Criticism
The FSB has been criticised for corruption and human rights violations. Some Kremlin-critics like Yulia Latynina and Alexander Litvinenko have claimed that the FSB is engaged in suppression of internal dissent. Litvinenko died in 2006 as a result of polonium poisoning. The FSB has been further criticised for the failure to bring Islamist terrorism in Russia under control. Peter Finn of the Washington Post has claimed that FSB exercises huge political influence in the country.
In his book Mafia State, Luke Harding, the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian from to 2007 to 2011 and a fierce critic of Russia, alleges that the FSB subjected him to continual psychological harassment, with the aim of either getting him to practice self-censorship in his reporting, or to quit the country entirely. He says that FSB used techniques known as Zersetzung (literally “corrosion” or “undermining”) which were perfected by the East German Stasi.
Read more about this topic: Federal Security Service Of The Russian Federation
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)