Institute of Modern Russia

In September of this year, Russia’s Federal Security Service announced that it had seized the Greenpeace vessel and its crew following environmental protests at an offshore Gazprom oil rig in the Pechora Sea and were taking them to Murmansk to conduct an investigation. The “Artic thirty,” as the crewmembers have come to be called, have been held in detention ever since and are now facing criminal charges.

There is no doubt that the Greenpeace activists committed a minor trespassing offense when they tried to scale the Prirazlomnaya platform. They also probably violated maritime traffic safety regulations; however, piracy charges, arrest, and pretrial detention are unjustifiable by law and demonstrate an exaggerated reaction on the part of the Russian justice system.

Piracy charges are groundless, since the inherent goal of piracy is committing larceny through the use of violence, or at least a threat of violence, and nothing of the sort happened in this case. Recently, there have been rumors of a possible reclassification of the crew’s charges from piracy to hooliganism. Hooliganism, however, implies a “rude violation of public order and an expression of clear disrespect for society.” What public order and what society did our investigators find in the Pechora Sea? There was no one there except for the two parties involved in the conflict.

According to the November 15, 2007, ruling of the plenary session of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation “on court practice in the criminal cases of hooliganism,” “a clear disrespect of a person for society is expressed through premeditated violation of generally recognized standards and rules of behavior dictated by the offender’s intent to oppose him or herself to other people and to demonstrate his or her disdain for them.” How is this relevant to the Arctic Sunrise case?

The same ruling defines the motives behind hooliganism, stating that hooliganism should be seen as premeditated actions committed “for no reason at all or over minor reasons.” Ironically, this ideally describes the actions not of the protesters, but of the Russian government toward the Arctic Sunrise activists—the authorities found a minor reason to perform a legal lynching. We are, in fact, dealing with state hooliganism.

The Russian justice system’s reaction to a performance of the punk-rock band Pussy Riot almost two years ago was similarly extreme. Two band members were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment each for actions that should have led to administrative punishment at most.

The Kremlin, which is not yet prepared to be fully and overtly repressive, instead seizes every opportunity to make a big criminal case out of a small offense. This is an act of self-assertion, and it is also a test of our reactions. Small people occupying top state positions are happy to realize that they can shape the destinies of those who dare criticize them. And then they wait for the reaction: What will the world’s response be? Can they move forward or should they slow down a little?

The government’s behavior in Soviet times was similar, only much more aggressive. On September 1, 1983, near the island of Sakhalin, a Soviet fighter aircraft shot down a Korean Boeing 747 flying from New York to Seoul when it deviated from its course and entered Soviet airspace. The passenger liner crashed into the sea, killing all 246 passengers and 23 crewmembers on board. The Soviet government then stated that Soviet air forces had shot down a U.S. spy plane. Thus the Kremlin took the lives of 269 people over a pilot’s error. It found a small opportunity and reacted to the maximum.

The Soviet government, blinded by its hatred of freedom and devoid of any appreciation of the law, strongly believed that it was its sovereign right to take punitive measures. The Soviet regime believed that it had the right to sentence a hungry person to five to ten years in prison for picking up a spikelet left behind in the kolkhoz fields. You steal—you go to prison. You arrive late to work—you get a sentence. An error on the shop floor was considered a subversive action and resulted in a sentence and sometimes even an execution.

Soviet justice was marked by an inconsistency between the seriousness of the crime and the severity of the punishment. Not to mention its punishment of “crimes” that would not be considered criminal in any civilized country. The Soviet government vehemently asserted its sovereign right to terror. It explained its relationship with society in terms of national peculiarities and called any attempt by the international community to influence its terrorist tendencies “intervention in domestic affairs.”

The current Russian regime demonstrates the same style of relationship. The main stylist is undoubtedly Vladimir Putin. He is setting the tone and running the show. The Russian president realizes his inability to deal with difficult situations and handle modern challenges and, consequently, feels it necessary to constantly prove to the whole world, his close circle, and himself that he is a tough politician who can afford to do whatever pleases him. His pathological vanity, to which he subjects the entire country, dooms Russia to shame in the eyes of the international community. Only rogue states and the country’s mediocre, corrupt officials, swindlers, and the remnants of the Soviet nomenklatura (who still yearn for the simplicity and clarity of a totalitarian regime) could support current Russian policy.

This stylistic similarity between Soviet law enforcement practices and those of modern-day Russian is just one of many indicators of a dangerous parallelism between the two regimes. A tendency to overreact to small troubles is a characteristic of a weak government, one that hysterically demonstrates power where tolerance and graciousness are needed.