Letter From the Editors
In his famous work “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault wrote that “it is society that defines, in terms of its own interests, what must be regarded as a crime.” The stories in this week’s Digest seem to prove his point. Take Armenia, for example: In the wake of parliamentary elections that affirmed a majority for Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, one of his main opponents, former president Robert Kocharyan, was arrested, along with his son Sedrak. On what charges? Abuse of office, bribery and money laundering. Before that, Armenian siloviki arrested and jailedanother political heavyweight, Gagik Tsarukyan, on similar charges. And yet another of Pashinyan’s competitors, tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, has been in jail for over a year for tax evasion. According to commentators Daniil Sechkin and Said Gafurov, all of this “discipline” is being meted out under the pretext of stamping out corruption as Pashinyan tries to steer his country toward accession to the EU. Bagrat Mikoyan, former chief of staff to Kocharyan, is having none of it: “Armenia is a concentration camp of democracy, full of police and Euro-police.”
You’re not likely to see any Euro-cops serving on Russia’s Central Electoral Commission, but it’s certainly keeping busy disqualifying undesirable candidates for the upcoming State Duma elections based on various court rulings. And the “crimes” are more hair-raising than money laundering or tax evasion – we’re talking violation of intellectual property rights. Imagine: The Yabloko party quoted the 1962 antiwar song “Let There Always Be Sunshine” on its Web site, and Communist party candidate Mikhail Matveyev used Microsoft fonts without a license! (Note: Each of these “crimes” was redeemed in its own way, but the Russian media kept the stories quiet: The son of the “Sunshine” composer publicly authorized Yabloko to use the song, and an appeals court in Nizhny Novgorod reinstated Matveyev on the ballot.)
In a more splashy act of redemption, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova published an interview in Vedomosti in which she aligns herself with “Russian feminism.” Daniil Zhaivoronok explains that this statement from a leader of United Russia’s party list is unprecedented, considering that a legislative bill designating feminism as an extremist ideology was drafted in 2023 by State Duma Deputy Oleg Matveichuk: “According to the logic of Matveichuk, . . . feminism is a hostile import; a corrupting influence of the West that undermines the foundations of Russian society.”
On the other hand, he continues, Lvova-Belova’s brand of feminism espouses conservative values, patriarchy and nationalism. The ombudswoman herself puts it this way: “When I am at work, when I am rescuing, protecting and solving problems, I am a Russian feminist. But as a woman, I have always been behind a man, and I value that greatly. . . . I always say – and men love me for this – that men are better in everything. We are for men.”
Zhaivoronok suggests that with this radical rebranding of feminism, the Russian authorities are “testing the waters for seizing the agenda. . . . This speaks to both the regime’s capacity to transform itself and to the feminist project’s remarkable openness to completely different interpretations and assemblages.”
Different interpretations, indeed: An ideology that verges on a crime in Russia can become mainstream. And conversely, a mainstream figure in Russian politics can be considered a criminal: Readers may recall that in March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Lvova-Belova in connection to what she calls “rescuing and protecting” Ukrainian children. They called it unlawful deportation.
Amazingly enough, Russia and American security agents used to work together to investigate such cases of cross-border trafficking. Dennis Cosgrove recalls in a Moscow Times commentary: “As an FBI legal attaché working in Moscow . . . I saw firsthand how this cooperation functioned in practice. It was real. It was productive.” Those were the days!