When Gennady Kravtsov sent a cover letter to a Swedish company, he reasoned that, even if a job did not come of it, he at least would know whether his engineering skills were valued outside Russia.
Instead, he found himself charged with treason and facing a possible 15 years in prison.
Kravtsov worked for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency from 1990 to 2005 as a radio engineer in satellite intelligence. For five years after he quit, he was barred from leaving Russia or taking certain security jobs because of the sensitive nature of the work. However, when that period was up, he sent a cover letter to a Swedish company he found online. Nothing ever came of it.
In 2013, Russian counterintelligence officers asked Kravtsov about the contact, and last year grabbed him on the street and threw him in jail.
The Russian government has increasingly portrayed any cooperation with foreign companies or nationals as a potential security threat, a throwback to Soviet times, when any interaction with foreigners aroused suspicion.
The eclectic group of Russians charged with treason this year includes a mother of seven, a Sochi traffic controller, a Black Sea Fleet sailor, a Siberian police major, a Russian Orthodox Church employee, a Moscow university lecturer and a retired nuclear scientist. The variety of suspects is not in itself evidence of a harsher crackdown, but Russia is clearly widening its net on treason and hauling in the most people in years.
Nine people, including Kravtsov, were arrested in Moscow last year on suspicion of treason, according to the Moscow City Court. Across Russia, 15 people were convicted of treason last year, nearly four times as many as the year before, Russian Supreme Court data show.
The stepped up campaign against suspected traitors follows a Kremlin move in 2012 to expand the definition of treason to include undefined “assistance” to a foreign government, which rights activists have warned could lead to abuse.
“If you look at it, any person who has talked to a foreigner and said something bad about the government can be sent to prison,” rights advocate Lev Ponomarev said.
Kravtsov’s lawyer, Ivan Pavlov, has handled treason cases for 20 years, but he has never had as many clients as he has now.
“They look for enemies and they find them. These are various people, from a breastfeeding mother to former intelligence agents,” Pavlov said. “The mood in law enforcement agencies, how aggressive they are, their zeal to intensify their search and prosecute [more people] stem from the developments in Ukraine and Russia’s position in the world.”
He said “every single treason case” he has seen recently has a connection to the crisis in Ukraine — where Kiev is fighting a pro-Russia insurgency — either because the person had traveled there or had some personal ties.
Russia is returning to old Cold War tactics in other ways as well. In July, the Nizhny Novgorod State University fired its vice rector, an American who had lived in Russia for two decades, after a state television program criticized him for hanging portraits of US scientists on university walls. When state media seek to discredit Russia’s marginalized opposition, they often accuse them of being too cozy with Western diplomats.
It is the treason campaign that perhaps most evokes the repression of the Soviet era.
“At first I thought he was the only ‘spy’ in prison,” said Kravtsov’s wife, Alla Kravtsova. “Then I realized it was a war-time campaign. A campaign to catch spies had begun and Gena was at the right time in the right place with his stupid letter.”
Pavlov is barred from discussing details of Kravtsov’s case, but he said that prosecutors are accusing his client of revealing his job description at the GRU, as well as information about the military capability of the Tselina-2 radio surveillance system.
Kravtsov’s defense argued that since the satellite, invented in the 1970s, has not been in use since 2000, information about it should not be classified.
The lawyer himself has been kept in the dark about much of the case, he said, and the defense was helpless since the government list of classified information is classified as well.
Kravtsov’s case was heard at the Moscow City Court, with the trial proceeding behind closed doors.
Kravtsov’s wife attended every hearing, even though she was not allowed in. She stood outside, straining to listen through the door and waiting to get a glimpse of her husband whenever it opened.
Prosecutors on Monday last week asked the court to sentence the 47-year-old Kravtsov to 15 years in prison.
The verdict is expected next Monday.
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