Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

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foreign agents are almost synonymous. However empirics show that it is not only in cases of
accusations of violating the NKO law where discourses of foreign agents appear.
The legal definition of foreign agents is defined by the law and applied by prosecutors and
court houses but in what other cases are the discourses of foreign agents visible? The word has
other cultural and social history and connections than the new law. News coverage can help to
recognize discoursive perspectives in foreign agents other than what is described in the context of
the law on non-commercial organizations. How much is foreign agents discourses used in sense of
agency, representatives, subjectivity or spies? Are there discourses in contradiction to those
presented in the law or NKO accusations?
4.2.1 Not Always NKO's
Contrary to the law where only NKOs can be foreign agents, the media language individuals are
also described as foreign agents. In Russia many organizations and groups are founded around their
leaders which according to the paradigm of Russian governmentality (Oittinen 2012, 79-80) appears
in all sectors of the society in fields of management, conduction and organization. The Moscow-
Helsinki Group is portrayed almost as synonymous to Lyudmilla Alekseeva, For Human Rights (За
права человека) is immediately connected to Lev Ponomarev as in political parties the party
leaders like Sergey Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party or Gennady Zyuganov of the
Communist Party are long time personification of their groups. Consequently if an organization is
accused of being a foreign agent it gets personalized to their leaders. Most visible personification of
the associations to the groups they represent was in the illustration of news stories where the related
pictures were most often of heads of the NKOs concerned instead of for example pictures of their
offices. However it was perhaps rather surprising that in news reports the heads of the accused
foreign agent organizations were not referred to as individual foreign agents. Instead the media
more often referred to individual representatives of the suspected foreign agent companies
participating in decision-making bodies foreign agents (Ria 2013p, q, r).
Foreign agents had discourses connected to individuals more in figure of speech contexts.
One example appeared in opposition demonstration a demonstrator attached a yellow badge where
was written ”foreign agent” to criticize the stigma the NKO law can give to individuals (Echo
2013f). The badges giving stigmas to individuals are globally popular form of protest props often
referring to the badges with the yellow star of David that the Jews were forced to wear during the
repressions of holocaust.
In a other case a representative of the extreme left -wing opposition Sergei Udaltsov was
rhetorically referred to as a foreign agent. Udaltsov as a political dissident was reported to have