The homepage of Sberbank of Russia’s online banking service looks reassuring at first glance, although a warning in the bottom right-hand corner reads, “Safety rules: If you are asked to enter your Sberbank Online password to cancel a transaction, don’t do it. These are con men.” Screenshot by the Russian Reader
1. On January 25, the long-forgotten and abandoned Registry of Information Distributors or the ORI, a list of websites obliged to supply information about the activities and correspondence of their users to the FSB via SORM, suddenly added a few sites. From the perspective of the laws governing the ORI, the new additions were odd, ranging from stihi.ru, a poetry website, to such major services as Sberbank Online.
2. On January 29, Kommersant newspaper published a story, corroborated by many other media outlets, about a new, large-scale cyber confidence scheme targeting Sberbank clients. The criminals telephone clients from what appears to be Sberbank’s number (an easy enough spoof). They mislead them by providing them with loads of detailed information about their accounts, including their correct current balance. This last bit would very much appear to be a leak from Sberbank Online or an intercept of the SMS messages the banks sends to its clients.
Is it a coincidence?
Maybe.
But it’s definitely a vital occasion to reflect on the actual consequences of all the laws on internet surveillance. Not about the virtual fight against virtual terrorism, but the very real transfer of huge amounts of sensitive data to the FSB, whose officers are corrupt and subject to absolutely no oversight.
FSB and Russian Interior Ministry Oppose Criminalizing Torture Mediazona
January 29, 2019
The FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) and Russian Interior Ministry have opposed amending the Russian Criminal Code to define torture as a discrete instance of official criminal misconduct, arguing it would be “superfluous,” according to the security service’s published response to a recommendation made by the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.
According to the FSB, torture was covered by Russian Criminal Code Articles 117.2.d (“maltreatment involving torture”) and 286.3.a (“abuse of authority involving torture”).
The Interior Ministry voiced a similar opinion, listing the articles of the Criminal Code that, in its opinion, “fully” treat actions meeting the definition of torture.
The FSB has also opposed establishing a single database of detainees that would enable loved ones of criminal suspects and people charged with crimes, as well as lawyers and members of the Public Monitoring Commissions, to discover their whereabouts.
The FSB argued this would enable people not involved in criminal investigations but who had a stake in their outcome, including criminal accomplices, to access information. It noted a database of this sort could threaten national security when cases of treason and espionage were investigated.
In September 2018, the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights held a special sixty-fourth session dealing with observation of the principles of openness and legality in penal institutions.
The UN Committee against Torture has on several occasions recommended that Russia explicitly criminalize torture, but Russian authorities have ignored the recommendations, citing the articles in the Russian Criminal Code dealing with “maltreatment.”
The nonstop international hasbara hoedown Quoragets all the best “specialists” to answer its readers’ pressing questions.
When my personal favorite Quora hasbarista, “Dima Vorobiev, I worked in Soviet propaganda,” is unable to make the shaky, miserable, mean, destructive Putin regime look indestructible and infallible, “Ha Dang, Military Specialist at United Nations Space Command (2016-present” picks up the slack.
Because people read it. This particular post garnered 60,400 views for “Ha Dang, Military Specialist.” That’s only 22,000 or so fewer views than the Russian Reader got all last year, even though I never publish hasbara and fake news, much less the “expert” opinions of self-avowed propagandists and video game enthusiasts.
This is the brave new world Alex Jones, Donald Trump, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Mark Zuckerberg, and other world-historical creeps have bestowed on us.
Obviously, I do. As a propaganda veteran, I believe that hardly anything people tell each other, is ever unbiased. Everything is propaganda—you just have to accept that, like death and taxes.
What is my bias? I’m the wrong person to ask: I don’t know. I live inside my own bias. Don’t ask fish what water feels like. It’s got no idea, it just swims in there.
The United Nations Space Command (UNSC) is the military, exploratory, and scientific agency of the Unified Earth Government which acted as the emergency governing body of the human race at large for a time. The UNSC was formed in the 22nd century, a time when remnants of old cultural ideologies clashed for supremacy in the Sol System. The UNSC served mainly as overseer of United Nations military operations in space. After initiating massive militarization propaganda throughout its off-world colonies, through the UNSC, the UN defeated Frieden and Koslovic insurgent forces in a conflict known as the Interplanetary War, which consisted of several side-battles that took place on Mars, the Jovian Moons and the South American rainforests. Although the Interplanetary War brought a great deal of suffering to both the colonial population and the residents of Earth, it also united most of humanity’s military forces by the end of the 22nd century.
This is one of the reasons I have nearly given up on the idea that this website has much to contribute to a conversation that is anything but intelligible. The masses (or, at least, a worryingly large number of people) want racist, fascist, apocalyptic, pro-Putinist fairy tales for breakfast, dinner, and supper, not the complicated but ultimately discoverable truth. {TRR}
The inspiring Petersburg artist and political activist Yelena Osipova has drawn this graffiti to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.
The piece is dedicated to her late friend Lenina Nikitina, another wonderful artist, who lived in the building on whose walls Osipova drew her work.
Nikitina lost her entire family during the Siege, which lasted nearly 900 days, from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944.
Lenina Nikitina, Cold Bath. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of ArtGuide and the Museum of Nonconformist Art, St. Petersburg
As many as a million civilians are believe to have died during the Siege.
The other evening, an arts program on one of the regional German channels broadcast a segment about Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich’s Blokadnaya kniga (Book of the Siege), which has recently been translated into German by Helmut Ettinger and Ruprecht Willnow, and published as Blockadebuch: Leningrad 1941–1944.
If you don’t have time to read Blokadnaya kniga or any of the other hundreds of books about the Siege, please watch Jessica Gorter’s stunning 2011 documentary film 900 Days. {TRR}
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The Siege of Leningrad Ended 75 Years Ago Today: Here Are Nine Films and Books about the Siege Worth Watching and Reading
Anton Dolin and Galina Yuzefovich Meduza
January 27, 2019
[…]
Once There Was a Girl
Viktor Eismont, 1944
Eismont began shooting this unique picture while the Siege was still underway. It premiered a year to the day after the Siege was lifted. The Siege is shown through the eyes of two children, five-year-old Katenka and seven-year-old Nastenka. Natalya Zashchipina, who played Katenka, would go on to star in children’s films such as The Elephant and the Rope and First-Grader in the late 1940s, while Nina Ivanova, who played Nastenka, would star in Spring on Zarechnaya Street in 1956.
Baltic Skies
Vladimir Vengerov, 1960
The best film about wartime Leningrad and Leningrad during the Siege, when Baltic Skies premiered, it outraged Nikolai Chukovsky, whose novel inspired the film and who is credited as the screenwriter. The movies features a star-studded cast, including Pyotr Glevov, Mikhail Ulyanov, Mikhail Kozakov, and Rolan Bykov. The film’s young lovers were played by Oleg Borisov and Liudmila Gurchenko, who would later act in Alexei German’s war films. German considered Vengerov one of his teachers.
We Looked Death in the Face
Naum Birman, 1980
A picture about the founding of the Frontline Youth Ensemble. In one of his final roles, Oleg Dahl played the former choreographer. The film features poems by Olga Bergholz and music by Dmitri Shostakovich.
A documentary film consisting of footage shot by cameramen during the Siege, it features rare scenes, including the execution of Germans. Loznitsa added a soundtrack to the film, bringing viewers closer to the events.
Less a film and more an impressive project by Sokurov, We Read the Book of the Blockade shows Petersburgers both famous and unknown reading aloud Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich’s book, a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the Siege. The readers include actors Vladimir Retsepter and Leonid Mozgovoi, and Sokurov himself.
Celebration
Alexei Krasovsky, 2019
[Posted on January 2, 2019, by Alexei Krasovsky. “Attention! This film was made without state financing or grants. The filmmakers paid for its production themselves. Please do not show Celebration without listing the information about how you can donate money to us. It is the only we can cover the costs of this film and start working on a new one. Thank you.
Don’t forget to mark your contribution as a “donation” so that we’ll have any easier time making films in the future.
Happy New Year!
Screenwriter and director: Alexei Krasovsky
Cinematographer: Sergei Astakhov
Starring: Alyona Babenko, Yan Tsapnik, Timofei Tribuntsev, Anfisa Chernykh, Pavel Tabakov, and Asya Chistyakov
Executive producer: Yuliya Krishtofovich
Art director: Yevdokia Zamakhina
Sound: Nelly Ivanovna and Anastasia Anosova
Assistant director: Zhanna Boykova
Editing: Vladimir Zimin and Alexei Krasovsky
The song ‘Field, O My Field’ was written by Iosif Kovner in 1937 and first recorded in 1941.”]
Filmmaker Alexei Krasovsky shot this controversial, intimate, tragicomic film at his own expense and uploaded it to YouTube during the New Year holidays. The picture deals with the privileged classes during the Siege and contains transparent illusions to the present. Starring Alyona Babenko, Yan Tsapnik, and Pavel Tabakov.
Polina Barskova, Zhivye kartiny [Living pictures], St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2014
Written by poet and academic Polina Barskova, this book is a miscellany of strange, heterogeneous, and genre-bending texts (several stories and essays on the verge of poetry, capped off with a short, semi-absurd play) that interweave the author’s own experiences as a researcher and human being with the real stories of people during the Siege.
Significant historical figures who survived the Siege (poet and literary scholar Dmitry Maximov, writer Vitaly Bianchi, playwright Yevgeny Schwartz) meet on the the pages of Living Pictures with other, unknown shades, such as the art historian Totya and the artist Moses, who made the mistake of falling for each other on the eve of the war, or six-year-old Katya, who plays a gloomy game of bouts-rimés with her mother, composing a poem about people stricken by hunger-induced dystrophy. The famous, the nameless, Barskova’s other characters, and Barskova, some of whom did not experience the Siege themselves, ring the changes on the book’s main point, as voiced by one of the characters: the Siege was a peculiar civilization with all the qualities of other human communities. This civilization did not disappear without a trace. It has germinated anew in subsequent generations, who continue to feel its icy breath.
“The ethic of sympathy demands the gaze not linger on mournful scenes of human agony,” writes historian Sergey Yarov in his book, seemingly ruthlessly violating this ethic. Instead of charitably averting his gaze from the most horrific aspects of the Siege of Leningrad, Yarov peruses as keenly and closely as possible theft and deception, monstrous, incurable physical deformities and people’s aversion to them, assaults on children (it was easier to take food from them since they were weaker), indifference to the suffering and deaths of other people, willingness to endure any humiliation, the collapse of community, and cannibalism.
As he plunges into the abyss of diaries, memories, and official records, uncovering truly unimaginable things, Yarov nevertheless hits upon an impeccable tone for discussing them, managing to maintain in each episode the perfect balance between scholarly scrupulousness and supreme humaneness.
Olga Lavrentieva, Survilo, St. Petersburg: Boomkniga, 2019
This graphic novel by the young artist Olga Lavrentieva is a laconic, black-and-white account of the life of her grandmother, Valentina Survilo. Survilo’s happy Leningrad childhood ended in 1937 with her father’s arrest. She was exiled to a village in Bashkiria, where her mother died, before making a long-awaited return to her beloved Leningrad. This was followed by the most important and terrible chapter in her biography, the Siege, which the still very young Survilo endured in a prison hospital, the only place willing to employ the daughter of an “enemy of the people.”
The relentless hunger, cold, bombings and artillery attacks, treachery of friends, and rare, miraculous instances of kindness left a deep wound in Survilo’s heart, causing her to suffer nightmares and be constantly anxious about family members during the relatively prosperous postwar years. Lavrentiev uses the rather typically tragic story of one Leningrad woman as a lens through which she and her readers can look at the history of her hometown and the entire country.
Survilo will be published in March 2019.
Thanks to Giuliano Vivaldi for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader. I have replaced the trailers used in the original article with full-length public-access videos of the films themselves (except for Sergei Loznitsa’s Blockade, which can and should be viewed on MUBI). Please take note of filmmaker Alexei Krasovsky’s appeal for donations. If you watch Celebration, please consider making a donation to him and his crew via Sberbank, PayPal, Yandex Money or Etherium.
“The titan beetle (Titanus giganteus) is a neotropical longhorn beetle, the sole species in the genus Titanus, and one of the largest known beetles. […] The short, curved and sharp mandibles are known to snap pencils in half and cut into human flesh. […] The adults defend themselves by hissing in warning and biting, and have sharp spines, as well as strong jaws.” Source: Wikipedia. Photo courtesy of Fluencia
Russian Government Approves Bills to Punish Fake News and “Flagrant Disrespect for the State” on the Internet Mediazona
January 24, 2019
The Russian government has approved a bill criminalizing “flagrant disrespect for the state on the internet,” as well as stipulating fines for disseminating fake news, reports Interfax, which quotes Pavel Krasheninnikov, chair of the State Duma’s state building and legislation committee.
According to Krasheninnikov, the government’s commentary on the two law bills, which his committee had been waiting for, arrived tonight. Both reviews were positive.
Yesterday, the Prosecutor General’s Office sent the Duma a positive comment on the law bills, although previously it had refused to approve them.
In December 2018, MPs from the United Russia party tabled a law bill that would amend Article 20.1 of the Administrative Offenses Code (petty misconduct) by criminalizing the dissemination on the internet of information that “expresses in indecent form” a flagrant disrespect for society, the state, state symbols, and state bodies.
The law bill stipulates punishing violators with fines of up to 5,000 rubles or fifteen days in jail.
In addition, the bill’s drafters propose fines between 30,000 rubles and a million rubles for publishing false information.
A rural post office, perhaps abandoned, in Novgorod Region. Photo courtesy of Novgorod.ru
Medical Care in Novgorod Region to Be Provided by Postmen Novgorod.ru
January 16, 2019
Yesterday, January 15, a meeting of the supervisory board of the Agency of Strategic Initiatives for Promoting New Projects (ASI) took place in Moscow. Novgorod Region Governor Andrei Nikitin attended the meeting, which recapped the work done by the ASI in 2018.
The meeting was chaired by President Vladimir Putin.
“The agency has developed a unique method for solving problems. Most import, it has brought together an entire community of people capable of generating and promoting positive change,” said Putin.
Attendees also discusses the new projects the ASI plans to implement in 2019–2021. They include support for urban communities and their leaders, creating a digital platform for handling appeals and complaints by entrepreneurs, and systematic measures for developing technological entrepreneurship in Russia.
One of the projects presented at the meeting has been underway in Novgorod Region’s Poddorye District. As part of a cooperation agreement between the regional health ministry and the Russian Post, postal carriers have undergone training and will now act as assistant paramedics.
While delivering the mail, they will perform primary medical diagnoses and communicate this information to paramedics. They will be able to measure blood pressure, check blood sugar levels, and perform emergency tests.
According to Nikolai Podguzov, director general of the Russian Post, around seven hundred letter carriers have undergone the training.
Thanks to Sergei Damberg for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader
Petersburgers marching along the former Robespierre Embankment towards Mikhail Shemyakin’s Monument to Victims of Political Repression, January 19, 2019. Photo by Anatoly Trofimov. Courtesy of the Russian Socialist Movement
Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) Facebook
January 19, 2019
Petersburg Stands Against Torture and Crackdowns
A rally against torture and crackdowns took place on the day the murdered antifascists Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer, and Anastasia Baburova, a journalist, are commemorated. Around 300 people gathered on the boulevard near Chernyshevskaya subway station. Their ranks included Sergei Mokhnatkin, the recently released political prisoner, activists from the leftist and democratic movements, and human rights defenders. The marchers held red carnations, and many of them had put sticker denouncing torture, crackdown, and fascism on their clothes. The January 19 march had not been authorized by Petersburg city hall, and so numerous policemen and plainclothes officers from Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E”) joined the marchers at the gathering point. At two o’clock, the marchers set out for the Monument to Victims of Political Repression on the Voskresenskaya Embankment. The police refrained from obstructing the march. The protesters laid flowers at the base of Mikhail Shemyakin’s sculptures of two sphinxes, situated directly opposite the old Crosses Prison. Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) activist Ivan Ovsyannikov spoke about the frame-up known as the Network case, the torture employed by officers of the Russian Interior Ministry and the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, and Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and other victims of neo-Nazi terrorism in Russia. The march ended without arrests.
“Anastasia Baburova. #Women’s History Night,” Central Petersburg, May 22, 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
Marchers Detained at Markelov and Baburova Memorial Event in Moscow Mediazona
January 19, 2019
Police have detained people attending a march in Moscow marking the tenth anniversary of the murders of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasia Baburova, Kommersant reporter Alexander Chernykh has reported on his Telegram channel.
According to Chernykh, police have detained journalist Igor Yasin, who was carrying a rainbow-colored flag, and five other people. The reasons for their arrests are unknown. The march has been halted.
OVD Info has reported that four people have been detained. Aside from Yasin, the detainees include Nikolai Kretov, Dmitry Borisenko, and Mikhail Komrakov.
Komrakov told OVD Info that when he was detained, a policeman said to him, “If it were up to me, I would kill you.”
According to Kretov, policemen hit him after he was put in a paddy wagon.
The Markelov and Baburova memorial march began at two o’clock on Tverskaya Boulevard and was scheduled to end with the laying of flowers at the spot where they were murdered on Prechistenka Street.
On January 19, 2009, Nikita Tikhonov, a member of the Russian neo-Nazi organization BORN (Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists), shot and killed Markelov and Baburova in downtown Moscow in broad daylight. Tikhonov and his accomplice Yevgenia Khasis were subsequently convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment and eighteen years in prison, respectively.
Last night, police investigators in Pskov detained Liya Milushkina, Open Russia’s coordinator for Pskov, and her husband, Artyom Milushkin, an activist with another political movement.
The young couple, parents of two small children, have been charged with a very serious crime: wholesale drug dealing.
Artyom and Liya are well known in Pskov as perennial organizers and participants of political protests. Liya was also involved in animal rights protection.
We know that when the Milushkins were brutally detained before a protest on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, police officers threatened to plant narcotics on them.
During the incident, the Milushkins were pulled over and dragged from their car as their children watched.
This background and the ways of the Russian police have forced us to take this case extremely seriously.
Their interrogations began at 12:00 p.m. Lawyers from Open Russia Human Rights were present.
Viktor and Yuli, 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m., January 17, Room 33, Petersburg City Court.
I have been getting into the “New Year’s mood” only now. What I mean is that is only now I have realized it will soon be a year since news a friend had been detained by the cops marked the start of a new life that has been going on in my head nonstop since then: care packages, remand prison, torture, parcels, remand prison, transfers, letters, remand prison, court hearings, remand prison.
I have been corresponding with nearly all the suspects in the so-called Network case. I have no idea how they manage to keep fighting, making jokes, and drawing goofy pictures.
The main question I tried out on myself during the past year was how you can endure having to support a loved one who is in jail by yourself or even as a part of a single family.
To put it bluntly, how do you make sure he has food to eat, clothes to wear, books to read, and medical care?
My opinion is that you cannot do it, no way, no how. There are a lot more than one of us trying to take care of the Network suspects, but there are so many things to do, an endless list of daily chores.
I am amazed my job still puts up with it.
The approach of this “new year” makes me really sad.
Actually, this has been my attempt to write a post about the upcoming custody extension hearings of Viktor Filinkov and Yuli Boyarshinov.
Since a “new year” in remand prison is just around the corner for them, the Petersburg City Court will decide whether extend their police custody.
There is a glass-enclosed statue of Themis at the city court. There is also a chance we won’t be herded into the basement, as happened during their last hearing at the Dzerzhinsky District Court. Maybe we will even be permitted to wave at the guys as they are marched past us by the guards and bailiffs.
Anyone who has the time and energy should come to the hearings. It would be great if there were tons of us there, so the guys could see us and have cause to rejoice. It would also be great if we were admitted into the courtroom before the hearing was once again declared closed to the public.
Such are the paltry and huge hopes you foster.
Viktor, Yuli and us, 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m., January 17, Room 33, Petersburg City Court.
January 19 is the tenth anniversary of the murders of Anastasia Baburova and Stanislav Markelov. The authorities in Petersburg have refused to authorize any rallies or marches on the occasion. In the afternoon, people will lay flowers in their memory at Mikhail Shemyakin’s sphinxes, the monument to victims of political terror directly across the Neva River from the old Crosses prison. (Why go there all of sudden? I have no could.)
In the evening, an exhibition dealing with both the Network case, and Baburova and Markelov opens at seven o’clock at Open Space. It will feature prison drawings and poems, pieces by artists who are in solidarity with the Network suspects, and a group reading of antifascist texts, as well as of letters sent by the guys from remand prison.
You should come to that, too.
This was how Dmitry Pchelintsev signed his final letter of 2018 to me: “Here’s wishing you a good 2019, the last episode of the season.”
My thanks to Ms. Kulakova for her permission to translate and publish this text here.
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Viktor Filinkov. Photo by Jenya Kulakova. Courtesy of Mediazona
Court Extends Police Custody of Penza Case Suspects Viktor Filinkov and Yuli Boyarshinov Mediazona
January 17, 2018
St. Petersburg City Court extended the police custody of Viktor Filinkov, accused of involvement in the so-called terrorist community known as the Network, reports the Petersburg Judicial Press Service.
During the hearing, the case investigator argued Filinkov’s police custody should be extended because he needed to review the final eight volumes of the seventeen-volume case file. Besides, the investigator noted, Filinkov had refused to give testimony in the case and admit his guilt.
Filinkov’s defense attorney asked the judge to put him under house arrest, but, allegedly, had failed to file papers confirming this would be possible. The defense attorney also told the that his client was a law-abiding national of another country [Kazakhstan] who would be willing to give testimony, but not to investigators who had tortured him.
Later the same day, St. Petersburg City Court extended the police custody of another suspect in the Penza Case, Yuli Boyarshinov, for two months.
Earlier in the week, a court in Penza concurred with similar arguments made by the investigator there and extended the police custody of the other suspects in the case until April 18.
Translated by the Russian Reader
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What can you do to support the Penza and Petersburg antifascists and anarchists who have been tortured and imprisoned by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)?
If you are in London or can get to London on January 19, join the solidarity demo at the Cable Street Mural at 2 p.m. The demonstration is supported by Anarchist Communist Group, Anarchist Federation, Brighton Antifascists, Bristol Anti-Fascists, Brazilian Women against Fascism, Feminist Fightback, London Antifascists, London Anarchist Black Cross, North London Anti-Fascists, Plan C LDN, RS21, and Labour Briefing. Please email london19jan(at)riseup.net to add your organization to the list of supporters. More information about the Cable Street Mural and its location can be found on its Facebook page.
Donate money to the Anarchist Black Cross via PayPal (abc-msk@riseup.net). Make sure to specify your donation is earmarked for “Rupression.”
Spread the word about the Network Case aka the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case. You can find more information about the case and in-depth articles translated into English on this website (see below), rupression.com, and openDemocracyRussia.
Organize solidarity events where you live to raise money and publicize the plight of the tortured Penza and Petersburg antifascists. Go to the website It’s Going Down to find printable posters and flyers you can download. You can also read more about the case there.
If you have the time and means to design, produce, and sell solidarity merchandise, please write to rupression@protonmail.com.
Write letters and postcards to the prisoners. Letters and postcards must be written in Russian or translated into Russian. You can find the addresses of the prisoners here.
Design a solidarity postcard that can be printed and used by others to send messages of support to the prisoners. Send your ideas to rupression@protonmail.com.
Write letters of support to the prisoners’ loved ones via rupression@protonmail.com.
Translate the articles and information at rupression.com and this website into languages other than Russian and English, and publish your translations on social media and your own websites and blogs.
If you know someone famous, ask them to record a solidarity video, write an op-ed piece for a mainstream newspaper or write letters to the prisoners.
If you know someone who is a print, internet, TV or radio journalist, encourage them to write an article or broadcast a report about the case. Write to rupression@protonmail.com or the email listed on this website, and we will be happy to arrange interviews and provide additional information.
It is extremely important this case break into the mainstream media both in Russia and abroad. Despite their apparent brashness, the FSB and their ilk do not like publicity. The more publicity the case receives, the safer our comrades will be in remand prison from violence at the hands of prison stooges and torture at the hands of the FSB, and the more likely the Russian authorities will be to drop the case altogether or release the defendants for time served if the case ever does go to trial.
Why? Because the case is a complete frame-up, based on testimony obtained under torture and mental duress. When the complaints filed by the accused reach the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and are examined by actual judges, the Russian government will again be forced to pay heavy fines for its cruel mockery of justice.
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If you have not been following the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case and other recent cases involving frame-ups, torture, and violent intimidation by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and other arms of the Russian security state, read and share the articles the Russian Reader has posted on these subjects.
The homepage of Sberbank of Russia’s online banking service looks reassuring at first glance, although a warning in the bottom right-hand corner reads, “Safety rules: If you are asked to enter your Sberbank Online password to cancel a transaction, don’t do it. These are con men.” Screenshot by the Russian Reader
Lenina Nikitina, Cold Bath. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of 
A rural post office, perhaps abandoned, in Novgorod Region. Photo courtesy of Novgorod.ru
Petersburgers marching along the former Robespierre Embankment towards Mikhail Shemyakin’s Monument to Victims of Political Repression, January 19, 2019. Photo by Anatoly Trofimov. Courtesy of the Russian Socialist Movement
“Anastasia Baburova. #Women’s History Night,” Central Petersburg, May 22, 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader
Liya and Artyom Milushkin. Photo courtesy of Open Russia
“January 17: Room 33, City Court. Viktor, 12:00 p.m., Yuli, 2:00 p.m. January 19: Open Space. Exhibition, reading, 7:00 p.m.” Image courtesy of Jenya Kulakova
Viktor Filinkov. Photo by Jenya Kulakova. Courtesy of Mediazona
The Russian Reader 