The case of the Russian spiritual master is not isolated. It reflects a systemic mechanism where anti-trafficking policies incorporate anti-cult narratives.
by María Vardé
In Argentina, anti-trafficking interventions are publicly framed as humanitarian efforts, yet for those labeled as “victims,” the experience of “protection” frequently resembles detention, characterized by isolation, surveillance, and intense pressure to adopt a predefined script of harm. The Rudnev case serves as a stark testimony to this institutional paradox.
Argentine authorities arrested Konstantin Rudnev—known internationally for past allegations in Russia—and opened a criminal case framed around trafficking and exploitation within an alleged “cult.” Following the arrest, several Russian women allegedly connected to his spiritual school were detained. Among them was “E.,” a woman who had recently undergone a C-section and was caring for a newborn. Although she was treated as a presumed victim, her reconstruction of events describes an intrusive form of custody justified through the language of rescue.
As she recalled in an interview, E.’s ordeal began at the Ramón Carillo hospital in Bariloche, where she had gone to give birth accompanied by a friend and an interpreter, as she spoke neither Spanish nor English. After surgery, she was left alone with her newborn; her translator and friend were removed, and her phone “disappeared.” In a critical physical state involving blood loss and fainting, she found herself surrounded by police officers who could not communicate in Russian and failed to provide adequate translation. Fearful, she managed to call her mother in the middle of the night to share recordings of the conversations with the authorities. However, her mother’s attempts to replace the public defender with private counsel were resisted; for an entire month, E. was denied contact with any lawyer other than the one imposed by the state. According to her testimony, the assigned lawyer even threatened her, stating that if she maintained contact with her mother, “they would arrest her mother as a criminal.” E. struggled to understand what she was supposedly a victim of, maintaining that she did not even know her alleged trafficker.
The situation escalated when she was moved to a “home for trafficking victims” in Buenos Aires, where she lived under a regime of confinement and opacity. She was not permitted to leave or even know the address of the shelter, which she described as having high humidity, no running water, and precarious hygiene. When she complained about hunger, the cold, or the inability to bathe, she was transferred to a second shelter where the staff was unfamiliar with her history, and her communication with her mother was treated as a “privilege” limited to minutes. When she attempted to use Google Maps to identify her location for her family, her communication rights were suspended for two days. Throughout months of abdominal pain and confinement, her own testimony—which did not fit the official label of “victim”—was systematically neutralized in the name of her own protection. Once she managed to contact the lawyer her mother had hired in Argentina to get her out, prosecutors attempted to pressure him to abandon her defense.
This pattern of “forced victimization” extended to other women in the Rudnev case, who describe being violently detained without a warrant or an interpreter to inform them of the charges. They recount aggressive insistence from state officials to “admit” they were victims and to implicate individuals they did not know. Some were even pressured to sign blank forms or documents in languages they did not understand. During the online hearings, the only two women who understood Spanish were muted when they attempted to translate and when they tried to declare that the prosecutors’ translations were distorted.
Accounts from the groups detained in Buenos Aires and Bariloche describe strikingly similar treatment. Held in cold cells without mattresses or blankets, they were forced for days to remain seated or, in some cases, standing, and to remain handcuffed. They were treated as a hybrid of suspect and victim without legal clarification of their status. They were not allowed to make any phone calls to family members or lawyers, and had no real option but to accept the state-appointed public defender. They further report that these public defenders repeatedly urged them to present themselves as “victims” to make the process easier. They also indicate they were denied basic hygiene and medical care even when they had visible injuries, infections, or apparent physical distress. They were compelled to scrub the police station floor with the same cleaning rag they were later forced to use to wipe the table where they ate. They also reported being forced to strip and being subjected to searches they described as worse than a gynecological examination. According to their accounts, they were allowed to use only a bathroom with no door, in front of male agents who mocked them, despite the presence of a bathroom with a door directly outside their cell. Some report that when they asked for food, police officers threw pieces of bread onto the cell floor “as if feeding animals.”
The theoretical framework behind these actions became clear in the April 3–4, 2025, formal-charges hearing. Before the women were freed, prosecutors portrayed the case through the lens of a “coercive” organization—an equivalent of “cult”—and explicitly stated they could not rule out that some of the women facing charges might also be victims who had not yet recognized it.
These events are not isolated incidents but reflect a systemic mechanism. Research by scholars such as Cecilia Varela, Estefanía Martynowskyj, Agustina Iglesias Skulj, and Jessica Gutiérrez has revealed that “forced victimization” is a regular outcome of Argentina’s anti-trafficking administration. Federal prosecutors, rescue offices, and state technical teams actively decide which situations will be treated as exploitation and which forms of consent will be treated as valid, often rendering individual narratives legally irrelevant. Even when people describe making autonomous choices, rescue interviews tend to reframe their testimonies using technical language like “impaired discernment” or “indoctrination,” effectively silencing dissent.
The result is a tight institutional coupling between “rescue” and criminalization. Assistance becomes a site where the “victim’s” narrative is evaluated, reformatted, and, if it does not fit the template, invalidated. As Jessica Gutiérrez shows, institutional interviews function simultaneously as assistance and as evidence-production. This highlights a recurring tension: the “truth” of trafficking is not simply discovered; it is assembled through interpretive filters that privilege certain storylines and distrust others. This dynamic explains why, in the Rudnev case, the statement “I am not a victim” does not close the matter, but rather triggers further intervention.
In the last decade, Argentine anti-trafficking policies have incorporated anti-cult narratives, adding another layer to this interpretive mechanism. The key assumption in anti-cult imaginaries is that people inside a “cult” are manipulated, incapable of recognizing harm, and must be rescued even against their stated wishes.
Crucially, this framework has been incorporated into legal procedures without criticism. Vulnerability has become a presumption that overrides individual examination and has been justified with facts as trivial as having a child or even being a woman. In practice, loss of autonomy is not the result of a clinical diagnosis established through individualized medical evidence, but an interpretive claim associated with “brainwashing,” despite decades of scientific discrediting.
Once this premise is accepted, the mechanism becomes self-sealing: if an adult agrees with the “victim” label, her statement is taken as confirmation; if she rejects it, that rejection is reclassified as proof of manipulation. Any religious commitment can thus be treated as evidence that a person is not fully competent to narrate her own experience. This logic has already shaped prosecutorial approaches in cases such as Iglesia Tabernáculo Internacional, Pastor Tagliabué, the Jesus Christians, and the ongoing Buenos Aires Yoga School case, where alleged victims have denounced prosecutors on these grounds. What we are witnessing is a practical tool that authorizes intrusive interventions: the system claims to “protect the victim’s voice” while simultaneously correcting it.
Ultimately, the Rudnev case exposes a broader institutional risk. The problem is not the fight against trafficking itself, but a mode of governance that feels authorized to proceed intrusively regardless of the person’s own narrative. When denial is treated as proof of what is denied, the line between rescue and punishment ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a physical reality of state-sponsored erasure.
Maria Vardé graduated in Anthropological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and is currently a researcher at the Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires (Institute of Anthropological Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Buenos Aires). She has written and lectured on archeology, spirituality, and freedom of religion or belief.
