Police Search Homes of Torfyanka Park Defenders
Grani.ru
November 14, 2016

Defenders of Moscow’s Torfyanka Park have had their flats searched by police. Olga Romanova, founder of the Imprisoned Russia project, reported the searches on her Facebook page.

According to Romanova, police visited the home of attorney Marina Verigina, who has been consulting the activists, and her husband Vladimir Grechaninov. Law enforcement officers broke into their apartment.

Police cordoned off Natalya Fyodorova’s stairwell and did not let her neighbors act as witnesses to the search, explaining they had brought their own witnesses with them. Fyodorova was loaded into a paddy wagon along with her disabled mother, her husband Boris, and her 18-year-old daughter. The door to the Fyodorovs’ apartment was cut down with a metal grinder.

After the search of his home, Pavel Alexeev was put in the paddy wagon with his underage son Alexander. Evgeny Lebedev and his wife were loaded into the paddy wagon with their underage daughter.

Police likewise searched the home of activist Vladislav Kuznetsov and his wife Svetlana Kuznetsova. Kuznetsov’s forehead was injured while he was detained. He was then handcuffed and a scarf was wrapped around his head.

In addition, Konstantin Yatsyn and his father Yuri Yatsyn were detained. It has been reported that several more families of Torfyanka’s defenders were incommunicado.

Natalya Kutlunina, a member of the Communist Party, has reported that her apartment has been searched as well. Law enforcement officers arrived there at six in the morning. Kutlunina is out of town, and the apartment was searched with her son present.

“The search lasted three hours,” wrote Kutlunina. “They confiscated placards, Party literature, my son’s and my husband’s laptops, and my younger son’s mobile phone.”

Meanwhile, OVD Info has reported that the search at the Verigina and Grechaninov household was still underway after 6:30 in the evening. Yet since lunch time law officers had refused to let lawyer Sergei Shank into the apartment, despite the fact he produced a warrant.

The people detained during the searches were taken to the Russian Investigative Committee’s Northwest Moscow District Office. According to RBC, each activist was escorted by fifteen to twenty police officers, and the arrests were filmed by employees of the national TV channel NTV.

All the detainees were interrogated as witnesses in a case opened up under Article 148 of the Criminal Code (insulting the feelings of religious believers) before being released.

OVD Info claims violation of Paragraph 1 of the article, which stipulates a maximum punishment of one year in a penal colony, is at issue in the case. Meanwhile, after his interrogation, activist Evgeny Lebedev wrote on the For Torfyanka Park! VK community page that a case had been opened under Article 148.3 (obstructing the activities of religious organizations), which carries a maximum penalty of a year of corrective labor or three months in jail.

Orthodox clerics want to build a church in Torfyanka. Local residents are opposed to their plans, and they have been protesting them since June 2015. The decision to permit construction of the church was made illegally. In the autumn of 2015, the Moscow Town Planning and Land Commission acknowledged this and canceled the permit, demanding that the construction site at the park be dismantled. However, this still has not been done.

Moreover, the park’s defenders have been assaulted several times by Russian Orthodox militants. In the early hours of February 13, militants from the Multitude (Sorok sorokov) movement attempted to start building the church without authorization, but they were stopped by police.

In the early hours of March 3, a camp set up activists maintaining a 24-hour vigil in the park was demolished with assistance from the police. Law enforcement officers drove the environmentalists from their tent and pushed them aside as persons unknown arrived in a GAZelle minivan, loaded up the tent and the activists’ personal belongings, and drove off. It transpired that the minivan belonged to the Losiny Ostrov (Moose Island) District Council.

In the early hours of August 29, police detained twelve people, claiming that activists had been trying to break the fence around the proposed construction site.

Ekaterina Schulman, political scientist
This is a bad story, and it is bad because of the numbers of people involved. Nine people have been detained. The police came to their homes at six in the morning and took them to the Investigative Committee on suspicion they have violated Article 148.1 of the Criminal Code (“Public actions expressing clear disrespect for society and committed to insult the feelings of religious believers”), for which the maximum penalty is a year in prison. Meaning that it is a minor offense. Why is the Investigative Committee involved at all? They supposedly deal with serious and very serious crimes in Russia, no? All the detainees are neighbors, husbands and wives, meaning the police carpet-bombed a neighborhood that had been protesting construction of a new church in a park. What is the magnitude of their crime, which did not involve violence? What, are they terrorists? If charges of insulting religious believers have been filed in connection with a complaint, then investigate the case the usual way. Dear Investigative Committee, as a law enforcement agency you are not in the best position nowadays, and if you think you are going to strengthen it by suddenly arresting a dozen ordinary Russians for the glory of the Russian Orthodox Church, you have another think coming. If you haven’t noticed, the trend now in Russia is against exacerbation, incitement, and extremism, and for keeping people calm during the economic crisis. The FSB at least pulled some terrorists from its sleeve who wanted to blow up shopping malls. People understand that, but what was your bright idea for cheering up the media scene?
Source: Facebook

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Nikolay Mitrokhin for the heads-up

__________

The Thermals, “A Pillar of Salt”

We were born to sin
We were born to sin
We don’t think we’re special sir
We know everybody is
We’ve built too many walls
Yeah, we’ve built too many walls
And now we gotta run
A giant fist is out to crush us

We run in the dark
We run in the dark
We don’t carry dead weight long
We send them along to heaven
I carry my baby
I carry my baby
Her eyes can barely see
Her mouth can barely breathe

I can see she’s afraid
She could see the danger
We don’t want to die or apologize
For our dirty God, our dirty bodies

Now, I stick to the ground
I stick to the ground
I won’t look twice for the dead walls
I don’t want a white pillar of salt
I carry my baby
I carry my baby
Her eyes can barely see
Her mouth can barely breathe

I can see she’s afraid
That’s why we’re escaping
So we won’t have to die, we won’t have to deny
Our dirty God, our dirty bodies

“A Pillar of Salt” as written by Kathleen Michelle Foster and Hutch Harris. Lyrics © TERRORBIRD PUBLISHING LLC

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