The Enemy Within
Plenty of nations recognize (and even enforce) the status of the "foreign agent." Indeed, the Russian legislation bears a strong resemblance to the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) adopted by the United States in 1938. Amended five times since then, FARA has been criticized as a tool for the suppression of dissent, whose application is sporadic and selective. Yet whatever its faults may be, FARA's rare invocation means that it has not been used broadly as an instrument of political intimidation in the U.S.; most Americans can comfortably spend their entire lives without even knowing of the Act's existence. Moreover, the government labors under a heavy burden of proof thanks to FARA's 1966 revision.
In the Russian Federation, "foreign agency" is the contentless culmination of two decades of increasing demonization of alterity, the foreign, and the outside world. After years of reflexively dismissing every manifestation of dissent as the result of foreign money rather than personal principle, the pretense of a logical chain of evidence has been abandoned. Being a foreign agent has nothing to do with actually being bought and paid for by a foreign power; it is the recognition of dissenting thought as foreign by definition. Therefore the words that describe the foreign agent status are devoid of content, serving instead as a signal: the voice behind whatever you are about to read or hear is alien.
It does not take a deep knowledge of Soviet history to find disturbing twentieth-century precedents to the foreign agent phenomenon. We need only recall the "wreckers" of the Stalinist 1930s brought up in this chapter's first paragraphs. LIke "foreign agent," the term "wrecker" applied to a wide range of people the state found inconvenient, who were thus the targets of unsubstantiated charges of espionage and sabotage. . While the contemporary Foreign Agent law has not yet led to widespread show trials and imprisonments, such a development is not out of the question. Since 2022, the prosecution of dissidents as foreign agents has been supplanted by even broader-ranging criminal statues that have been used to charge a wider range of Russian citizens with "discrediting the Russian armed forces" or "spreading false information" about the Special Military Operation.
The foreign agents of late Putinism are the essence of alterity itself, freed from the particular ethnic, sexual, gendered, or religious trappings that surround other folk devils. They need not actually be queer, sectarian, or Ukrainian; rather, they embody the threat posed by all of these categories as a free-floating ethos or ideology that renders them equivalent to the pariahs du jour. In the absence of even the pretense of evidence or due process, they are alterity's monsters, players in a fictional narrative that its authors need develop only in the broadest strokes. They are the alien nations of the Russian state.
As such, they are the culmination of decades of storytelling that, in every sense of the word, entertained the thrill and threat of the alien. Some of these narratives, such as the tales of spies and sleeper agents, would look to Westerners like contemporary updates on familiar Cold War themes, while others (from zombies to extraterrestrials to apocalyptic contagions) had been relatively underdeveloped in Soviet times. All of these more fantastic figures are even more prominent in the West than they are in Russia, but their relative novelty and postsocialist context make them play out differently in a country that, increasing, is depicted in its own media and by its own leaders as under constant siege from the West.
Next: Spies Like U.S.