October 30, 2017 – The Russian Reader

Russian riot police paddy wagon parked in downtown Petersburg, 11 November 2016. Photo by the Russian Reader

Putin Calls for Assessing Police Actions at Protest Rallies
Natalya Demchenko and Pavel Kazarnovsky
RBC
October 30, 2017

The president argued that instead of organizing protests, critics of the authorities should ensure their presence [sic] on the internet and in the media. He also said that “disrupting life in big cities” was wrong, but that freedom [sic] must be guaranteed.

During a meeting of the Presidential Human Rights Council, Vladimir Putin suggested analyzing the actions of law enforcement agencies vis-à-vis protesters, noting that freedom must be guaranteed. The president’s address was broadcast live by TV channel Rossiya 24.

“Freedom must be guaranteed. I completely agree with you. We must always analyze established practices in our country,” he said in reply to a question from council member Nikolai Svanidze.

According to Putin, however, “some groups of protesters” and rally organizers deliberately aggravate the situation “in order to attract attention,” whereas in order to “state their position and criticize the authorities” it suffices to secure a presence on the internet and in the media [sic].

“I can imagine that the authorities drive these protests over the hill since they have no desire whatsoever to show them up and close. But deliberately interfering with life in the big cities, deliberately triggering aggression, is also wrong. We must work with both parties to this process,” said Putin.

According to him, hysterical outbursts occur from time to time in Russia due to protest rallies.

“Outbursts happen. Look at what has been going on in the US. There are hysterics there,” noted the president.

According to him, these outbursts are a natural phenomenon. There is no need to expect complete calm.

“There never was such a thing and there never will be.”

It is necessary, however, to minimize the negative aftermath of the outbursts.

A series of anti-corruption rallies, organized by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, were held this past March in Russia. The events were authorized [sic] by the authorities in 24 cities, although organizers advertised events in a hundred cities across Russia. The best attended rallies took place in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Vladivostok.

In Moscow, a protest on Tverskaya was not agreed by the authorities, who did not propose an alternative venue to the organizers [as required by law]. Navalny thus announced that, in according with a Constitutional Court ruling, he considered the protest rally authorized and encouraged his supporters to come to Tverskaya. Consequently, according to OVD Info, over a thousand people were detained by police. (According to official police figures, the number was around 500.)

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov later said the Kremlin respected people’s civic stances and the right of Russians to voice them in a manner agreed with the authorities, but the March protest rally on Tverskaya had been a provocation.

When asked why the national TV channels did not cover the anti-corruption rallies in Moscow and other Russian cities, Peskov said the TV channels showed what they considered “important and meaningful.”

Translated by the Russian Reader

There is actually no evidence the Russian authorities have any respect for such basic human freedoms as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, as guaranteed by the Russian Constitution and the international conventions to which Russia is a signatory.

Here are the highlights of my coverage of the recent clashes between Russian protesters, many of them young people, and Russia’s “lawlessness” enforcers, encouraged by the “legal anarchy” on display once again in President Putin’s remarks earlier today, as quoted above. TRR

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London’s Biteback Publishers have announced that this coming spring they will be publishing an autobiographical memoir, described below the fold, by Vladimir Yakunin, one of the most corrupt men in Russia.

It’s due in no small part to the large-scale, palbable treachery of Yakunin and his ilk (i.e., the current Russian elites) that the country finds itself in such a sorry state.

But Vladimir Yakunin is made of slightly different stuff than your run-of-the-mill Putin crony because a) he has been working overtime recently to launder his ill-gotten goods squeaky clean so his family members can live comfortable lives in the west; and b) for the past fifteen years he has been running an extensive active measures operation, Dialogue of Civilizations, for coopting, suborning, and otherwise neutralizing as many top-flight international academics, decision-makers, opinion leaders, and IR experts as he possibly can.

Previously focused on eponymous annual gatherings of these VIPs, under Yakunin’s generous patronage, in Rhodes, Yakunin has now transformed Dialogue of Civilizations into a so-called reseach institute, headquartered in downtown Berlin.

He was able to do this, in part, because the EU, unlike the US, has not placed him on its sanctions list. This would be inexplicable were it not for Yakunin’s furious gladhanding of god knows how many European officials and otherwise influential people over the years.

So, he is free to run amok in the EU and UK, a hardcore Russian Orthodox nationalist and “former” KGB officer (as Putin once famously said, there is no such thing as a “former” KGB officer), ultrarich and corrupt to the gills, to boot, pretending to be interested in dialoguing with movers and shakers from the remnants of the democratic world.

“A publishing house is nothing without top class authors,” Yakunin’s latest pack of enablers (useful idiots) write without apparent irony on their website.

I wonder how much Yakunin has paid them to publish the book.

Yakunin’s previous vanity press outing, 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World’s Foremost Thinkers, was published by New York University Press.

Although I don’t know how much that more subtly conceived pail of whitewash cost Yakuin (although that he did indeed pay for the book from his own pocket is frankly acknowledged by the book’s editors right up front), it did do the job of elevating the “former” KGB officer and now-former head of Russian Railways to the ranks of the world’s alleged “foremost thinkers,” as he was one of the twenty-two people with whom the editors conversed at length, alongside such leftist luminaries as Mike Davis and Immanuel Wallerstein.

In case you were wondering, I have never found a single review of the first book questioning the propriety of marshaling so many previously respectable figures and entities for the miserable task of making one of Vladimir Putin’s made men appear to be a respectable member of the world intellectual community.

Mum’s the word when Russian oligarchs and “former” KGB officers are footing the bill. Everyone wants to get paid and get along in life, right? TRR

Photo by the Russian Reader

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The Treacherous Path
By Vladimir Yakunin

In 1991, Vladimir Yakunin, a Soviet diplomat and KGB officer, returned from his posting in New York to a country that no longer existed.

The state that he had served for all his adult life had been dissolved, the values he knew abandoned. Millions of his compatriots suffered as their savings disappeared and their previously secure existences were threatened by an unholy combination of criminality, corruption and chaos. Others thrived amid the opportunities offered in the new polity, and a battle began over the direction the fledgling state should take.

While something resembling stability was won in the early 2000s, today Russia’s future remains unresolved; its governing class divided.

The Treacherous Path is Yakunin’s account of his own experiences on the front line of Russia’s implosion and eventual resurgence, and of a career – as an intelligence officer, a government minister and for ten years the CEO of Russia’s largest company – that has taken him from the furthest corners of this incomprehensibly vast and complex nation to the Kremlin’s corridors.

Tackling topics as diverse as terrorism, government intrigue and the reality of doing business in Russia, and offering unparalleled insights into the post-Soviet mindset, this is the first time that a figure with Yakunin’s background has talked so openly and frankly about his country.

Source: Biteback Publishing