Alexander Bastrykin

Alexander Bastrykin graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1975, and was a university classmate of Vladimir Putin.[1][2][3]

Bastrykin and Vladimir Putin in working meeting, 21 February 2013

In 2007, President Vladimir Putin established the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office, de facto independent from the Prosecutor General's Office, and Bastrykin became its first chairman. The appointment was reportedly instigated by Igor Sechin, wishing to retain his influence after the dismissal of his close ally Vladimir Ustinov from the position of prosecutor general in 2006.[1][2][3]

Bastrykin is considered to be an intimate advisor of President Putin.[4]

On November 28, 2009, as head of the Investigative Committee at the scene of the 2009 Nevsky Express bombing, Bastrykin was injured by a second bomb and was hospitalised.[5][6] The second bomb was reportedly targeted at investigators, and was detonated by mobile phone.[6]

According to Dmitry Muratov, Bastrykin threatened the life of newspaper editor Sergei Sokolov, and jokingly assured him that he would investigate the murder himself.[7][8]

Bastrykin holds a doctor of law degree, and has published more than 100 scholarly works in Russia. In 2007 Bastrykin was publicly accused of plagiarism, because parts of his then new book "Signs of the Hand. Dactyloscopy" (2004) had been rewritten from the famous book of German writer Jürgen Thorwald.[9] In 2013 these accusations were confirmed and supplemented by Dissernet community and its founder Sergei Parkhomenko: it was found that Bastrykin's book also contains an entire chapter from the book by Anthony Summers "The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover" (in Russian translation “The FBI Empire – Myths, Secrets, Intrigues”).[10][11]

On 26 July 2012 Russian blogger and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny published documents indicating that Bastrykin had a residence permit and owned real estate in the Czech Republic. Mr. Navalny wrote that the real estate holding and residence permit in a country belonging to NATO, a military alliance opposed to Russia, should raise questions about Mr. Bastrykin's security clearance for work in law enforcement and access to state secrets.[12]

In 2015, Bastrykin proposed to amend article 15 of the Constitution of Russia by establishing the priority of national laws over universally recognized principles and norms of international law and international agreements ratified by Russian Federation (it is possible only through the adoption of the new Constitution because article 15 appears in chapter 1, established the fundamental principles of the constitutional order).[13]

In 2016, Bastrykin expressed the need to establish official national ideology and censor the Internet, on the grounds that there is information warfare against Russia launched by USA and its allies.[14][15] As such proposals clash with the provisions of chapters 1 and 2 of the Constitution of Russia, established the fundamental principles of the constitutional order and the fundamental rights of citizens, the complaint was lodged against Bastrykin with the General Prosecutor's Office of Russian Federation[16][17] but General Prosecutor's Office refused to initiate an investigation.[18][19]

On January 9, 2017, under the Magnitsky Act, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List and blacklisted Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, Andrei K. Lugovoi, Dmitri V. Kovtun, Stanislav Gordievsky, and Gennady Plaksin, which froze any of their assets held by American financial institutions or transactions with those institutions and banned their travelling to the United States.[20][21]

On the 6th of July 2020, the government of the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Bastrykin as part of a move to sanction a number of Russians and Saudis for having 'blood on their hands'.[22]

• Order for Merit to the Fatherland, 2nd and 4th class
• Order of Alexander Nevsky
• Order of Honor
• Medal "In Commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of Saint Petersburg"
• Medal of Anatoly Koni (Ministry of Justice)
• Medal in Commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Ministry of Justice
• Medals "For Diligence" 1st and 2nd classes (Ministry of Justice)
• Russian Federation Presidential Certificate of Honor (2009)
• Honorary Title of Honored Jurist of the Russian Federation
• Order of Friendship (Armenia, 2016)
• Order of Honor (Ingushetia, 2013)
• Order of Honor (South Ossetia, 2009)

• Michael Weiss. The Rise and Probable Fall of Putin's Enforcer // The Atlantic, Aug 12 2013