A new book, free to download, gathers scholars, lawyers, a journalist, and the young mother cast as a “victim” who says she never met the accused.
In March 2025, a young Russian woman, heavily pregnant, sat in a hospital in Bariloche, in Argentine Patagonia. She had come to Argentina, as thousands of Russian women do every year, so that her child could be born there and obtain an Argentine passport. She had also come to get away from a violent partner, and she did not want to name him. Hospital staff insisted on documents about the father. Under pressure, the friend who had traveled with her produced a photocopy of a passport she had found in the house where they were staying. It belonged to a man the young woman had never met, never spoken to, and knew nothing about: Konstantin Rudnev.
From that photocopy grew one of the strangest criminal cases in recent Argentine history. Within days, Rudnev, a Russian esoteric teacher who had moved to Bariloche with his wife after serving eleven years in Russian prisons, was arrested at the local airport as the alleged head of a transnational human trafficking ring. Prosecutors described him as an “evil cult leader.” The young woman, Elena Makarova, became his alleged “victim.” DNA tests later showed that Rudnev was not the father of her child. She has said, again and again and in public, that she was never trafficked, never abused, and never part of any group. More than a year and a half later, Rudnev is still in pre-trial detention.
Readers of “The European Times” have followed this story in these pages. Now a book tells it in full, and asks what it reveals about the country where it happened. “Dangerous Justice: Argentina’s Criminal System in the Mirror of the Rudnev Case,” edited by Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne and Argentine anthropologist María Vardé and published by CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin, Italy, can be downloaded free of charge. The introduction is by James T. Richardson, an American sociologist and legal scholar who has studied the relationship between religion and the courts for half a century.
The most harrowing pages are those by Patricia Duval, a French human rights lawyer, who reconstructs what happened to Rudnev in custody. He was taken from Bariloche to a high-security prison in Rawson, in the cold south, wearing only a T-shirt. He spent ten days in solitary confinement in a punishment cell, used a bucket as a toilet, and, lacking even a spoon, ate with his hands. He was made to swallow three pills a day without being told what they were, and guards checked his mouth to make sure he had taken them. Only later did his lawyer discover that they were strong drugs that lowered his blood pressure, which explained his fainting spells. He waited twelve days to see a lawyer. No interpreter was provided, and prison staff occasionally tried Google Translate on their phones. A man who entered prison at 57 with a serious lung disease lost 53 kilograms. Richardson, who has spent a lifetime studying such matters, writes that this is the worst treatment of a prisoner he has heard of since the days of apartheid in South Africa.
Why would anyone treat a suspect this way? Duval’s answer, which other contributors share, is that pre-trial detention in Argentina often works as a means of pressure. A defendant who signs a confession can receive a reduced sentence or walk out on time already served. Rudnev, she reports, has been offered such a deal repeatedly and has always refused, saying he will not confess to crimes he did not commit.
The evidence, meanwhile, has thinned out. Pills that prosecutors said contained cocaine or ecstasy turned out to be common pharmaceutical products. The “hallucinogenic” mushrooms were dried mushrooms of the kind sold for cooking. Introvigne’s chapter lists ten falsehoods on which the case was built, from the claim that Rudnev uses “brainwashing,” a theory courts and scholars abandoned decades ago, to the idea that a conviction obtained in Putin’s Russia, where drugs are routinely planted on those the regime dislikes, proves anything at all.
What makes the book worth reading even for those who have never heard of Rudnev is its wider ambition. Several of its authors have no particular interest in esoteric teachers and write about Argentina’s justice system as a whole. Marisa Tarantino, herself an assistant prosecutor in Buenos Aires, explains how the country’s anti-trafficking laws were rewritten in 2008 and 2012 in ways that made the consent of adult women legally irrelevant. Under these rules, a person can be declared a victim even if she insists she is not. Cecilia Varela and María Vardé show how, in recent years, Argentine agencies fighting trafficking adopted the vocabulary of the anti-cult movement, speaking of “coercive organizations” and “coercive persuasion.” In this framework, a member of a spiritual group who denies being exploited is taken as further proof of how deeply she has been manipulated. Heads, the prosecution wins; tails, the defendant loses.
Ezequiel Kostenwein, a sociologist from the National University of La Plata, interviewed dozens of judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers. They told him about “judicial danger,” the fear that a judge who releases a defendant will lose his or her career if that person later commits a crime and the newspapers find out. Politicians campaign against the “revolving door” of the courts, and judges feel the pressure. Alessandro Amicarelli, a London-based human rights lawyer, adds a figure that should worry every Argentine: at the end of 2024, 45,305 people were behind bars without a final sentence, more than one prisoner in three. He also tells the story of police officers who spent six years in pre-trial detention in another case, and of their children, who began to fall ill before every prison visit.
As a journalist, I was most moved by the chapter of Alejandro Agostinelli, an Argentine colleague who has the courage to put his own past on trial. In 1991, he wrote a much-read newspaper article warning about “flying-saucer cults” that “brainwashed” their followers. A year later, his reporting helped fuel a panic that led to the persecution of a Brazilian religious leader, Valentina de Andrade, accused of horrific crimes against children. She was eventually acquitted, and a serial killer with no connection to her confessed to the murders. Agostinelli now calls himself a “repentant anti-cultist,” and he sees in the media coverage of Rudnev the same machinery he once helped build. Every editor and reporter who covers minority religions should read his pages.
The book is not a one-sided pamphlet, and this is part of its strength. Liliana Eva Cucurullo, a public defender in the province of Buenos Aires, reviewed some of the court documents and concluded that there were objective grounds to open an investigation. She also warns, however, that a theory which treats every contrary statement as further proof of guilt can never be disproved, and that the voice of an adult woman cannot simply be overruled by the state. Rosita Šorytė, a former Lithuanian diplomat, examines a Russian YouTube “skeptic” whose video attacking Rudnev has passed one million views, and shows how Moscow’s campaign against him has followed him all the way to Patagonia. Michele Olzi, a political scientist from the University of Insubria in Italy, borrows the old question of the Roman poet Juvenal, “Who watches the watchmen?,” and asks who holds prosecutors to account.
At the heart of the volume, however, is the voice of Elena Makarova herself, in a text first published in “Bitter Winter.” She describes a cesarean section performed against her wishes, being forced to breastfeed in front of police officers, weeks without a lawyer of her choice, and threats that her baby would be taken away if she did not declare herself a victim. “I am called a victim in the Argentine case,” she writes, “but I am not a victim of anybody except the Argentine prosecutors, against whom I have filed a complaint.” Back in Russia with her son, she asks only to be left alone. “Dangerous Justice” is a short book, a little over one hundred pages, and it is free. It tells the story of one man and one young mother caught in a machine much larger than either of them. It also asks a question that concerns every democracy: how can a state protect those who are truly exploited without silencing those who say they are not? Argentina’s judges and lawmakers would do well to read it, and so would anyone who believes that the presumption of innocence should apply to everyone, including those whose beliefs seem strange.
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