U.S. Lecturer in Russia Warned Over Homework

An American lecturer was interrogated for two hours and given a warning by the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, after assigning Russian students to gather information on local people.

Elizabeth Sweet, who is teaching economics and general studies at Omsk State University, was reported to the security service, known as the FSB, after her students carried out interviews at a factory.

The problem arose because many local enterprises are part of the secretive defense industry, said Sergei Subbotin, a spokesman for the Omsk branch of the FSB, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

Subbotin said the FSB’s investigation had shown that Sweet had no ill intent when she gave the assignment.

The incident follows a series of spying cases against foreigners, Russian academics, former naval officers who exposed the military’s appalling environmental record and others.

It highlights the increasingly shaky ground for academics and businesspeople in Russia, as human rights monitors and analysts report a resurgence in the power of the FSB since the organization’s former chief, Vladimir V. Putin, became president more than 17 months ago.

Sweet was working with the Civic Education Project, a private group that sends visiting lecturers to universities in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Irina Zorina, director of the program in Russia, said Sweet’s students were doing an oral history project in Omsk asking people for their life stories. The incident occurred about 10 days ago in the city, which is about 1,300 miles east of Moscow.

But Viktor A. Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, said Sweet could not have found a more inappropriate place for the assignment. “The entire region is literally larded with defense enterprises,” Kremenyuk said.

He saw the incident as a sign of the FSB’s eagerness to reassert control.

“The problem with the FSB is that you can change its name and not call it the KGB anymore, but you can’t do anything about these people’s brains,” he said. “These FSB people still have an old mentality--they think that they are doing something important, that they are protecting the motherland and its secrets by catching the people who they think are spies.”

Zorina said Sweet did not tell her students to go to factories to do interviews; that was the students’ idea. Their visit to one factory with links to the defense sector triggered a call to the FSB.

The agency warned Sweet that she risked destroying U.S.-Russian relations because of her activities, Zorina said.

Sweet was ordered to surrender the students’ reports and pressured to sign a document. An interpreter who accompanied the FSB agent told Sweet that it was a summary of the interrogation, and Sweet signed it.

Sweet declined to comment about the incident to The Times.

Zorina said many older people still behave as if they live in Soviet times, helping turn the clock back.

“I can feel the old psychology returning. The category of conscientious citizens who never think twice before going to the secret services is reemerging.”

“I think it’s very serious from this point of view: We can only count on the young generation,” Zorina said. “This is a very clear sign that people still have fear in their genes, so they create situations like this.”

But Zorina said Sweet’s students found it hilarious, not frightening, that the FSB had seized their papers.

“The attitude of the younger generation is different, and this gives us hope,” she said.