I have been a member of the board of the Liberal Mission Foundation for almost seven years and I am immensely proud of it. I am even more proud of it now that Liberal Mission and the Dynasty Foundation, its main sponsor, have been added to the registry of foreign agents—for these days, being included in the registry lends a non-governmental organization a seal of quality.
Witch-hunts and the eternal search for an enemy to blame for our troubles are the permanent bedfellows of Russian totalitarianism, as was evident back in July 2012, when amendments to the Federal Law on Noncommercial Organizations and Law on Public Associations formed a legal framework for the official persecution of Russian NGOs the regime deems undesirable. According to the new paragraph 6 of article 2 of the Federal Law on Noncommercial Organizations, a foreign agent is now any Russian NGO receiving “cash and other property from foreign governments and their public authorities, international and foreign organizations, foreign citizens, stateless persons or persons authorized by them, and (or) from Russian legal entities receiving cash and other property from foreign sources,” and involved “in political activities on the territory of the Russian Federation, including for the benefit of foreign sources.”
The wording of the law implies that NGOs acting as a foreign agent are those that:
receive money or property from a foreign source, directly or indirectly; participate in political activities carried out on the territory of Russia. According to the law, an NGO is deemed to participate in political activities (regardless of statutory goals and objectives stated in its founding documents) if “it is involved (including through financing) in organizing and conducting political activities in order to influence decision-making by public authorities aimed at changing state policy pursued by them, as well as in shaping public opinion for such purposes.” The same paragraph specifies the activities that do not fall under the category of political activities, including “activities in the areas of science, culture, art, health care, preventive care and public health, ... charitable activities as well as promotion of charity.”
But it never gets so bad that it could not get worse. Apparently having found that the Procrustean bed for Russian NGOs was not narrow enough, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, as a loyal ally of Russian law enforcers, decided to support them as much as it could. That support resulted in expanding the definition of “political activities” to include “intention to participate in political activities on the territory of the Russian Federation.” Evidence of such intentions, according to the Constitutional Court (CC), can be found in an NGO’s official documents, or the public speeches of its leaders (officials) containing “calls to adopt, amend, or repeal certain government decisions, notices of meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets submitted by the non-profit organization to the executive authority of a subject of the Russian Federation or to a local authority, drafting and launching of legislative initiatives, as well as other manifestations of social activity, that are objective evidence of its intention to engage in organization and conduct of political campaigns in order to influence decision-making by public authorities and their public policies.” Noting the various forms of political action, the CC included in this category “public appeals to public authorities, disseminating... assessments of decisions taken by public authorities and their policies, as well as other activities, an exhaustive list of which cannot be legislatively established.”