Berlin: summit "foreign agents" from Russia (video)

The participants of the congress “do not recognize themselves as anyone’s agents,” say the organizers of the event in one of the hotels in Berlin. On February 2, a two-day “meeting of persons declared by the Kremlin as foreign agents” opened there.

Edition DW tells, that “the meeting of persons declared by the Kremlin to be foreign agents” had been prepared for a month and a half, and, for security reasons, without any public announcement. The publication’s report contains all the details of the conference.

The forum takes place on the first floor of a respectable skyscraper near the Zoologischer Garten (Zoological Garden) train station – the address of the event became known at the last moment. However, otherwise there are no special, conspicuous security measures – no strict verification of documents at the entrance, no inspection of things. Only Mark Feigin attracted the attention of those present with three tall and stately Chechen bodyguards surrounding him.

Some events are closed to the press; at others, the organizers urge you not to photograph guests with green badges. The program includes general public talks, legal trainings and seminars, presentations of NGO projects helping emigrants, and work in “sections” – from human rights defenders and anti-war activists to journalists and creative figures.

The summit opens with a kind of “parade of foreign agents” – they are invited to the stage by number, in chronological order of status assignment. The first to give a welcoming speech is Lev Ponomarev with number 214, a “foreign agent”-patriarch since December 2020 (numbers before him were assigned entirely to “foreign agents”-legal entities), the last is environmental activist Evgenia Chirikova with number 750, included in the register just two weeks ago . Some sent video messages instead: for example, writer Mikhail Zygar is from New York, and Russia’s first “foreign agent” milkmaid, Elena Agafonova, is from the Tula region. The first day of the event also featured:

• politician Leonid Gozman (“the status of dispossessed people was restored for us…”),
• businessman and ex-political prisoner No. 1 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who diligently disavows the organization of the congress,
• actual co-organizer Marat Gelman is a Berlin gallerist, in the past a Russian political strategist who invented this forum together with documentarian Vitaly Mansky and journalist Anna Mongait,
• human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina (“it’s amazing how those who gave us this status know how to achieve goals that are directly opposite to what they set”),
• political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky (“let’s make sure that this government bitterly regrets uniting us”),
• ex-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov (“they hate us primarily because we remain free”),
• Evgenia Kara-Murza, who called herself “the only acting “foreign agent” at the congress – she spoke on behalf of her husband Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of three “foreign agents” currently serving time in Russian colonies, and other forum participants.

In the auditorium, their speeches were listened to by the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe Kirill Martynov, businessman Evgeny Chichvarkin, economist Sergei Aleksashenko, lawyer and head of the human rights association Agora Pavel Chikov, actress Tatyana Lazareva, founder of the Walk through the Forest movement Grigory Sverdlin, journalists Andrei Arkhangelsky , Evgeny Kiselev, Sergey Kovalchenko, Maxim Kuzakhmetov and Dmitry Gubin, LGBT human rights lawyer Max Olenichev, ex-deputies father and son Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov (the latter spent the whole day accepting congratulations from others on the fact that he had managed to save him from deportation from Thailand the day before to Russia group Bi-2), as well as Ilya Ponomarev.

Some invitees attended the event without the status of “foreign agent” (apparently as honorary observers) – from Member of the European Parliament Sergei Lagodinsky to LGBT activist and blogger Renat Davletgildeev.

The opening session was moderated by human rights activist Anastasia Shevchenko and actor Artur Smolyaninov, who was responsible for most of the humor (“you can’t easily pull fakes out of the pond”), and even eventually sang with a guitar. The other participants also actively joked, primarily based on the number of restrictive statuses and criminal cases opened in Russia.

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