Russian rights activists: FSB has turned political repression into a propaganda tool
Russian human rights project "Political Prisoners Support. Memorial" says the Federal Security Service uses videos of arrests to intimidate society. The share of such videos in news has doubled since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB, the country's main security agency) has turned political repression into a propaganda tool, according to a report by the human rights project "Political Prisoners Support. Memorial". The project says the share of news items featuring video of detentions, searches and interrogations has doubled since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
What was studied
The project's experts examined 70 politically motivated criminal cases. In their study, titled "FSB Reels: Behind the Frames of Spectacular Arrests", they write that the agency has put video production aimed at intimidating the public virtually on a conveyor belt.
Memorial claims that all the analysed videos follow one template: the arrest, a display of items found during a search, the transport of the detainee and his confession.
Key findings
Covert filming of the alleged "crime" before the arrest appears in only 6 of the 70 cases. All of those involve an operational provocation: officers contact the person themselves, persuade him to take an action, film it, and then stage a supposed "exposure".
About a quarter of the arrest scenes show clear signs of staging. Many videos show humiliating treatment of detainees and harsh actions by officers. Two thirds of the footage shows forcible seizures: people are thrown to the ground, their heads pinned with feet, and they are pulled up by the hair in front of the camera operator. Another format is early-morning raids, in which half-dressed people are filmed in bed to demonstrate their complete helplessness.
Sergei Davidis, head of the project, told the outlet Echo that there is clearly a political will to accompany such prosecutions in this way.
Purposes of the videos
The experts concluded that a whole system for producing video for propaganda purposes has formed within the FSB. The videos aim to create an atmosphere of total control, demoralise and intimidate the disloyal, deter unwanted actions, show the agency's effectiveness and impose its own version of events in a given case. Real footage is not always impressive enough, so staged videos were introduced, and most of the videos the agency publishes are made this way. According to the rights activists, this dynamic "video production" is a direct continuation of torture practices that have become widespread in Russian security structures, especially the FSB.
