In the Sorbonne auditorium, Bastrykin at first seemed unperturbed by the angry yells. Then one question made him lose his composure. It wasn’t about Bastrykin’s agency or its conduct. Instead, it challenged Bastrykin’s own integrity as an author. The issue was that of plagiarism.

The Investigative Committee is sometimes referred to as the “Russian FBI”; the comparison may be a bit of a stretch, but that perhaps makes Bastrykin a Russian J. Edgar Hoover. Like Hoover, the Bureau’s first director, Bastrykin, who graduated from law school in Leningrad the same year as President Vladimir Putin, has been the head of the Committee since its establishment as an independent agency; he has worked incessantly on expanding its authority and prosecuting what might be called un-Russian activities. The Investigative Committee is associated with high-profile cases such as the prosecution of members of the band Pussy Riot (for “hooliganism,” in the form of a forty-second “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral), of almost three dozen people who took part in a May, 2012, anti-Putin rally (for “mass unrest”), and of an international Greenpeace team detained in September. Bastrykin is also behind the prosecution of Russia’s most prominent public and political activist, Aleksey Navalny. Arbitrary rulings, contempt for lawful procedure, and the brutal treatment of suspects have been commonplace in such cases.

The Investigative Committee has the authority to instigate legal proceedings on its own, which makes it a handy tool for the powers that be when they need to deal with unwelcome figures. There is no accountability worth worrying about; Bastrykin’s agency can easily get away with practices that appear dubious at best, and those who look deeper can face grave consequences. On one occasion, a Moscow reporter for Novaya Gazeta alleged that Bastrykin’s agency was intentionally half-hearted in investigating the case of a murderous gang; the piece, written in rather emotional terms, suggested that the investigators sought to cover up the crime rather than disclose it. Shortly thereafter, Bastrykin invited the reporter to accompany him on a trip, then, on the way back, according to an open letter his editor-in-chief wrote afterward, the reporter was driven by Bastrykin’s security guards to a secluded forest outside Moscow, where he was left one on one with Bastrykin, who threatened to kill him. Bastrykin made a public apology for losing his cool, but denied the death threat. He kept his office, and continued to broaden his authority.

Since early this year, a group of journalists and academics that calls itself Dissernet has been muckraking academic fraud: it goes over dissertations that earned degrees for members of the Russian establishment—lawmakers, governors, prosecutors, and others—and quite often discovers large-scale “unscrupulous borrowing”; the Dissernet group avoids the term “plagiarism” for legal reasons. (I’ve written about this campaign before.) According to Sergey Parkhomenko, one of Dissernet’s founders, so far, it has examined over seven hundred dissertations; “malevolent copypasting” was discovered in about three hundred.

When his Paris detractors mentioned “plagiarism,” Bastrykin could no longer stay as calm as he did when it was just a matter of prisoners or torture. He angrily threatened to sue Dissernet...