released the five in May, a few days after a letter from Human Rights Watch protesting their detention arrived in Armenia. Another way besides arrests to keep opposition figures from spreading their message is deporting them.
Russia did this after its illegal occupation of Crimea with the leader of the peninsula’s Tatar community, Refat Chubarov.
The new Russian-led Crimean authorities refused to let him re-enter the country after a visit to Ukraine in July 2014.
The reason, they said, was that he had given an extremist speech in Ukraine.
Chubarov will be unable to return to Crimea for five years.Armenia used a similar tactic to keep an ethnic Armenian from France out of our country this year. Immigration authorities at Yerevan’s Zvartnots International Airport refused to let Shant Voskeritchian, who heads the Paris branch of the Renaissance Armenienne opposition group, enter Armenia on May 21.
After hours of questioning, he was put on a Paris-bound plane on May 22.If you keep up with current events, you know that the cases of Shant Voskeritchian and the other political victims listed here are just the tip of the iceberg in the former Soviet Union.
A full accounting of political victimization would fill volumes. It’s not just the number of political victims that makes you shake your head. It’s also the innovative tactics that are used — like the development of difficult-to-detect poisons. If this innovation could be channeled into high tech, Silicon Valley’s days would be numbered.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.
