Foreigners are not wrong to fear surveillance, but perceptions often overshadow reality
By Matthew Bodner and Matthew Kupferm.bodner@imedia.ru
Elena Rasputina
Most foreigners who have spent extended periods of time in Russia can recall advice given to them before their arrival. For government officials, it comes as an institutionalized briefing from their security services. For journalists, scholars, and students, it often comes as wisdom passed down from previous generations of Russia watchers.
For both, the mantra is the same: assume you are being watched.
In modern Moscow, this advice can be easy to forget. The city is a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis like any other. But when Briton Jonathan Haslam first visited as part of a six-month graduate exchange in 1977, the Russian capital was another world. As a foreigner in a closed society, his very presence and interest in the Soviet Union aroused deep suspicion.
“The assumption was that foreigners were spies,” he recalls. This was implicit in the way the Soviets handled visitors like Haslam. There were strict restrictions on where foreigners could live, and the authorities monitored their daily life – both covertly and overtly.
“Their aim was largely to deter you, to give you the impression of total coverage,” Haslam says.
That was the Cold War. Much has changed since 1977, but the spectre of unwanted government attention still hangs over the ranks of Moscow’s foreign population to this day — as recent allegations that Russia may have blackmail on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump show.
But much like the unsubstantiated Trump allegations, many cases of surveillance remain difficult or impossible to prove. State-sponsored snooping is real, but perceptions greatly outpace reality. The conflict adds a degree of paranoia to daily life in Moscow.
Back in the USSR
From a historical perspective, foreigners are not wrong to fear surveillance. The Soviets were unparalleled masters of the art, argues Haslam, now a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the author of Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, a recent book on the subject.
“They had a vast number of people to call upon for following foreigners, something Western services could not match,” he says. “Any girl you went out with would be questioned after your meeting, and then obliged to report on you. Most tour guides were just students on holiday jobs, and they were really there to report on any unusual behavior.”
In Haslam’s time, students from capitalist nations were confined to the first six floors of an Academy of Science’s hotel, which were heavily monitored. Soviet authorities did not always go to great lengths to conceal their efforts.
At the hotel, cleaning staff would regularly sift through papers left by students on their desks. Rooms were obviously bugged. Once, when Haslam broke his morning routine to retrieve a forgotten item from the room, he walked in to find the housekeeper perched atop a stool, talking to a fire alarm on the ceiling.
The fire alarm, it seems, was wired to a central nervous system of surveillance tech hidden away on one of the hotel’s 12 floors. That floor was inaccessible from the main elevator, but Haslam says he once stumbled upon the entrance while exploring the back stairwell. An employee had left the door wide open, and Haslam decided to have a peek. Inside, he discovered a room filled with banks of tape recorders.
"Blabbing helps the enemy!" This Soviet poster from the mid-1950s reflected the emerging atmosphere of distrust between the Soviet Union and the West,
New Surveillance, New Russia
That chance encounter with an open door offered Haslam a glimpse behind the curtains of Soviet surveillance. But it was just one facet of a broad-spectrum effort that Katy Pearce, an expert on media and surveillance in the former USSR, recently described in the Washington Post as a “tedious, costly analogue process involving phone tapping, stakeouts, following people, and lots of photography and videotaping.”
The Soviet collapse in 1991, however, “democratized surveillance,” Pearce argues.
What was once the exclusive forte of a monolithic state apparatus became the bread-and-butter of thousands of former KGB agents, sent out into the cold without work. To make ends meet, they began plying their trade in the private sector, working for Russia’s emerging class of oligarchs. As a result, blackmail came to play an outsized role in the topsy-turvy world of 1990s Russia.
Prominent politicians and businessmen had their phone calls surreptitiously recorded and leaked to the press. Rumor and blackmail became tools of the political trade.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin even used a compromising sex tape to take down the prosecutor general, Yury Skuratov, who was investigating him for corruption. The man who orchestrated the operation was none other than Vladimir Putin, who then served as the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) — a scaled-down remnant of the Soviet KGB.
Such cases bolstered the mythology of surveillance. The Soviet collapse had opened the floodgate, and thousands of foreigners poured into Russia. With high profile surveillance cases proliferating, many foreigners seemed to believe that they, too, were under watch. That was one of the “social oddities” of Moscow life, says Matt Taibbi, an American journalist who worked here in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“Foreigners love to talk about how their phones are tapped,” he wrote in a 1997 article published in The eXile, a popular but now-defunct Moscow-based alternative publication. “They like the idea that someone considers them important enough to be worthy of listening to.”
In comments emailed to The Moscow Times, Taibbi says that, in his view, 95 percent of expats have nothing to worry about. The only real targets are certain prominent businessmen, diplomats, lawyers, and a few journalists.
Taibbi cites his own experience as an example. Reporters working for The eXile were notorious for outlandish, sometimes tasteless stunts, and muckraking investigative work. Taibbi once published transcripts of a former Kremlin chief of staff’s phone calls. The records were obtained, naturally, through surveillance. For his efforts, he says he was never followed and his phones were not tapped.
“I had basically begged to be arrested/surveilled,” he says. “[The fact that] I wasn’t told me that the ordinary expat has little to fear when it comes to surveillance.”
Read More: R
https://themoscowtimes.com
www.fotavgeia.blogspot.com
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου