Insulting government officials, rehabilitating Nazism, justifying terrorism, inciting hatred – examinations on these criminal cases are now becoming students’ final theses. Tomsk State University has graduated the first masters of the pilot program “Legal Linguistics”. As final qualifying works (FQW), students defended a portfolio with their linguistic research and examinations on real criminal and administrative cases. T-invariant has reviewed the final theses of newly-minted experts and tells how new personnel are trained to evaluate media publications, comments, and correspondence in court.
Expert experiment
Tomsk State University is one of the six universities that have conducted an experiment since autumn 2023: they have opened “professional” master’s programs. According to the idea of the Ministry of Education, students of such “professional” master’s programs, unlike “research” ones, should closely cooperate with employers in order to quickly enter the labor market.
“The university has always responded to the country’s challenges that were associated with industrialization or accelerated training of personnel,” said the rector of TSU in the summer of 2023, announcing 13 new experimental programs at the university.
Tomsk State University. Photo: https://www.tsu.ru
One of them — “legal linguistics” — in a year “refinements” philologists and linguists to expert linguists who can collaborate with the courts. Expert centers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Investigative Committee, the Ministry of Justice, the FSB and non-governmental bureaus are waiting for them to work – this is how the curators of the pilot master’s program campaigned for students to enroll last summer.
Fragment of the final qualifying work of the master’s program “Legal Linguistics” of TSU
The first group of linguist experts, seven people, graduated from TSU in July 2024 not with a classic dissertation, but with a portfolio of their own expertise. These portfolios, the curators claim, should be enough to get a job immediately after graduation.
In practice, this can happen even earlier – out of seven master’s students, four began to work in their specialty even before they defended their dissertations and received the qualification of “linguist experts”. And the head of the group, Alexandra Gavrin, got a job at the Tomsk forensic laboratory of the Ministry of Justice after the first semester (T-invariant offered Alexandra to talk about studying in the pilot master’s program and her new job, but she immediately blocked the journalist).
In addition to practical classes with teachers who have experience in linguistic expertise, students have interactive classes in the program. For example, in November 2023, master’s students acted out a court hearing: they were called in for questioning by teachers of the TSU Law Faculty in judicial robes and listened to philologists defend their expert opinions.
Judging by the final theses and reviews of master’s students, the focus of the TSU program is precisely on compiling expert assessments, studies and reports on “controversial texts”: on which it is necessary to issue a conclusion for a court case or to consult those who are onlyis going to sue. According to Artem Shmakov, one of the graduates, he wrote more than ten expert opinions in nine months of study.
This focus on practice in legal proceedings really distinguishes this master’s program from similar programs in other universities that are not participating in the Ministry of Education’s pilot program, such as St. Petersburg State University or the Russian State Pedagogical University named after Herzen.
Fragment of the final qualifying work of the master’s program “Legal Linguistics” of TSU
“St. Petersburg State University has had a program in legal linguistics for many years, but they teach much more than just the methodology of legal expertise,” explains the linguist Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya, who was fired from St. Petersburg State University in 2023 after she criticized the quality of the linguistic examination in the case of Sasha Skochilenko. — They are training people who can evaluate or create texts of laws, instructions — that is, they will train linguists who have legal specifics. Every year, five students were admitted to this program, but I don’t remember any of them taking up linguistic expertise specifically.”
Anna Shevchik, program curator. Photo: VK
Posts, comments, text messages
The “controversial” or “conflict” texts that TSU students analyzed in their theses were not only publications in online media, posts and comments on social networks, but also personal SMS correspondence and dialogues in messengers. Probably, some of them are materials of cases for which sentences have already been passed. But there are also fresh materials.
The works thoroughly analyze, for example, statements addressed to a police officer, emotional disputes of participants in a homeowners association meeting, a dialogue between colleagues about a bribe, a conflict between spouses, a complaint from a resident about the negligent work of a management company, a post about the second Chechen war.
The authors of these statements, posts and messages were sued or planned to be sued under various articles: insulting government officials, rehabilitating Nazism, justifying terrorism, inciting hatred, calling for extremist activity, accepting a bribe and others.
Fragment of the final qualifying work of the master’s program “Legal Linguistics” of TSU
In the appendix of one of the works there is a scan of the prosecutor’s appeal to the rector of TSU dated November 29, 2023 with a request to allocate a linguist expert who could prepare an opinion on the SMS correspondence in two weeks. Screenshots are attached to the document – a dialogue 12 mobile phone screens long.
It is difficult to say whether the master’s conclusions influenced current criminal and administrative cases: some works indicate that the examination was prepared jointly with the teacher, while others do not specify whether the master prepared the conclusions, research and certificates independently and whether they were involved in the case.
Individually undefined person
Nevertheless, all the final qualification works were published “with the exclusion” of several chapters at once – precisely because the works are about the court cases of real people. More than a hundred pages were cut out of the scanned versions of some master’s final qualification works. Only the abstract, explanatory and analytical notes, as well as the list of references remained in them. But in some published parts, you can still find the names of the defendants in the cases or the source where the so-called “controversial” text appeared – for example, a Telegram channel, a VKontakte community, a review site. Thanks to this uncut data, T-invariant was able to contact a resident of Tomsk, whose case Master’s student Marina Bokhonnaya analyzed in her final qualifying work.
On December 31, Tomsk Mayor Dmitry Makhinya published a post in his Telegram channel: “Happy New Year!” Among the return congratulations at 17:24, there was a not at all festive comment from Elena Agafonova, who complained about the tram and trolleybus department. The woman called the dispatcher to find out when the first tram would arrive after the accident – the line hung up. Soon Elena was blocked on the Telegram channelle mayor and deleted all her comments about the city’s problems. And in March, Elena received a call from the prosecutor’s office and was asked to write an explanatory note. That’s how she learned that the mayor’s office had tried to open a case against her for an administrative offense – for “insulting an individually unspecified person.”
“I laughed for a long time and thought: guys, you’ve found something to investigate!” Elena Agafonova tells a T-invariant journalist. – I started racking my brains over what kind of comment they were talking about and what kind of insult they had in mind. I myself have a higher linguistic education. But it turned out that before deleting me from the Telegram channel, the mayor’s office screenshotted my messages about trams and the deputy mayor for security filed a complaint about insult. Now I can’t even look at what I wrote there word for word – there is no quote anywhere. I only remember this: “some boor hanging up on me.”
Fragment of the final qualifying work permit for a master’s degree in the Legal Linguistics program at TSU
The prosecutor’s office looked at the duty schedule at the tram and trolleybus department to find the very dispatcher who was “hanging up on me.” She gave an explanation for why she did not continue the conversation: “A lot of work, a heavy workload” (T-invariant has a copy of the document). In addition, she admitted that she does not follow the comments on the mayor’s Telegram channel, so she does not consider herself offended.
Nevertheless, according to all the rules, the screenshot with Elena’s comment was sent for linguistic examination. The object of the master’s student’s study, as can be seen from the unseized pages of the final qualifying work, was a phrase with the word “boor”. And although “linguistic signs of humiliation of honor and dignity” were found in it, the prosecutor’s office refused to initiate a case against the deputy mayor.
The only evidence
Despite the fact that legal specialization is a rather rare competence for a linguist, the shortage of personnel was not very noticeable until recently, says Svetlana Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya. “Only in recent years has the justice system become hooked on the ‘linguistic needle’,” she says. “Previously, such expertise, which I have been doing for at least a quarter of a century, was a rather rare event. It was required in cases of protecting honor and dignity, slander, or when cases arose about trademarks whose names were similar to the point of confusion. But in recent years, due to the abundance of cases related to fakes and defamation, linguistic experts have become necessary. It is naive to think that anyone who knows Russian from birth and has received a higher education is able to correctly interpret any phrase.”
Students of the Legal Linguistics program. Photo: VK
In cases involving articles on fakes and discrediting the Russian Armed Forces, linguistic expertise can be the only evidence for the prosecution. This is what happened in the case of documentary filmmaker, philosopher, and poet Vsevolod Korolev, who is being tried for two posts on VKontakte in which he mentioned events in Bucha, Borodyanka, Donetsk, and Mariupol.
Fragment of the final qualifying work of the master’s program “Legal Linguistics” of TSU
“The only evidence was the examination, in which the same people as in Sasha’s case participated Skochilenko, – Drugoveyko-Dolzhanskaya explains. – The more criminal and administrative cases are related to texts, the more professionals are needed in this field.”
In the new academic year, the pilot program in legal linguistics at TSU is recruiting 16 students – six state-funded and ten fee-paying places (179,000 rubles per year of study). This year’s admissions campaign, as program curator Anna Shevchik writes, is different: students no longer mistrust the experiment. They no longer doubt that a year of study is enough and that they will issue a real diploma.
“Yes, there are not many such master’s programs in Russia yet. And yes, in 2026, all master’s programs that teach professions will be like ours,” — writes the curator. T-invariant contacted Anna Shevchik to talk about innovations in the master’s program, but she replied that there was no such possibility.
Text: Anna Ryzhkova
Анна Рыжкова 12.08.2024