23 May 2025
By Leonid Nikitinsky
Source: Novaya Gazeta
Participants in the 13th International Legal Forum, held in St. Petersburg, were clearly divided into two groups, ‘past’ and ‘future,’ according to its plan of events. The ‘future’ group consisted chiefly of young, impeccably dressed, cynical heads of law firms catering to businesses. The ‘past’ was represented by those of a certain age from the ‘law enforcement’ establishment, including from the Investigative Committee, the Ministry of Justice and, I’m sorry to say, the Constitutional Court and even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Lawyers, who are workhorses, could barely get in: they couldn’t afford it, and there wasn’t much point. Officials got in ‘by virtue of their position,’ but lawyers from firms had to pay 330,000 roubles per person, not including travel, meals and accommodation in expensive hotels. We confidently identified these lawyers as ‘cynical,’ since participation in such an event today in itself presupposes a share of healthy cynicism. But for connections and reputation in the eyes of clients who are connected in one way or another with the state budget, one must pay.
And not only in roubles. When they wandered into events on the parallel track, where they were openly and unashamedly bored despite the TV cameras, representatives of the law firms did their best not to stand out from the rest of the attendees who were fired up not about legal, but ideological issues.
It was difficult to align that part of the programme which was given most importance and intensity (not in terms of volume) with jurisprudence. Which is not surprising seeing how, at the level of legislative and law enforcement practice, the law has been subsumed by ideology.
We’ll talk more about this in the final part of the article, but first – a general view of the Forum panels.
This time round the Forum was a showcase for the Minister of Justice, Konstantin Chuichenko, who left even the head of the Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin – who as usual talked about migrants – far behind him, declaring the Decembrists to have been ‘subjects of foreign influence’ and expressing the view that Tsar Nicholas I did not punish them severely enough. During the session on ‘Foreign Interference: Lessons of History,’ both Herzen and the members of Narodnaya Volya, whose names are given to many streets and not only in St. Petersburg, took a beating from Chuichenko.
Possibly this historical injustice long prevented the Minister from getting to sleep, because the next day he suggested that, in order to avoid mistakes of the past, actions directed at the defence of moral values should not be regarded as criminal. Chuichenko does not throw his words to the wind: for example, it is possible to expand the framework of ‘necessary defence’ to include the lynching of ‘traitors to the motherland’ (of those who did not escape, like Herzen, abroad). Perhaps such a bill is already being prepared in the Ministry of Justice in line with judicial practice which considers participation in the Special Military Operation extenuating circumstances.
Deputy Minister of Justice Oleg Sviridenko, as required, did not get ahead of his boss, but took an active part in the session on ‘Institution of the Foreign Agent. World Experience’. In particular, he said that in only 2023-2024, 67 journalists and 46 ‘cultural figures’ were designated as ‘foreign agents’ in the Russian Federation, and there are currently 999 legal entities and individuals in total in the Ministry of Justice register. Sberbank has already opened 561 special accounts for them (including 473 for individuals), from which it will be impossible to withdraw money until after removal of the ‘foreign agent’ brand. (Sberbank has nowhere it can hide from such a link to the Ministry of Justice, but this money, however much it is, will be under their management for a long time.)
This session on the first day of the Forum set the tone for all the rest. Maria Zakharova from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the ‘whingeing’ Western countries of adopting their own laws on foreign influence. She talked about the sanctions that chiefly threaten (who would have thought?) representatives of Russia and China, but did not go into details. I would like to hear from her (if she prepared the report herself) precisely who it is that must register in those countries as an ‘agent of foreign influence,’ and under what conditions, and what awful punishments await those ‘unregistered.’
Deputy Yana Lantratova made a vivid speech, describing how the secret services of hostile countries involve ‘our children’ in criminal terrorist activities and corrupt them from infancy with disgusting toys. We would even agree with her that a doll in a coffin is, at the very least, in poor taste, but did Yana Valeryevna perhaps knock on the wrong door? After all, this is not entirely a legal issue.
The representatives of civil society ‘Vovan and Lexus’ (Vladimir Kuznetsov and Aleksei Stolyarov) who took on the role of proactive fighters against lawlessness, showed a video montage of their interviews with ‘foreign agents’ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Artur Smolyaninov, Liudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin*, Dmitry Bykov*, Viktor Shenderovich*, and Andrei Makarevich*. The issue is not even the difference in public status of those ‘pranksters’ and the individuals who became their naive victims. A prank is a joke, albeit a cruel one, but this was a political provocation, planned in advance as a denunciation. We will leave aside the question of the lack of taste shown by the organizers, but the nature of Vovan and Lexus’s activities does not explain why they were invited to a legal forum (at the organizers’ expense, one must assume).
Against this backdrop, the head of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, who had previously been the chief ideologist of the St. Petersburg Forum, appeared as one of the moderates, especially since his favorite theme of the priority of ‘statehood’ over human rights was taken over by Chuichenko. The head of the Constitutional Court modestly chose ‘the hydra of corruption’ as the topic of his lecture. He pointed, in particular, to the privatization of the 1990s as the source of the current levels of embezzlement in Russia. Perhaps so, but Professor Zorkin is not only a jurist and legal historian, he is also chair of the Constitutional Court, and this court has just, in essence, abolished the statute of limitations for invalidating privatization deals. It is unlikely that this complaint to the Constitutional Court will be the last, so next time strictly speaking the chair will have to recuse himself.
Zorkin discussed corruption as a phenomenon with historical examples and did so quite reasonably, until he linked Russian corruption to the ‘Dulles plan’ to completely corrupt the Soviet people. The problem is that the ‘Dulles plan’ (named after the CIA director from 1953, even though the ‘plan’ dates back to 1945) is most likely a fake — a compilation from Soviet literature about spies. The archives of those years in the US have been completely declassified, but no one has been able to find anything resembling this source.
The Petersburg International Legal Forum was brought to a close by Nikita Mikhalkov who suggested at the final session that those gathered drink ‘to Victory’ — his assistants promptly distributed shot glasses filled with deeply patriotic moonshine accompanied by pickled cucumbers.
And there was a need to relax: everyone had just watched a montage from Mikhalkov’s own personal online channel, Besogon. This identification of Besogon with justice is perhaps the best metaphor for the legal absurdity that is taking place.
It was Chuichenko who in his speech developed the central idea of the Forum that the state has priority over the law, and ‘statehood’ over human rights. The constitution must be rewritten accordingly, and laws against ‘foreign agents’ who dare to think differently must be tightened. The same ideas were echoed in other speeches, and turning them into legislative bills will be a quick and easy task.
It’s not that there was anything new in this. But if we compare the 13th Forum with previous ones, this was the first time that anti-legal ideas were expressed so openly and brazenly. What happened? Was it nerves resulting from the continuation of the special military operation, or did the officials get drunk on something similar to moonshine before the opening of the Forum rather than before its closing? Either way, they dropped their masks and revealed themselves to the legal world as they really are: with horns and hooves.
Seriously speaking, the shift toward the dominance of ‘statism’ and the ideology that supports it over law is apparently a global trend today, replacing the globalization that had taken the stage under the banners of democracy and the rule of law. Also playing a role has been the emergence of new players on the world stage, hitherto alien to the doctrine of human rights, and the rejection of legal approaches in international affairs in favour of force.
The pendulum effect, general fatigue, and the reaction to the well-known ‘excesses’ of liberalism are all at work. But in the 80 years since the end of World War II, the doctrine of human rights, born out of the horror of that war, has managed to take root in the mass consciousness as something attractive, and it has become somewhat indecent to build one’s rhetoric on rampant nationalism in the 21st century.
The essentially liberal idea of the rule of law in the logic of the ‘Spin Dictators’ (see the book of that name by Sergei Guriev* and Daniel Treisman) must be replaced with something else.
There have to be grounds for the state’s renunciation of justice. Ideology and demagoguery come to the rescue, and here everyone has their own strengths, but Russia is ahead of the pack.
The forbidden word ‘war’ was heard on almost all panels at the St. Petersburg Forum — in the sense of the war that is now and forever being waged against Russia by the malicious West, but in a ‘hybrid’ way, including all kinds of legal traps and tricks. And in war, all means are good, and laws lose their force.
Russia is the victim. Insulted and humiliated, always innocent. We are only defending ourselves, including from internal enemies, whether in the form of the former Decembrists or the current opponents of the Special Military Operation. This is the core of the Forum’s rhetoric. Albeit in legal language, participants in one-sided ideological ‘debates’ were extremely aggressive, but they spoke as if on behalf of the victims, the ‘long-suffering.’ At the heart of the right-wing populist turn, which Russia has been quicker to adopt than the West, lies a deep inferiority complex. It itches like a boil, until the pus bursts out.
* Added by the Russian Ministry of Justice to the register of ‘foreign agents.’
Translated by Alyssa Rider and Simon Cosgrove
