Opinion | Vladimir Kara-Murza: I am not a foreign agent

Every month, I get a visit from a couple of polite officials from Roskomnadzor, the Russian government’s censorship agency, who present me with administrative court summons for violating Russia’s “foreign agent” law. All messages that I pass by correspondence from prison and that are posted by my colleagues on my social media are supposed to carry a Caps Lock disclaimer that they have been “produced by a foreign agent,” they tell me. And I respond, invariably and just as politely, that I am a Russian politician and not a “foreign agent” — and that I have no intention of engaging in self-slander. I tell exactly the same thing to the (aptly named) Soviet district court that obligingly issues my administrative convictions. On June 11, it handed me the third one, opening the way for the authorities to initiate a new criminal case against me for “noncompliance with the foreign agent law.”

Trying to defame political opponents as “agents of foreign influence” is an old Soviet tactic — one of many adopted by Vladimir Putin’s regime. During the mass state terror under Stalin, millions were sent to the Gulag or to their deaths with this label. (This includes my great-grandfather and great-great-uncle who were executed as “Latvian agents.” Both were fully rehabilitated and exonerated of all charges, posthumously.) In the post-Stalin era, Soviet state propaganda went to great lengths to paint dissidents — including such notable figures as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn — as Western stooges.

Under Putin, this practice was revived after the mass pro-democracy protests of 2011 and 2012 with the passage of the first “foreign agent” law. The Kremlin claimed it was merely following the example of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the analogy was patently false from the beginning. Unlike the U.S. law, which focuses on political lobbying “at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal,” Putin’s measure targeted anyone who has engaged in vaguely defined “political activity” — and, importantly, did not link foreign funding to any specific actions. (The concept of a “foreign principal” was absent altogether.) Moreover, the definition of “foreign funding” included pretty much anything: Opposition activists and groups have been labeled as “foreign agents” for taxi payments, airline mile transfers and even using Western online pay systems such as PayPal.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin signed a new law that dispensed with the funding formality altogether: The Justice Ministry could now place the “foreign agent” label on anyone it deemed to be “under foreign influence” — meaning, in practice, on any public figure who spoke out against the Kremlin. I was designated a “foreign agent” in April 2022 (simultaneously with my arrest) for opposing the war in Ukraine and for calling Putin a war criminal — this was the official justification produced by the Justice Ministry when I challenged the designation in court. The Russian government’s “foreign agent registry” now includes more than 800 organizations and individuals — including Russia’s most accomplished living novelists Ludmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin, legendary rock musicians Andrei Makarevich and Boris Grebenshikov, renowned poet and literary critic Dmitry Bykov, and Nobel Peace laureate Dmitry Muratov.

Frankly, it reads more like an honor roll than any kind of blacklist. But the blacklisting is very real: Individuals designated as “foreign agents” are prohibited from engaging in a wide variety of activities, including teaching, organizing public events, conducting anti-corruption audits, monitoring elections, advertising on social media and so on — not to mention informal bans such as the one on books by “foreign agents” in bookstores and libraries.

Amendments signed by Putin last month prohibit “foreign agents” from participating in elections and holding elected office at any level. Traditional authoritarian techniques such as election fraud have become redundant in Russia: The government can now remove any opponent from the ballot or from the legislature instantaneously simply by labeling them as “foreign agents.” Among the first to be stripped of his seat under this law will be Boris Vishnevsky, a longtime member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and deputy leader of the liberal Yabloko party, who was recently blacklisted for his antiwar stance.

But perhaps the most insulting requirement of the “foreign agent” law is that people have to label themselves with public disclaimers — something even the Soviet KGB hadn’t come up with. Those who refuse are faced with administrative and then criminal prosecution — hence my regular rendezvous with the Soviet district court. My criminal trial here in Omsk will likely start in the fall — and the outcome, of course, is well known. It seems that my current 25-year sentence will not be the limit. But on the upside, I will get more welcome opportunities to leave my prison cell.