Cartridges and Dissidents

Former FSB officer Trepashkin sentenced for other people's secrets

The Military Court of the Moscow Garrison has sentenced former FSB employee Mikhail Trepashkin to four years in a colony-settlement.

In 2002, during a search conducted by prosecutor's office employees based on a tip from the Internal Security Directorate (USB) of the FSB of the RF, a number of "secret" papers were seized from Mikhail Trepashkin—mostly notes on the works of Lenin, Engels, Marx, and Feuerbach. On a bookshelf, they found a bag of cartridges—just in case, for all types of weapons the officer had ever owned. Some time later, following an anonymous tip, traffic police officers stopped his car and extracted a pistol from it, after which Mikhail Trepashkin ended up in a pre-trial detention center (SIZO).

By a strange coincidence, counterintelligence became particularly interested in their former employee after Trepashkin and several other officers sued the FSB and effectively won the case: they proved that the disciplinary sanctions their superiors had bestowed upon them were unfair.

Nikolai Patrushev himself—now the Director of the FSB (at that time, the head of the Internal Security Directorate)—was forced to justify himself during that trial. "In a conversation with you, I stated a condition under which you could remain in service: if you go to Grozny, then I will petition the Director of the FSB of the RF," General Patrushev stated, trying to convince the judge that he had not pressured his subordinates.

Nikolai Patrushev has another long-standing reason not to lose sight of Colonel Trepashkin. We have already published a letter from the Prosecutor General's Office ("Novaya Gazeta" No. 65 for 2001): "An investigation has established that in 1995, Deputy Director of the FSB of the RF, Colonel-General N. P. Patrushev, using his official powers, instructed <...> to make inquiries about Kislyakova, who owed money to Pogodin..."

Recall: when General Patrushev headed the FSB's internal security service, a letter came to him from Karelia with a request for help in a debt collection case—8 thousand dollars. The problem was purely personal, but Patrushev tasked the head of the 3rd department of the USB FSB RF with it.

Mikhail Trepashkin was appointed as the direct executor; he did not show much zeal and after some time tried to find out how legal the leadership's order was...

• Roman SHLEYNOV

Where did M.I. work!?