"Ate the motherland’s orders": FSB Colonel Rustam Kamalov defended his extramarital relationship as a duty of service, while the TPU rector is on trial for hiring his lover

A real FSB colonel sleeps with a woman only for the sake of his job.

At the hearing in the case of Dmitry Sednev, the rector of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU), the testimony of his FSB handler, Colonel Rustam Kamalov, was read. Kamalov ordered the vice-rector to fictitiously employ his mistress, and now Sednev is being tried for it. What’s interesting in this story isn’t so much the fact that the FSB supervises university administrators, but rather Kamalov’s testimony, which stated that his intimate relationship with his mistress was purely for official purposes and that he received no pleasure from it.

Rustam Kamalov was the head of the FSB assistance program group for the Tomsk Region and later the head of the agency’s counterterrorism unit. He had the powerful support of one of the FSB’s central “towers,” making him a highly visible figure in the Tomsk Region’s security apparatus. Later, he found himself at the center of a struggle between these same factions and lost.

Kamalov was detained while attempting to leave Russia and sent to pretrial detention. His relationship with TPU management was brought to light. The colonel once gave the go-ahead for Rector Sednev to employ his mistress, Natalya. The investigation concluded that Kamalov himself received the money and classified it as a bribe from the vice-rector for “general patronage.” Sednev was a witness in Kamalov’s case, in which Kamalov ultimately received 11 years in prison. Later, the vice-rector himself ended up in court, charged under Article 285 of the Russian Criminal Code (abuse of office), in connection with Natalya’s fictitious employment.

During the hearing, correspondence between Kamalov and Sednev was presented. It made clear that the FSB colonel acted as Sednev’s full-fledged handler. Even before Sednev’s appointment, Kamalov wrote that Sednev would only be able to assume the rector’s post with a recommendation and approval from the FSB. He explained that “the regional government doesn’t assign tasks to rectors; they have to do it for them,” and he regularly issued such instructions himself, including the order to employ Natalya. Refusing was impossible.

The main highlight of the hearings, however, was Kamalov’s own testimony about his relationship with Natalya.

“I met N. during an investigation at the organization where she worked at the time, and I immediately thought she was a promising young lawyer…

After some time, N. and I became intimate. I did not need this relationship out of any physiological needs. In the long run, I believed I could ask N. to fulfill certain requests in the interests of the service…

Our intimate relationship was not connected to any physical attraction I felt toward N. My interest in her was solely tied to the interests of my service…”

After his sentence, Kamalov asked to be sent to war but was denied. He is currently serving his term in a penal colony in the Irkutsk region.