Putin's Preventive Counter-Revolution by Robert Horvath

Author:Robert Horvath [Horvath, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Former Soviet Republics, Political Science, World, Russian & Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9780415694216
Google: gEx3lhUIgv4C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-15T03:43:21+00:00

The ‘spy rock’ affair

That evening, the debate was transformed by the broadcast of a television documentary that bolstered Putin’s arguments for controls over the NGO sector. The documentary, titled ‘Spies’, alleged links between leading Russian human rights organisations and Western intelligence agencies. It appeared on ‘Special Correspondent’, a current affairs programme on the Rossiya channel hosted by Arkadii Mamontov, a journalist who was to play a conspicuous role in the ‘preventive counter-revolution’. Mamontov’s exposé revolved around the cloak-and-dagger activities of four diplomats at the British embassy in Moscow, who had used a receiver concealed in a small rock to communicate with their agents. In a sign of FSB cooperation in the production, the documentary featured surveillance footage of the diplomats circling the rock. But the Mamontov was less interested in the world of espionage than in the fact that ‘one of the British diplomats, or rather spies, was linked to several Russian non-governmental public organisations’. This diplomat was Mark Doe, a 27-year-old Second Secretary at the embassy, who was filmed, disguised as a student backpacker, travelling to the rock and removing it after an apparent malfunction. In his diplomatic capacity, Doe had also served as a coordinator of the Global Opportunities Foundation, an initiative of the British Foreign Office which had dispensed grants to an array of Russian NGOs. Mamontov exploited this fact to insinuate that Doe’s espionage activities extended to his interactions with civil society:

An intelligence agent, Mark Doe was professionally obliged to recruit Russian citizens to work for British intelligence, he had access, and most importantly unlimited opportunities to work with and contact many public figures in Russia. Through him, money was transferred to several nongovernmental public organisations.

Here was the fuse for Mamontov’s bombshell: the beneficiaries of Doe’s largesse included the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), the oldest and one of the most respected of Russia’s human rights NGOs, which had been established in 1976 by Yurii Orlov to monitor Soviet violations of the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act. Presenting a document that was later dismissed by Ludmila Alekseeva, the group’s chairman, as a forgery, Mamontov showed Doe’s incriminating signature beneath a grant awarding £23,000 to the MHG. Further evidence was uncovered on the MHG’s own website, which recorded Doe’s authorisation of a payment of £5,719 to the Eurasia Foundation for the support of low-circulation regional newspapers. ‘The money [flows] like a river’, commented Mamontov, before moving to his final exhibit: a programme, also supervised by Doe, for ‘the creation of a network of schools for public inspectors in distant regions of Northern Siberia and the Far East’. Exploiting the vagueness of this description, Mamontov insinuated that the inspectors were engaged in something sinister: ‘What kind of inspectors? What will they look at in our regions of northern Siberia and the Far East? One can only guess.’

According to Mamontov, the moral of the ‘spy rock’ tale was that Russia’s civil society was under threat from its adversaries. Gloating that the British embassy and other Western diplomatic

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