The Real Russia. Today.
Putin lends extra help to United Russia, another group wants memes decriminalized, and Moscow objects to Bolton's quip
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
This day in history. On August 22, 2004, President Putin signed Federal Law No. 122, replacing various retirement benefits (like free public transportation and subsidies for housing, prescriptions, telephone, and other basic services) with relatively small cash payments.
- The Kremlin says United Russia can call itself ‘the president's party’ in areas where it's least loved
- New report says Russia's coming regional elections will be the country's least competitive in at least six years
- German police arrest a Russian citizen in an alleged bomb plot
- An elderly Russian woman faces misdemeanor charges for encouraging neighbors to meet with journalists
- A town official outside Sverdlovsk wants local reporters to explain how they got their hands on her bio and photo (spoiler: this info isn't classified)
- Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council calls for the decriminalization of nonviolent hate and offensive speech online
- The former head of Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service now owes the state 2.3 billion rubles for embezzling money
- A prison in Vladimir is allegedly hiding a mass hunger strike by inmates
- Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council says this jailed district official outside Moscow needs to be hospitalized pronto
- The Kremlin objects to John Bolton's quip about Russia being ‘stuck’ in Syria
- Finland is none too eager to grant asylum to Russia's fleeing Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Divorce proceedings reveal that this long-time Russian newspaper chief editor is allegedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars
Russia votes again
👍 The big guy says it's okay
The Kremlin will reportedly allow United Russia to call itself “the president’s party” in campaign ads ahead of elections on September 9 in certain regions across the country where the party is struggling to maintain voters’ support. Sources told the magazine RBC that the slogan will appear on promotional materials in the Irkutsk and Vladimir regions, as well as in Yekaterinburg. United Russia might play its presidential trump card in Arkhangelsk and Ulyanovsk, as well, but it apparently hasn’t yet committed to this approach in these cities. Party officials refused to comment on the rumors.
On September 9, eighty regions across Russia will hold local elections, voting for mayors, legislative assembly deputies, and city council members. Seven regions will also stage special elections for vacant seats in the State Duma.
According to the state-owned pollster VTSiOM, nationwide support for United Russia has dropped 13 percent since early July, falling to 35.3 percent. In Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections, the party used 12 quotes from Vladimir Putin in billboard advertisements.
🗳️ Afraid of a little competish'
A new report by former Economic Minister Yevgeny Yasin’s Liberal Mission Foundation says Russia’s September 9 regional elections will be the country’s least competitive since 2012. The group’s experts also found that opposition candidates “who obviously had serious chances of winning elections” were disqualified in several races. The country’s “municipal filter” remains an “insurmountable obstacle” for genuine oppositionists, while “technical candidates” easily find their way to the ballots, the study found.
What is Russia’s “municipal filter”? Read Taisiya Bekbulatova’s special report about its humiliating reality in this year’s Moscow mayoral race.
Reach for the sky, partner
💣 Arrested in Germany
German federal agents have arrested a 31-year-old Russian citizen named Magomed-Ali C. (the authorities haven’t yet released his full surname) on charges of plotting an attack against the state using explosives. The man was reportedly working with someone else named Clément B., planning an attack in October 2016, but police foiled that effort. Magomed-Ali’s accomplice apparently got spooked afterwards and fled to Marseilles, France, where he was arrested along with another man in April 2017. When German law enforcement finally searched Magomed-Ali’s apartment, they discovered a supply of the explosive acetone peroxide.
🎤 Do you have a permit for that conversation?
A 63-year-old woman outside Nizhny Tagil faces misdemeanor charges for allegedly organizing an unpermitted public assembly because she urged her neighbors to meet with a visiting television news crew. Irina Kutsenok says she appealed to journalists after her town had gone without hot water for two months. When she learned that a film crew from Vesti Ural would come on August 1, she posted signs in the lobbies of apartment complexes throughout the town, urging residents to gather for a meeting with the reporters. Afterwards, Kutsenok says a top local official named Marina Selskaya filed a police report against her, accusing her of staging an illegal demonstration.
Kutsenok’s hearing is scheduled for August 30. If convicted, she faces a fine of up to 30,000 rubles ($440), fifty hours of community service, or 10 days in jail.
🕵️♀️ Classified biographies
Yulia Puzacheva heads the human resources department in the town of Karpinsk, in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region. She recently filed a complaint with Russia’s federal censor against the news website Vecherny Karpinsk after it published a story about her receiving a certificate from the Sverdlovsk regional legislative assembly. The story featured a short biography of Puzacheva and her photograph, and attracted a few dozen comments, several of which questioned how much she deserved the certificate.
Responding to Puzacheva’s complaint, Roskomnadzor ordered Vecherny Karpinsk to explain how it acquired her biography and photograph. The journalists say this information is available from open sources, pointing out that they first summarized her career in a story published two years ago. What really bothers Puzacheva, Vecherny Karpinsk’s editors say, is their readers’ criticism.
👾 Ease up on the trolls
Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council is endorsing a legislative initiative to end felony penalties for public actions intended to insult religious sensitivities, and the group also wants a new misdemeanor code for such offenses. The council says all hate speech without a credible threat of violence should become a misdemeanor, and it advocates the total decriminalization of displaying Nazi or other extremist symbols, when those displays aren’t meant to promote extremist ideologies.
In mid-August Vkontakte’s parent company, Mail.ru Group, urged the government to decriminalize the sharing of harmless Internet content (including posts, reposts, “likes,” and comments), and also asked state officials to amnesty Internet users convicted of nonviolent crimes under Criminal Code articles 282 (extremist hate speech) and 148 (offending religious sensitivities). A similar initiative has the support of Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s Communications Ministry, and even the Russian Orthodox Church.
Good Ultimately Lasting Awesome Games
🤝 This was the guy in charge?
A court outside Moscow says Alexander Reymer, the former director of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, and several other defendants must pay 2.3 billion rubles ($33.8 million) for embezzling government money by orchestrating the purchase of defective electronic monitoring bracelets at inflated prices. In the summer of 2017, Reymer was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the scheme. Prosecutors say his actions cost the public roughly 2.7 billion rubles (almost $40 million).
🤫 Mum's the word
An activist in Vladimir has accused the local maximum security penitentiary of hiding a mass hunger strike by inmates that started on August 13. According to Roman Kaifadzhyan, the head of an organization that assists foreign citizens and fights illegal immigration, the prisoners are protesting against torture, beatings, and guards driving inmates to suicide. Prison officials have reportedly refused to let relatives or lawyers visit the inmates, in order to conceal the hunger strike.
- Read Meduza's special report on reported torture cases in Russia's prisons in 2018.
👨⚕️ Send in the docs
Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council is asking the Federal Penitentiary Service to hospitalize Alexander Shestun, the jailed head of the Moscow region’s Serpukhov district. On June 14, police arrested Shestun on charges that his business illegally acquired 10 hectares (about 25 acres) of local land from the state in 2010.
In April, Shestun addressed a video to Vladimir Putin, claiming that Governor Andrey Vorobyov was threatening to confiscate his home and put him in prison, if he didn’t resign. Vorobyov supposedly wants him out because Shestun opposes the transformation of the Serpukhovsky district into a municipal precinct and he objects to further waste shipments from the city to Serpukhov’s over-capacity “Lesnaya” landfill.
Despite being in jail, Shestun hoped to seek re-election in next month’s race, but regional officials refused to register his candidacy, citing technicalities. His wife will run in his place, instead.
Stories from across the Blue Dot
👨👨 Dueling mustaches
Russia is “stuck” in Syria and looking for others to fund post-war reconstruction there, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said while on a visit to Israel this week, describing this as an opportunity for Washington to press for “the withdrawal of all Iranian forces.” Read the story at Reuters.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov promptly objected to Bolton’s use of the word “stuck,” telling reporters on Wednesday, “Let’s not forget that American soldiers are also on the ground in Syria.”
🙅♂️ Will anybody take the JWs?
More than 200 Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses have fled to Finland, seeking asylum, since Russia banned their group in April 2017. According to the newspaper Aamulehti, Finnish authorities have only reviewed 10 asylum requests, so far, rejecting most of them. State officials in Finland reportedly deny that Jehovah’s Witnesses face “systematic persecution” in Russia, and the authorities are considering each asylum petition individually.
In April 2017, the Russian Supreme Court designated the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Administrative Center as an extremist organization, banning its activities nationwide, after the Russian Justice Ministry accused it of disseminating extremist literature. Officials have also banned Jehovah’s Witnesses’ local organizations. Members of the millenarian Christian denomination have filed complaints about harassment and persecution with Russia’s Human Rights Commission and the European Court of Human Rights.
On August 16, Radio Liberty reported from a refugee camp in Konnunsuo, Finland, where roughly half of the asylum-seeking Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses are currently living. Sources told the news outlet that the Finnish authorities are dragging their feet when it comes to reviewing refugees' applications.
Tough break, Pavel 💸
Pavel Gusev, the long-time chief editor of the newspaper Moskovsky Komomolets, is getting divorced, and the legal dispute over the assets he’s acquired during his marriage has revealed that the man is apparently worth a whopping 30 billion rubles ($441.2 million). According to Mskagency.ru, his soon-to-be ex-wife wants to split the lion’s share of that wealth (approximately 27 billion rubles, says journalist Alexander Plushev). A source told the news outlet that roughly 1.5 billion rubles of Gusev’s money is invested in real estate in and around Moscow. The rest is found in corporate shares, including stock in the publishing houses that own and manage Moskovsky Komomolets.
In May 2018, Gusev, who also serves as the head of the Moscow Journalists’ Union, condemned the media boycott against State Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky, following sexual harassment allegations from multiple women journalists. After the women came forward, Gusev accused them of “degrading journalism” by staying silent for years.
Yours, Meduza