MOSCOW -- When Russian police arrested and tried to frame three leaders of the democratic opposition on the night of October 3, they reckoned without the potential of electronic mail to spread vital information fast.

Alexander Segal, Boris Kagar-litsky and Vladimir Kondratov are leading members of the Russian Party of Labour. Segal is the press secretary of the country's main labour movement body, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, and Kagarlitsky and Kondratov are former deputies to the now-suppressed Moscow City Council.

Late on the evening of October 3, after the failed assault on the Ostankino television station in Moscow's northern regions, the three political activists were seized by police as they stood on the pavement outside the offices of the Oktyabrskaya local council in southern Moscow. They had just played an important role in preventing a pointless and potentially bloody attack on the Shabolovskaya television station.

Over the next 24 hours the three Party of Labour leaders, and others who were arrested with them, were systematically beaten by police in an effort to extract "confessions" with a view to laying frame-up charges. The detainees were told they stood accused of complicity in killing two police in order to steal their vehicle.

News of the men's fate only reached relatives late on the evening of October 4, after a criminal prisoner who had been in the cells with the political detainees was released. The man phoned Kagarlitsky's wife, journalist Irina Glushchenko.

One of Glushchenko's first responses was to contact Vasily Balog, deputy head of the International Department of the General Confederation of Trade Unions, the coordinating body of the major union federations in the CIS countries. Balog is a frequent user of electronic mail, operating largely through apc's node in the former Soviet Union, GlasNet.

In electronic mail, Balog realised, he had the ideal tool for initiating a swift international campaign to secure the prisoners' release. Within minutes, a message was in a series of international conferences, appealing to e-mail users to telephone the Moscow police station where the men were being held.

"I was so agitated," Balog later recounted, "that I couldn't remember the English term 'police station' -- I think I called it a 'police house'. But the message did the trick."

"We were watching from the cell as the phone calls came in," Kagarlitsky said. "One of the first was from Japan. The police didn't seem able to believe it.

"After that the phone ran hot. The calls seemed to be coming from everywhere -- there were quite a few from the Bay Area in the US.

"In the end the police started saying we'd already been released. But we were shouting through the bars, 'No! No! We're still here!'"

Within a few hours most of the detainees were released, and the frame-up charges were abandoned. The Russian authorities, who had been used to jailing their critics with impunity, had received a rude shock.

With labour and political activists in Russia increasingly hooked into international e-mail systems, repression in the country will never be as easy again.

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This story was emailed to the Neahtawanta Center by Edie Farwell the Liaison Director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), who received the story from Carlos Afonso, the director of AlterNex, the Brazilian network member of APC.

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