Moscow protest: Thousands rally against Vladimir Putin
Tens of thousands of people have rallied in central Moscow in a show of anger at alleged electoral fraud.They passed a resolution “not to give a single vote to (PM) Vladimir Putin” at next year’s presidential elections.
Protest leader Alexei Navalny told the crowd to loud applause that Russians would no longer tolerate corruption.
“I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and [Government House] right now but we are peaceful people and won’t do that just yet,” he said.
Demonstrators say parliamentary elections on 4 December, which were won by Mr Putin’s party, were rigged. The government denies the accusation.
A spokesman for Mr Putin, currently Russian prime minister, later said that “the majority of the population” supported him, describing the protesters as a minority.
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Unexpected delights of 2011
There are those columnists who keep meticulous lists of events during the year so that in the final days of December they can churn out detailed reflections on the proceeding 12 months. I’m not one of them. But, nevertheless, I do have my own list of standouts — some unexpected delights — that deserve recognition.
I’ll start with the courageous Senate Democrats. Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) on Medicare reform, Sen. Ben Cardin (Md.) on the Magnitsky bill to sanction Russian human rights abusers and Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.) on Iran sanctions all put principle and good policy above partisanship, defied the White House (which sneered at Wyden-Ryan, and tried to undermine the Magnitsky bill and water down Iran sanctions) and showed that the Democratic Party has not become entirely McGovernized on foreign policy.
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Russians await Putin’s fall
With Russians taking to the streets to protest the recent flawed parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suddenly ceased to be an inevitable leader. He may think that this spring he will be elected president — the job he held from 2000 to 2008 — and serve up to 12 more years in that office.
But I, like many Russians, think the regime will fall before the March election or soon after.
As Putin’s grasp on the country loosens, I wonder: What would Russia look like today if he had never come to power? And now, what might be in store for a post-Putin Russia?
Twelve and a half years ago, then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked Putin as his successor from a tiny pool of bureaucrats who had remained loyal to him when his popularity plummeted. If Yeltsin had picked someone else, it almost certainly would have been another little-known functionary. This person would probably have been, like Putin, afflicted with severe nostalgia for the Soviet past — when the country was feared, the trains ran on time and most people did not like to stand out from the crowd. But this hypothetical bureaucrat’s love of all things Soviet would probably have been more obvious to the West than Putin’s has been.
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Rights Council: Free Khodorkovsky
In a stinging rebuke of the justice system, the Kremlin’s human rights council said Wednesday that former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev had been jailed illegally in their second trial and their verdicts should be overturned.
Moreover, the legal system should be reformed to avoid a repeat of similar cases, the council said in a 400-page report based on the findings of nine state-employed and independent experts, both domestic and foreign.
The council’s decisions have been ignored in the past, but Wednesday’s report comes after two presidential candidates pledged to release Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, fueling new hopes that the two bitter enemies of Vladimir Putin’s government might finally be freed.
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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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U.S. Congress holds hearings on human rights in Russia
This week the U.S. Congress held hearings on human rights in Russia. The first remarks by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), conducting the hearings, and they were pretty tough. This was not surprising, since long ago she signed a bill named for Sergey L. Magnitsky, a Russian attorney killed in police custody. This bill now has twenty-five senators supporting it in the upper house of the U.S. Congress, and may well be adopted. Further testimony was given Phillip H. Gordon, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs, and Thomas O. Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
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People tire of democratic facade in Putin’s Russia
The Guardian – Prince Edward Island
For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have swarmed the streets in the tens of thousands across the country in protest of the Dec. 4th parliamentary elections, in which Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party maintained its majority of seats in disputed fashion.
Outraged by the extensive allegations and reportings of electoral manipulation, Russians have called for new, transparent elections and even for the resignation of the prime minister himself. Yet, there is more to this sudden public outburst than meets the eye. Rather, it is a manifestation of general dissatisfaction with the state of democracy and corruption in the Russian Federation.
Twenty years after the fall of communism, little in Russia has changed. Political power and financial wealth remain concentrated in the hands of an inner circle of elites who dominate all facets of society. To the frustration of the Russian people, the development of a multi-party democracy, which once seemed genuine in the 1990s, has given way to the resurgence of authoritarianism and elitism under Mr. Putin and current President Dmitri Medvedev.
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What Putin’s Return Means for U.S.-Russia Policy
Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin as Russia’s President next spring will once again align real and formal power in Russia, as they were during his earlier two terms in office. Although the Russian Prime Minister is nominally subordinate to the President, Putin has dominated Russian politics throughout Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency. As if to underscore that point, both Putin and Medvedev have implied that they had agreed on Putin’s return as a condition for Medvedev’s assumption of the presidency in 2008. (The Constitution banned a third consecutive term for Putin.) Although that was likely true only in a general way—that Putin reserved the right to return should circumstances warrant—the public insinuations stripped Medvedev of credibility as a leader and his achievements in office of any lasting political worth.
And there were achievements both at home and abroad, no matter how artificial the so-called Medvedev-Putin tandem may now appear. Abroad, Medvedev’s more “modern” image eased the repair of relations with the United States and Europe after the dark days of the last two years of the Bush Administration. At home, Medvedev’s presence as a second pole of power, albeit very circumscribed, fostered a much-needed broader elite discussion of the challenges facing Russia and the appropriate policy responses to them, enticing participation from progressives suspicious of Putin. Putin’s presence, meanwhile, reassured the more retrograde elements that Medvedev’s “reforms” would not spin out of control as Gorbachev’s had a generation earlier. As a result, Russia’s standing in the world improved and a spotlight was turned on the requirements for Russian modernization in the face of the corrosive effects of “legal nihilism.” Little was accomplished in a practical way in this latter portfolio, but there was at least hope, and hope can kindle morale and, ultimately, action.
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A Bitter Pill
In the hours after anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was detained at a December 5 rally protesting falsified election results, he continued tweeting cheerful pictures snapped with his cell phone, showing a tight cadre of fellow protesters in the back of a police van and himself penning an official protest of his arrest. Yet in the same detention center from which Navalny will be released today, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov declared his latest hunger strike, which once again landed him in critical condition in a local hospital over the weekend.
This evening Navalny, along with Solidarnost Youth Coordinator Ilya Yashin and other protesters, will be released 15 days after they were arrested at the first mass rally against alleged election fraud on December 5. For the opposition, the return of one of their most recognizable and popular leaders Navalny will be a welcome boon as they prepare a 50,000-person demonstration on Sakharov Street in downtown Moscow on December 24.
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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
