RUSSIA IS THE big story this weekend. The G8 meeting comes to town in a fortified St Petersburg and the world’s media will be there. After the winter stand-off between Ukraine and Russia over gas supplies energy supply is likely to dominate debate . But lurking behind that issue are a host of others — including the “bugged rock” spying affair.

If you believe the Russian authorities, their intelligence agencies caught spies in January supposedly scurrying from the British Embassy to a public park. These “spies” were indulging in the classic “dead letter drop” tactics of the Cold War era, using the embassy as a cover for espionage and funding front organisations to do the same.

One intriguing aspect of this throwback to Ian Fleming was that the allegations emerged on primetime television. Whether or not Britain’s intelligence services had been hiding electronic equipment in hollowed out rocks in Moscow parks is hard to say, no official investigation was ever mounted. But the timing of the broadcast, which coincided with new restrictions on NGOs, was dubious. Virtually all Russia’s media are state controlled, and highly politicised subjects such as this will not go on air unless it suits the Government.

Russia’s journalists are in a sorry condition. Many follow the official line on anything the slightest bit controversial, whether counter-terrorism, tensions with the West, the Chechen conflict, human rights or rampant racism in Russian cities. Those that step out of line are punished. My own experience may be instructive. At the Russian Chechen Information Agency, the chief editor, Stanislav Dmitrievskiy, and I run a clearing-house for news about Chechnya, news that most Russians would struggle to find in the mainstream media. For our pains we are under attack from the authorities.

Earlier this year Stanislav was convicted of “inciting hatred or enmity on the basis of ethnicity and religion”. His crime? Publishing appeals for peace by Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen leader (since killed), and Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen envoy and former Culture Minister who has been granted asylum in Britain. Stanislav now has a two-year suspended prison sentence hanging over him, plus a four-year period of restricted movement.

The criminal case against Stanislav coincided with an invasive audit by tax inspectors of the accounts of the Russian Chechen Friendship Society, the human rights offshoot of our news agency. In addition to imposing a fine of about £20,000, auditors claimed that foreign grants for peace-building and human rights reporting constituted profits, a view that could affect many already beleaguered NGOs. Intimidatory checks by the tax authorities are already a common tactic of harassment.

Individuals who have taken a stand on racism or lawyers who take on controversial cases such as police mistreatment, regularly report official or semi-official intimidation. So the tactics used against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Yukos oil group, have been mirrored in numerous cases involving tiny, cash-strapped organisations. Oligarchs and NGOs alike are fair game for the State.

A new law on NGOs gives the authorities sweeping additional powers. An organisation can be denied registration merely on the basis that its name “insults the national or religious feelings of Russian citizens”. Last week President Putin voiced his absolute opposition to foreign funding for those involved in “political activity” in Russia, despite there being no clear legal definition of what constitutes political activity. The Kremlin seems intent on exercising an intrusive level of control over all groups campaigning in Russia.

This brings us back to the G8 and how the world’s most powerful economies should respond to the Kremlin’s tactics. Despite alarming Foreign Office briefings, Tony Blair doubtless will have warm words for his “friend” Vladimir Putin this weekend. So will President Bush, whom Mr Putin has been talking about in terms of personal affinity and special friendship.

Two weeks ago I met Ian McCartney, the Minister with responsibility for human rights. I was in London to receive an award from Amnesty International for “human rights journalism under threat”, and I took particular encouragement from Mr McCartney’s supportive words. But isn’t it alarming that such “threat” awards are now going to Russian journalists rather than those under fire in places such as Colombia or the Middle East? That is one question, at least, that Mr Blair should ponder on the plane to St Petersburg.

It seems almost superfluous to mention that anonymous leaflets containing death threats have been distributed in my neighbourhood in Nizhny Novgorod. According to these, I am a “traitor” linked to “terrorist activities” by Chechen fighters. My home address is helpfully provided. Presumably Stanislav’s address is already known, as his flat has been broken into — an affair, like the death threats, investigated by the police but without success.

We need to be clear-eyed about what Russia’s assertiveness presages. Its economic muscle-flexing abroad is going hand in hand with growing illiberalism at home. Russia is poised on a precipice in terms of its crumbling respect for press freedoms and a genuinely open civil society. In St Petersburg this weekend, will there be a G8 leader brave enough to say so?

Oksana Chelysheva is editor of the Russian Chechen Information Agency

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