The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Dugin's media had been attacking Umland since he wrote his Oxford dissertation, in which he compared Dugin's movement to Nazism. "Most liberal sociologists in Germany are homosexuals," reported one of the articles on Umland. "And as we know, sixty percent of them are infected with HIV. So the question arises: Why are homosexuals with AIDS telling us what's right and what's wrong?"¹² A follow-up piece claimed that "Umland, who has pedophile proclivities, has been fired from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford for making homosexual advances to his colleagues."¹³

In the Russian parliament the crusading members never managed to clear up the textual contradictions in their bill, so the Kremlin introduced its own. Legislation increasing penalties for sex offenders was passed in the fall of 2011.¹⁴ Repeat offenders would now face life imprisonment—the maximum penalty possible in Russia for any crime—but the crusaders were not satisfied and continued to insist on chemical castration. The new law introduced a new concept: that of a

person afflicted with pedophilia. A defendant diagnosed with pedophilia was now subject to compulsory psychiatric treatment. Psychiatrists had to be trained to diagnose "pedophilic sexual orientation."¹⁵

Letters went out to every psychiatric clinic in the land.¹⁶ Large psychiatric hospitals dispatched doctors for training sessions in Moscow at the Serbsky Center for Social and Court Psychiatry, once infamous as the place where Soviet dissidents were sent for punitive treatment. Participants in Serbsky seminars were taught that perversions were often diagnosed together—for example, pedophilia frequently went with homosexuality.¹⁷

Even while the parliament was debating new anti-pedophile measures, the police redoubled their efforts. In July 2011, the minister of the interior reported that law enforcement was pursuing 128 different cases of online distribution of pornographic images of minors, that this was just for the first three months of the year and the number represented a 20 percent increase over the year before.

Activist citizens began looking for pedophiles too. A twenty-one- year-old college dropout in Voronezh devoted herself to the hunt full­time. Anna Levchenko claimed to have identified the names and IP addresses of eighty pedophiles in the space of six months. "The number of sex offenses against children has nearly doubled in the last year," declared her livejournal.com page. A manifesto full of boldfaced emphasis followed.

Pedophiles are afraid of nothing and no one They are

everywhere. They are united. There are hundreds of thousands of them. . . . They have cast their nets over the entire world. They challenge our entire society and they are laughing at us.

They are trying to tell us that no one will ever be able to protect our children from them. I will prove them wrong. If law enforcement can't deal with it, then society itself must rise up in defense of the children. I identify pedophiles on the Internet and collect evidence against them. I make sure that criminal charges are filed. I work with a group of like-minded people. We write dozens of reports every week. Thousands of people read my blog every day. We need your help, too. You can join our team and help us catch those who are killing our children

Only if we unite our efforts will we be able to defeat this threat. Any

support you can lend will help us save hundreds of children's lives

and prevent new crimes.¹⁸

Levchenko developed her own entrapment techniques and then trained other young people to use them. She attended the Kremlin youth training camp at Lake Seligher in the summer of 2011 and was granted an audience with Medvedev so that she could tell him about her work. She informed the president that her movement included three hundred volunteers. Medvedev praised Levchenko's efforts and suggested incorporating her group into the Investigative Committee— the federation's central anti-crime unit—by creating a special anti- pedophile project there. The president's children's rights ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov, perhaps fearful of being left out of the loop, immediately offered Levchenko an assistant position, albeit an unsalaried one.¹⁹

It was in this context that the Makarov case was unfolding.