“The moment you transgressed in thought, you have already signed your own sentence. Thoughtcrime cannot be hidden forever. Dodge for a while you you can, and not even one year, but sooner or later they will get to you.
George Orwell
Millions of words have been said about activist safety and communication with authorities,
written hundreds of brochures, practical advice, rules and memos on effective communication with “law enforcement” agencies, dozens of seminars, trainings on this topic. But experience shows that this in practice turns out not to be enough. There are several reasons for this:
1. Most traffic participants do not accept all these instructions.
seriously, believing that they are not doing anything that could lead to serious consequences, perceive activism as a form of harmless youthful protest, they hope that it’s definitely not their touches (according to the principle “Death is what happens to others”).
2. Theory is always at odds with practice. No matter how much you read legal advice, during interrogation, all this either flies out of my head by itself, and legal
Knowledge gives way to fear.
Regarding the first reason, we can say that such people are better in general to avoid, and even more so not to involve them in any activity, because it is not uncommon for people who seem to be doing nothing illegal did, pulled out information about other participants in the movement, small facts, which gave a hint to the investigation in which direction to look. People who want
do something collectively, and at the same time do not care about the collective security, are unworthy of being a member of such a collective.
The second reason seems to us much more complex and multifaceted.
There are cases when the most “legal-conscious” failed at the first
interrogation, and when a person who did not know his rights at all worthily left KGB office. Naturally, our experience is our weapon in the subsequent struggle.
However, you need to be able to learn from the mistakes of others, not just your own.
Content
Foreword …….. 3
Chapter 1. Psychological features of investigative actions …… 5
Mental states of the suspect and the accused, their features
behavior during the preliminary investigation……… 5
Psychological features of the search…….. 7
Interrogation…. 8
Tactics of interrogation of the accused …. 12
Methods of psychological influence……… 13
Chapter 2. Your behavior during interrogation….. 17
Interrogation or conversation?……. 17
Confrontation…. 17
Once again about the FLOOD system…… 17
Annex 1. Useful articles of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus …. 25
Annex 2. Survival in conditions of mass terror.. 29
Annex 3. The duel between the investigator and
suspect/witness……. 3
However, the experience of the Belarusian autumn 2010 suggested that there is another perhaps the biggest reason for failures in interrogations: psychological.
It turned out that the interrogation was not at all a fight between two “lawyers”, not an exam on the topic
“The rights and obligations of the suspect” and the struggle of two characters, actions an experienced psychologist to trample on the subtle psyche of activists.
In other words, it is a kind of torture. Torture means any act by which any person willfully
severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is inflicted to obtain information or confessions from him or from a third person, punish him for an act which he or a third person has performed or in the commission of which he suspected, as well as to intimidate or coerce him or a third party, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or
suffering is caused by a public official or other person
acting in an official capacity, or at their instigation or with their
knowledge or tacit consent.
This is how this edition appeared, in an attempt to describe another, opposite legal, determining the side of the proceedings. Because it is impossible to resist the enemy without knowing his tactics, we decided to study literature intended for investigators and select the most important, in our opinion, points that explain in what ways the investigators extract from us the information they need, force us to confess, coerce testify against our comrades. It will be a little strange for you to read advice to investigators on applying psychological pressure, but then you quickly learn the methods and techniques that have been used on you or on your friends.
There are no ready-made recipes in the book on how to resist these techniques, but their knowledge
will help you clearly define the purpose of the question, quickly orient yourself, and make
the right choice for you. It helps, just like knowing additional questions on the exam helps relieve stress before the answer.
At the same time, we do not claim that the psychological aspect of communication with authorities are more important than the legal one, so this brochure can be considered a consistent continuation of the “Memo to an activist on communication with the police,” released by the ABC-Belarus team based on the Russian editions.
