Russia: Who is Challenging Power?
The rain was pouring down on a crowd of thousands of people who gathered at Chiysty Prudy on December 5th during an unprecedented rally in Russian history for its scope and scale. For the first time since the early 1990s, protesters challenged Putin’s power as his new rule as President could enable him to stay in power until 2024. The number of demonstrators in street rallies has grown approximately to 100,000. Mostly political activists, professionals and intellectuals expressed their dissent as a result of alleged falsifications during latest parliamentary elections, though suspected frauds were only the last trigger. Since he took power in 1999, it seems that Putin has not changed his politics: a Leviathan’s deal of order over democracy. Meanwhile, many Russians have changed.
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Human Rights court awards damages to sick Russian prisoners
The European Court of Human Rights has awarded three seriously ill Russian remand prisoners a total of 38,000 euros following lawsuits against the Russian authorities for poor treatment in pretrial detention centers, according to a ruling published on the court’s website on Tuesday, RAPSI news agency reported.
The issue of poor medical treatment in Russian pretrial detention centers has become increasingly controversial following the high-profile deaths in custody of Hermitage Capital Management fund legal adviser Sergei Magnitsky in November 2009 and Vera Trofimova, a defendant in a fraud case, in April 2010.
The Strasbourg court said the petition was filed by Armen Arutyunyan, Teymuraz Sakhvadze and Vladimir Vasilyev, who were charged with serious crimes including murder and attempted rape.
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The Failure of the “Russia Reset”: Next Steps for the United States and Europe
Abstract: The policies of the United States and the European Union should encourage and support Russian civil society and Russia’s democratic modernizers. And, if Russia continues to abrogate its international commitments to basic freedoms and human rights, the U.S. and the EU must stand up for democratic values and make it clear that Russian aggression will not be tolerated. President Obama’s Russia “reset” policy achieves the opposite. Just as the U.S. reset has shaped European thinking, overly lenient signals from the EU to Russia will have a negative effect on U.S. interests, including support of democracy and promotion of economic freedom. The U.S. should collaborate with individual European allies as well as the European Union to set an agenda that better defends transatlantic interests from Russian aggression.
President Barack Obama’s Russia “reset” policy has encouraged European Union politicians who have long advocated a “softly, softly” approach toward Russia to push for a “fast-forward” in Brussels’ relationship with Moscow. Clearly alluding to President Obama’s Russia-policy pronouncement at the EU–Russia summit in June 2010, President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy stated: “With Russia we do not need a ‘reset.’ We want a ‘fast forward.’”[1]
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Man On A Mission: Bill Browder vs. the Kremlin
“There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!” thundered Max Shachtman—once known as Leon Trotsky’s “foreign minister”—in New York City in 1950. By popular account, the line had been cooked up that night by a young Shachtmanite named Irving Howe; it ended the debate between the anti-Stalinist socialist Schachtman and his opponent, Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA, who had been expelled from the party in 1946 at the behest of Moscow Central after suggesting that Soviet Communism and American capitalism might coexist after all.
Browder’s grandson Bill, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has continued the family tradition of heretical defiance of the Kremlin and as a result has had an experience that in all its eccentricity defines the malign brutality of Russian political life today.
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Andrei Piontkovsky. Features of the Russian “light totalitarianism”
A paper of Andrei Piontkovsky – a physicist, scientist of Startegic studies center, publicist and one of the most famous dissidents in contemporary Russia. The speech was delivered in an international conference “Totalitarianism and Tolerance. The Challenges to Freedom”, which was held in Vilnius, November 16th.
Some time ago my book about contemporary Russia “Third Path to Serfdom“ appeared. The name of the book was an allusion to the famous work of the philosopher and economist Friedrich August von Hayek „”he Road to Serfdom”. F. Hayek claimed that fascism and communism as well inevitably lead to serfdom. Completely agreeing with this, I still think that today we can complement the considerations of F.Hayek by maintaining that there’s also a third way leading to serfdom, and this is putinism.
I would like to emphasize that I truly am not going to equalize putinism, fascism and communism. For me it is important to stress that despite of internal differences all these ways lead to the same point. It would be irresponsible to call putinism as fascism in a new form. If fascism or stalinistic totalitarianism would be prevailing in today’s Russia, I would for sure not have this opportunity to talk to you from this tribune, and all the opponents of the regime would be simply physically eliminated. Putinism can be called as “light totalitarianism“. But let’s not get it wrong, even though looking from aside it is not so bloody and agressive, in certain aspects this phenomenon can be even more dangerous than its “hard“ form.
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Hopes Raised As Court Frees Entrepreneur
The country’s courts may finally be heeding orders from the Kremlin to end a crackdown on the business community, judging by the recent surprise ruling to not jail gravely ill entrepreneur Natalya Gulevich after her conviction on fraud charges.
The judiciary has come under increasing pressure from rights activists, the media and the government to cease its harsh treatment of business owners after a string of high-profile deaths in pretrial detention — most notably that of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
Many courts around the country have stubbornly resisted, but Gulevich’s unexpected release suggests that change may finally be under way. Still, many other ill suspects remain under arrest, and it is unclear whether they will receive the softer treatment that President Dmitry Medvedev has promised.
Gulevich was convicted of large-scale fraud late Monday by Moscow’s Tagansky District Court.
While the verdict was widely expected, the sentence was decidedly less so. Gulevich got off with a three-year suspended sentence and a fine of 1 million rubles ($32,000), as well as an order to pay back a bank loan of 590 million rubles ($26.5 million at the time) that sparked the case in 2008.
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Fragments of a Defunct State
How to characterise the Putin regime, a now shaken and besieged ruling group sometimes said to be the richest in the history of the world? ‘Soft authoritarianism’, ‘hybrid regime’, ‘managed democracy’: the labels reveal less about Russia than about the inability of commentators to loosen the Cold War’s lingering hold on their thinking.
Luke Harding was the Guardian correspondent in Russia between 2007 and 2011 who last February was turned back at Domodedovo Airport and told that his presence in the country was no longer welcome. An editorial in the Guardian described it as ‘the first removal of a British staff journalist from the country since the end of the Cold War’. Harding himself sees his account of Putin’s Russia as a kind of codicil to Malcolm Muggeridge’s denunciation of the Soviet Union when he was the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in 1932-33. ‘Eight decades on,’ Harding writes, ‘not much has changed’: ‘Kremlinology is back’; Russia ‘has become the world’s foremost spy-state’; ‘KGB habits of secrecy’ have returned; ‘Russia’s state media are still stuck in Cold War battle mode.’ And so on. Harding is not alone in this view. But it’s wrong. Putin doesn’t represent a return to Soviet ways; it’s something very different and more anarchic.
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Russians quiz Sergei Magnitsky’s mother
Russian authorities risk further controversy after calling the mother of dead whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky for questioning into his alleged criminality.
The highly unusual move comes after prosecutors refused to drop a posthumous tax investigation into the lawyer who died in custody two years ago. He was jailed after blowing the whistle on what he claimed was the biggest tax fraud in Russian history.
Mr Magnitsky was working for London-based investment fund Hermitage Capital Management when he made the allegations. Shortly after revealing the alleged tax scam, Mr Magnitsky was jailed and allegedly beaten. He died after being denied medical care. His case raised global concern about law and order in Russia.
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Russia: Hermitage Capital says more pressure exerted on Magnitskiy family
Interfax
A new investigator just assigned to the case of the former Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergey Magnitskiy has summoned his mother to appear for questioning, Interfax news agency reported on 28 December, quoting a Hermitage Capital statement.
“Magnitskiy’s mother has received a telegram from Boris Kibis, an investigator of the Interior Ministry’s main directorate for Central Federal District, who has formally replaced Oleg Silchenko [as the Magnitskiy case investigator]. Investigator Kibis has requested her to come to his office today, 28 December, at 1500 [1100 gmt]. As an alternative, investigator Kibis has offered Magnitskiy’s mother to waive her right to seek rehabilitation of her son,” the statement says. Investigator Kibis, the fund adds, earlier refused to consider as “insignificant” the conclusions made by the presidential council on human rights acknowledging Magnitskiy’s arrest as illegal and recognizing violations of his rights by biased investigators. Moreover, Hermitage Capital’s statement says, the new investigator did not find any wrongdoing in the actions of his predecessor, who continues to oversee the Magnitskiy case.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
