Some 20 investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office and the Federal Security Service spent more than eight hours combing through the offices of the Agency for Strategic Communications, the firm Yabloko has hired to advise it on the upcoming State Duma elections.

The deputy director of ASC, Yuna Rappoport, said prosecutors confiscated five computer servers containing programs and information vital for the party's Duma campaign, as well as reams of documents. "This without a doubt is going to hit the Yabloko campaign hard. We can't do anything for the campaign without those servers. The entire office is paralyzed," she said after the raid.

A spokesman for the prosecutor's office denied the raid was political, saying, "Investigations are being conducted as part of the criminal cases of theft and tax evasion by a number of firms controlled by the Yukos oil company."

Prosecutors said they found $700,000 in cash.

Earlier in the day prosecutors said they were interested in a database they believed was kept at ASC's offices that could contain financial information on Yukos-affiliated companies.

But political analysts said Thursday's developments appeared to take the Yukos affair to a whole new level.

"This is a principal turning point in the campaign against Yukos," said Nikolai Petrov, head of the Center for Political and Geographical Research.

"This is a whole new dimension. Prosecutors are moving from business and are going directly to the Duma election campaign and Yabloko's financing and political strategy," he said.

Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky has openly said he is funding Yabloko, as well as the Union of Right Forces. Three Yukos representatives -- Konstantin Kagalovsky, a Yukos shareholder; Galina Antonova, head of strategic planning at Yukos; and Alexander Osovtsov, project director of Yukos' Open Russia charity -- are running on the Yabloko party list. Another senior Yukos shareholder, Sergei Muravlenko, is reported to be funding the Communist Party. He is also running on the Communist list together with at least one other Yukos representative.

Analysts have said the onslaught against Yukos appears to partly be an attempt to rein in Khodorkovsky's mounting political ambitions and a reaction to his funding of opposition parties ahead of the election campaign.

The attack on Yukos began when core company shareholder Platon Lebedev was arrested on charges of theft of state property in a 1994 privatization deal. The accusations have since mounted to include charges of murder, attempted murder and tax evasion. Another Yukos shareholder, Vasily Shakhnovsky, was charged with tax evasion last week, and prosecutors have said they expect to bring charges against other senior Yukos managers soon.

Analysts were split on what the exact target of the prosecutors' raid was on Thursday. " It's difficult to say what the aim is: Yukos or political projects connected to it," Petrov said.

But independent political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky speculated the attack seemed to be a signal from the Kremlin that it did not want to see Yabloko in the next Duma.

"Today's events lead one to the conclusion that the presidential administration has decided that in their regime of 'managed democracy' they would prefer to see the Union of Right Forces representing the right wing in the Duma and not Yabloko," Piontkovsky said.

He said a move by Unified Energy Systems chief Anatoly Chubais to openly run in the Union of Right Force's top troika of candidates could have only have come with the Kremlin's blessing. He said Chubais' decision since then to call for the creation of a "liberal empire" out of the former Soviet Union republics could well have earned him more brownie points with the Kremlin.

"This seems to be a signal of the clear preference of the administration, that it is better to have liberal imperialists than a party that criticizes the powers that be," he said. "This raid could be used to mount a campaign to discredit Yabloko and show it is in the pocket of the oligarchs."

A spokeswoman for the prosecutors denied, however, that law enforcers were pursuing a political agenda. "If there is campaign information on the servers, prosecutors aren't interested. This has nothing to do with the election campaign," she said.

She could not say what was actually on the servers.

Whatever the target of Thursday's raids, Yabloko deputies were sure that prosecutors' heavy-handed tactics would deal a severe blow to their election campaign.

Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky condemned the raids as "a serious violation of the law."

"As soon as the search began, the Prosecutor General's Office was warned that the documents being confiscated were the property of the Yabloko party and their confiscation hinders the election campaign. The warning was ignored," he said in a statement carried by Interfax. "Yabloko believes these events are a serious violation of the law and require an explanation."

Yabloko Deputy Sergei Mitrokhin said the raid was "a huge blow" to the party's campaign. Mitrokhin and Yabloko Deputy Alexei Melnikov were detained soon after they arrived at ASC's office at around 1 p.m. Thursday by law enforcers who, Mitrokhin said, first would not let them enter the building but then, after relenting, would not let them leave until the raid was over, some time after 6 p.m.

"There wasn't any financial information on the servers they confiscated," he said when contacted on his cellphone after the raid. "There was only data for the party's campaign."

He earlier told Interfax that the detention by law enforcers was in violation of laws granting deputies legal immunity. He said the detention was "unprecedented" in Russian history.

Prosecutors insisted they were acting in line with the law by keeping people inside the building during the raid.

Stanislav Belkovsky, the head of the Center for National Strategy said, however, that Yabloko had not been the target in the raid.

Belkovsky is seen as the man who helped launch the onslaught against Yukos by publishing a report earlier this summer that accused Yukos of mounting "a creeping coup" and of seeking to gain control over the Duma in this year's elections.

He said prosecutors might have been seeking information that links Yukos to making payments via ASC to Kremlin officials in return for their support in lobbying the company's interests to Putin. He said they also were looking for evidence that Yukos might have used ASC to conduct an anti-Putin PR campaign in the United States during the president's recent visit there.

"I can't say this for certain. I'm not in court. ... But it is widely known in political circles that Yukos used the company [ASC] for these purposes," Belkovsky said.

ASC denied engaging in any such activities. "We have no relation to Yukos apart from the fact that Yukos has given funding to Yabloko and we have helped Yabloko in its campaign," Rappoport said. "Belkovsky says a lot of interesting things. I don't even want to comment on what he says."

Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin said Belkovsky's comments were "absolute rubbish."

He denied that Yukos had any connection with the agency.

Shadrin added that prosecutors were wasting their time if they were looking for information about Yukos at ASC.

"They could look for this information with the same degree of success in a zoo, circus or lunatic asylum," he said.

Earlier Thursday, before news broke of the raid, Khodorkovsky reiterated that he believed the prosecutors' actions were politically motivated.

"Without a doubt there is a political, or to put it more cautiously, an orchestrated aspect to the actions of the law enforcement bodies," he said during a visit to Saratov, Interfax reported.

"We are all familiar with the methods of prosecutors when they are really investigating serious crimes. And we all know their methods when they try to humiliate and show people their place, which is what's happening now," he said.

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State Duma elections 2003

The Moscow Times, October 24, 2003