--- title: Inside Putin's Russia description: Inside Putin's Russia canonical: https://time.com/archive/6642774/inside-putins-russia/ author: Simon Shuster article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-11-26T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-26T16:28:07.008Z article:section: World og:title: Inside Putin's Russia og:description: Inside Putin's Russia og:url: https://time.com/archive/6642774/inside-putins-russia/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte83c20a9a2213e31/698a45234ee262060f31c468/360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside Putin's Russia twitter:description: Inside Putin's Russia twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte83c20a9a2213e31/698a45234ee262060f31c468/360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [World](/section/world/) # Inside Putin's Russia by [Simon Shuster](/author/simon-shuster/) Nov 26, 2012 5:00 AM CUT  Members of the dissident punk collective Pussy Riot plan their next performance at a Moscow hideout. Three members were arrested earlier this year. Members of the dissident punk collective Pussy Riot plan their next performance at a Moscow hideout. Three members were arrested earlier this year.Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for TIME by [Simon Shuster](/author/simon-shuster/) Nov 26, 2012 5:00 AM CUT The Surveillance device was likely planted on the breakfast table, possibly inside a flower arrangement, at Moscow’s Holiday Inn Hotel. It was either small enough or so well hidden that Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, did not notice it. He simply assumed, as do many diplomats who pass through Russia, that the government was spying on him. Bildt had traveled to Moscow in May of last year for a conference on human rights, and during a break in his schedule, he had breakfast with Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition movement. They sat at a table in one of the hotel’s dining rooms and talked about opposition politics, about the protest movement, about corruption. Nearly one year later, an audiotape of that conversation was leaked to the Russian tabloids. It contained nothing incriminating. But it served as a handy way for the state-run media to smear Navalny as an agent of foreign influence — about as serious an insult as you can get in Putin’s Russia. [(MORE: What Lies Beneath Russia’s Latest Round of Protests)](https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2114257,00.html "undefined") Surveillance in Moscow, like heavy snow and heavier traffic, is often treated as a fact of life, so Bildt was not surprised when the tape emerged. (A few months later, in early August, Navalny found an audio transmitter built into the baseboards of his office and a tiny video camera pointing directly at his desk from behind a pinhole in the doorjamb.) “You have to assume these things are going on,” Bildt told me in September. “What I found to be something of a novelty was that the state would make such things public.” In the year between the tape’s creation and its release, there seemed to have been a change in the political calculus of spying. That foreign diplomats in Moscow are bugged may damage Russia’s image, but if it meant a chance to embarrass the opposition, the risk was apparently worth it. To Bildt, this reflected a new kind of brazenness in the tactics of Russia’s spy agencies: Yes, we are watching you — but now we don’t care if everybody knows it. [(MORE: Was a Swedish Firm Complicit in Sudan’s War?)](https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2001197,00.html "undefined") Under Vladimir Putin, who began his third term as Russia’s President in May, that message is being hammered home. On Sept. 21, the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, voted on a legal amendment that could make meetings like the one Navalny had with Bildt an act of treason. The amendment was proposed to the Duma by Russia’s domestic spy agency, the FSB, which succeeded the KGB after the fall of the Soviet Union. One of its deputy directors, Yuri Gorbunov, argued that the legal definition of treason should go way beyond the crime of passing state secrets to foreign governments. It should incriminate anyone who provides “consultations or other help” that may allow foreigners to harm Russia’s “constitutional order” — meaning the ruling regime. After hearing Gorbunov’s two-minute speech, all 449 members of the chamber voted in favor of the amendment. By coincidence, that unanimous vote capped off the year since Putin announced his intention to run for a third term as President. It was a fitting capstone. In the course of those 12 months, the Kremlin has demonstrated that Putin’s next six years in office will not be marked by compromise or democratization. Instead, the sound of officers banging on the door has again become familiar for Russia’s activists, whose homes are now routinely raided, as are the homes of their relatives. New laws have been enacted targeting human-rights groups, journalists and opposition protesters. After a weeklong show trial in August, three members of the performance-art collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for performing a crude anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral. Although one of their sentences was suspended on appeal, two of the women were sent to serve their terms in Russia’s harsh prison colonies, despite the international outcry over their case. That shouldn’t be surprising — Russia has begun to demonize the West, and particularly the U.S., in ways not seen since the Cold War. This shift is partially the result of the growing influence of security agents like Gorbunov, who claimed that day in the Duma that “international organizations … are actively used as a cover for espionage” — though he did not give any examples or evidence to support his statement. The Duma took five minutes to pass the final two readings of the amendment on Oct. 24, sending Russia’s opposition leaders and rights groups into a panic. “This is the beginning of the end,” Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the FSB, wrote on his Facebook page on the day of the vote. The amendment, he points out, would allow the FSB to conduct indefinite surveillance on practically any Russian citizen who comes into contact with a foreigner. [(MORE: Russia’s Revolution Will Be Tweeted and Facebooked and YouTubed)](https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2104446,00.html "undefined") Call it a return to Putin’s roots. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was fast decaying, Putin served as a low-level KGB agent in East Germany. A decade later, he was plucked from the ranks of the Kremlin bureaucracy to lead the FSB, and he made sure to hold on to his ties in the security services when he was promoted to the post of President. From the start, many of his closest advisers were KGB veterans. But initially the influence of these men was tempered by a powerful clan of Kremlin liberals — mostly reformist holdovers from President Boris Yeltsin’s administration — who at least maintained the promise of reforms, if not their implementation. But ever since last fall, when Putin announced his bid for a third term as President, the reformers have been pushed aside, and the conservatives have come to the fore. Now finding themselves in the embattled opposition, liberals like Alexei Kudrin, who served for over 11 years as Putin’s Finance Minister, admit that Russia is heading down a scary road. “The worst scenario has been chosen,” Kudrin told me in September, about a year after resigning from government. “The one of repression.” [See Protesters March on Moscow.](https://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2106180,00.html "undefined") [See how Russia’s Opposition Gets Its Act Together Electronically — for Now.](https://world.time.com/2012/10/23/russias-opposition-gets-its-act-together-electronically-for-now/ "undefined") **Defining Down Treason** In a speech he gave on Sept. 12, about a week before the Duma put the amendment to a vote, Putin argued that Russia was engaged in an “open battle” with foreign powers over “the spiritual and moral values” of the nation. The weapons in this fight were “well-orchestrated propaganda attacks” from abroad, and if Russia did not counteract them, they could lead to “ultimate collapse, the loss of sovereignty and wars of brothers killing brothers.” The once and current President cast the threat in absolutist terms. “\[Their\] attempts to influence the worldview of entire nations,” he said, “to bend them to their will, to force upon them their system of values and outlooks is an absolute reality, just like the battle for natural resources.” [(MORE: The Managed Democracy: A How-to-Manual from Putin’s Russia)](https://world.time.com/2012/10/15/the-managed-democracy-a-how-to-manual-from-putins-russia/ "undefined") Within hours of this speech, it became clear which enemies Putin had in mind. The development arm of the U.S. State Department, USAID, was ordered that day to pack up and ship out of Russia by the end of the month. The agency had spent two decades and some $2.7 billion developing Russian civil society, financing everything from election observers to health programs, and its expulsion was the worst diplomatic snub Moscow had dealt Washington since the end of the Cold War. The insult seemed calculated. As one Russian pundit described it: “Putin has publicly wiped his feet on Obama’s jacket.” Moscow appeared to have been building toward such a decision since the start of Putin’s re-election campaign. A mass opposition movement, mostly from among the urban middle class, had sprung up last winter to oppose his return to the Kremlin. After the first major street protest in December, Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving “the signal” that started the demonstrations against him. Anti-Americanism quickly became a central theme of his campaign and continued after Putin’s election in March. One of the progovernment networks, NTV, showed such an uncanny ability to predict U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul’s every move that he seemed to suspect he was under surveillance. “Do they have a right to read my e-mail and listen to my phone?” McFaul tweeted in March. McFaul’s suspicions, which NTV denied, point to a unique aspect of surveillance in Russia — the government’s ability to coordinate the work of state-run media and the legislature, as well as law-enforcement and spy agencies. The teamwork seemed evident in early October, about a week after the vote on the treason amendment, when NTV ran a documentary accusing various opposition leaders of treason. The film included footage from another surveillance camera that showed Sergei Udaltsov, a leader of the anti-Putin protests, sitting around a table with a few of his comrades from the opposition. “It is not out of the question that they were plotting a terrorist attack,” the NTV voice-over suggests, switching to stock footage of an explosion. In the final frames, the narrator asks the police to investigate Udaltsov and his fellow activists for treason. Sure enough, the prosecutor general soon got to work, filing criminal charges for “inciting mass arrest” against Udaltsov and two other activists from his Left Front opposition group. They all denied the charges, but if the treason amendment is approved in time, they could be the first ones charged under the new statute. One of the accused, a union organizer from the Left Front named Leonid Razvozzhayev, fled to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on Oct. 16, the day before official charges were filed against him. In Kiev he applied for political asylum at the U.N. agency for refugees. When he stepped outside the agency’s office for a coffee break, however, he was kidnapped by four men, bundled into a van and driven back across the Russian border. He appeared three days later at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, having apparently signed a 10-page confession for “organizing mass unrest.” According to the statement he made to rights workers in prison — as relayed independently to TIME by those workers — the confession was extracted through torture. He said he was held in a basement for almost three days without food, threatened with the murder of his wife and young children and forced to read his confession in front of a video camera. The four men who held Razvozzhayev in that basement never identified themselves, but once they had secured his confession, he says, they handed him over to the Russian police, who took him to prison. Although the U.N. demanded an investigation into the alleged kidnapping in Kiev, Russian investigators have denied Razvozzhayev’s version of the story, saying he turned himself in to police in Moscow and voluntarily confessed to “get it off his chest.” [(PHOTOS: Protests and Counterprotests in Russia)](https://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2101572,00.html "undefined") Valeri Borschev, one of the human-rights activists who met Razvozzhayev in prison, says his case marks a paradigm shift in Putin’s Russia. “What we’re seeing is a return to methods of repression perfected under Stalin,” he says. As for Udaltsov, he expects to be arrested soon as well. “Their surveillance is unconstitutional,” Udaltsov told me by phone on Oct. 16, the day before he was charged. “They did not have the right to film me in that conference room. I wasn’t under investigation for anything.” Sweeping his apartment for bugs, says Udaltsov, has become “part of my routine now. But you can’t check every single place you have a meeting. Eventually you just start to assume that they’re watching at every moment.” [Vladimir Putin Admits His Crazy Wildlife Stunts Were Setups.](https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/09/14/vlad-vs-wild-russias-vladimir-putin-admits-his-crazy-wildlife-stunts-were-setups/ "undefined") [See photos of Putin Sworn In as Russia’s President.](https://world.time.com/2012/05/07/vladimir-putin-sworn-in-as-russias-president/ "undefined") **Sex, Lies and Videotape** The creeping return of Stalinist-era surveillance is part of the legacy of Putin’s long-serving security chief, Nikolai Patrushev, whose influence has been on the rise since Putin’s return. During his almost nine years as FSB chief, the legal notion of “extremism” was significantly expanded, lumping together terrorists, liberal activists, trade-union leaders and writers critical of the Kremlin. According to a recently published history of the FSB, The New Nobility, which Soldatov co-authored, the outspoken people from all of these groups are entered into a database of citizens who can be monitored by the state. “It basically includes anyone who actively opposes the regime,” Soldatov says. In 2008, when Putin moved over to the role of Prime Minister because of constitutional term limits, Patrushev took over the Security Council, a body that oversees all of Russia’s law-enforcement and spy agencies. His tenure there has coincided with a huge jump in government surveillance. Even as the official crime rate fell from 2007 to ’11, the number of wiretaps and other methods of surveillance jumped by 75% to reach a record last year of more than 465,000, according to data released by the Supreme Court. [(MORE: Why Putin Can’t Claim Victory in His War on Terror)](https://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1212052,00.html "undefined") Alexei Filatov, a retired lieutenant colonel of the FSB, insists that the spike comes down to modern gadgetry, not over-zealous policing. “We have a lot more technical capabilities now,” he tells me. “It’s not that we didn’t have the need \[to conduct surveillance\] before, but we didn’t have the means to do it all.” The system used to conduct surveillance in Russia is known as SORM, which intercepts phone conversations and Internet traffic, and there are now seven government agencies that can legally use it — even the bureau of prisons. Although each wiretap officially requires a court order, Filatov admits that “quite often, this technology is used not with the aim of fighting terrorism or crime.” The FSB did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Just take the case of Vladimir Ryzhkov. A career politician and former lawmaker, Ryzhkov helped lead the anti-Putin protests last winter and immediately became the target of leaked surveillance videos. The first one caught him in a Moscow café discussing strategies for a protest with another lawmaker, Gennady Gudkov. “We made plans for that meeting over the phone only a half an hour before,” Gudkov tells me. “So not only did they have our phones tapped, but they had a mobile team ready to set up surveillance in the café.” Things only got nastier from there. In February, a video was posted online from a camera apparently installed inside Ryzhkov’s home or office. It showed someone with a stark resemblance to Ryzhkov masturbating and receiving fellatio from a young woman on a couch. Ryzhkov claims the sex acts were spliced in using “fake, doctored video,” although he believes some of the footage may have been taken by a hidden camera. “I’m watched all the time,” he says. “What do you expect? The country is run by an officer of the KGB, so the KGB is what we’re dealing with.” And then there was Alexander Lebedev. When the winter protests broke out, he became the only Russian billionaire to side with the opposition, even financing Navalny’s anti-corruption projects. He wound up paying dearly for it. In July, a video montage appeared on the Internet of Lebedev with a handful of prostitutes, usually two at a time, at a suite in Kiev’s Hotel Ukraina. Even though Lebedev himself owns the hotel, it appears that two hidden cameras were installed in the suite, one in the living area and another facing the bed. What they captured would amount to pornography were it not for the editor’s decision to blur out Lebedev’s genitals. Lebedev, who is married, admits that the tapes are genuine. “Here it is just not surprising,” Lebedev told me in September. “People accept that these are the rules, that opponents are fair game, even when it comes to their private lives, their private property.” Since the tapes leaked, Lebedev has decided to sell all his Russian assets and move his money abroad. “I’m done banging my head against the wall here.” [(MORE: Alexander Lebedev Attacks Fellow Oligarch on Russian Television)](https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/19/billionaire-punch-up-alexander-lebedev-attacks-fellow-oligarch-on-russian-television/ "undefined") Navalny has meanwhile come to accept near constant surveillance as an occupational hazard for the opposition. The frame of his office doorway is still partly disassembled, revealing the small hole where he discovered the hidden camera in August. “Of course it makes you paranoid,” he tells me, glancing toward the camera wires that protrude from the doorjamb. Since Putin’s return to the presidency, Navalny’s apartment, where he lives with his wife and two children, has been searched twice; a sweep of his parents’ wicker factory followed. By the arrival of fall, Navalny had given up sweeping his office for bugs. He doesn’t see the point. “I just work on the assumption that their technology is so much stronger than ours that there’s no way to fight them. If they want, they’ll listen through the windows, through the power outlets, through the walls. We just have to learn to live with that.” [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](https://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek "undefined") [See the Cartoons of the Week.](https://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek "undefined") ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642774/inside-putins-russia/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6642774/inside-putins-russia/"},"headline":"Inside Putin's Russia","datePublished":"2012-11-26T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:28:07.008Z","description":"Inside Putin's Russia","url":"https://time.com/archive/6642774/inside-putins-russia/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte83c20a9a2213e31/698a45234ee262060f31c468/360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Simon Shuster","url":"https://time.com/author/simon-shuster/"}],"articleSection":"World","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte83c20a9a2213e31/698a45234ee262060f31c468/360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"360_int_zkgb_1126.jpg","caption":"Members of the dissident punk collective Pussy Riot plan their next performance at a Moscow hideout. 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