MOSCOW – In the early 1950s, a group of prominent, mostly Jewish doctors from Moscow was accused of plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders on orders from the West. The accused were fired from their jobs, arrested and tortured. But after Josef Stalin died in 1953, Lavrenty Beria — one of Stalin’s longest-serving secret police chiefs, who oversaw the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1938–1945 and spent decades filling the Gulags — called off the investigation.
As it turned out, the security services had made the whole thing up. Today, the Kremlin is following the same playbook. While the 2012 foreign-agent law was initially applied to organizations receiving international funding, its reach has expanded dramatically since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the “foreign agent” label slapped on anyone deemed inconvenient.
This label carries a range of penalties, from a ban on holding public office or performing publicly funded work (such as teaching) to disclaimers on social-media accounts. In July, the Duma approved measures to strip key citizenship rights — including access to bank accounts and consular services (such as passport renewals) — from Russians living abroad who face prosecution at home over political “offenses,” such as failing to comply with foreign-agent legislation. Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin derided those affected as “degenerates and traitors to the motherland.” His choice of words was telling: not dissidents, but “degenerates.”
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