August 19, 2019 – The Russian Reader

Our Common Cause
The criminal investigation of the “riot” on July 27, 2019, in Moscow is absurd. The frame-up has been concocted by Russian law enforcement authorities in plain view. All of the people charged in the case are innocent.

We demand that the authorities drop the case.

What Is the Article 212 Case?
On July 27, 2019, thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow to protest the invalidation by the Moscow City Elections Commission of the signatures of thousands of Muscovites in support of independent candidates for the Moscow City Duma, who were consequently barred from standing in the September 8 elections. The peaceful protest was marred when police and other security forces detained 1,373 protesters, an unprecedented number, and injured 77 protesters.

On July 30, 2019, the Russian Investigative Committee launched a criminal investigation of the events of July 27, 2019, under Article 212 of the Russian Criminal Code, which means the authorities want everyone to believe the peaceful protest was a “riot.”

At present, 13 people have been arrested in the case. All of them have been remanded in custody and faced three to eight years in prison if they are convicted as charged.

The Prisoners

Sergei Abanichev
25, manager
Arrested: August 3, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2 (“involvement in rioting”). According to investigators, Abanichev threw a tin can at a police officer on July 27.

212-2

Vladislav Barabanov
22, grassroots activist from Nizhny Novgorod
Arrested: August 3, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2. Barabanov is accused of “directing” protesters on Petrovsky Boulevard on July 27.

212-3

Danila Beglets
27, self-employed
Arrested: August 9, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2
Remanded in custody until October 9, 2019.

212-4

Aydar Gubaydulin
25, graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Arrested: August 9, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2

212-5

Yegor Zhukov
21, student, Higher School of Economics
Arrested: August 2, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2. Zhukov is accused of directing the crowd on August 27 by “pointing to the right.”
Moscow’s Presna District Court remanded Zhukov in custody until September 27. Currently jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina Remand Prison.

212-6

Kirill Zhukov
28, studied physics, engineering, and psychology at university
Arrested: August 4, 2019
Currently jailed in Remand Prison No. 4.

212-7

Daniil Konon
22, student, Bauman School
Arrested: August 3, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2
Currently jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina Remand Prison.

212-8

Yevgeny Kovalenko
48, railroad security guard
Arrested: August 2, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2 and Article 318
On August 5, the court remanded Kovalenko in custody for two months. He and his legal counsel will appeal the ruling at a hearing scheduled to take place at Moscow City Court, Room 327, at 11:10 a.m. on August 22.

212-9

Alexei Minyaylo
34, entrepreneur, volunteer
Arrested: August 2, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2
Currently jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina Remand Prison.

212-10

Ivan Podkopayev
25, technician
Arrested: August 2, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212
Currently jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina Remand Prison.

212-11

Samariddin Radzhabov
21, construction worker
Arrested: August 2, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212, Article 30.3 (“Preparations for a crime, and attempted crimes”), Article 318.1
Remanded in custody until September 27. Currently jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina Remand Prison.

212-12

Sergei Fomin
36, self-employed
Arrested: August 8, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2

Valery Kostenok
20, student, Moscow State University of Design and Technology
Arrested: August 12, 2019
Charges: Russian Criminal Code Article 212.2. Kostenok is accused of tossing two empty plastic bottles towards the police on July 27.
Currently jailed in Remand Prison No. 5 (Vodnik).

Our job is protecting innocent people from the lawlessness of Russia’s law enforcement agencies.

Our Team
We are a pressure group, established by activists, and friends and relatives of people who were detained by police in the aftermath of grassroots protests during July and August 2019 in order to coordinate assistance to protesters charged with felonies.

Our goal is to help the people arrested in the Article 212 Case and their families and friends, publicize the criminal prosecution of the protesters, and encourage other forms of solidarity and support.

We want to make everyone recognize there was no “riot” on the streets of Moscow on July 27, 2019.

We seek the release of everyone wrongfully prosecuted by law enforcement and the courts.

We want to see human rights honored and observed.

We are:

Armen Aramyan, graduate student at the Higher School of Economics, editor of the independent student magazine DOXA
Alexandra Krylenkova, civil rights activist
Nikita Ponarin, student at the Higher School of Economics, grassroots activist
Roman Kiselyov, civil rights activist
Maria Chernykh, co-founder, Verstak Design Bureau

And many, many others.

How Can I Help?

Sign the petition on the Article 212 Case, as launched by Novaya Gazeta on Change.org.
People in jail are cut off from the outside world. Letters are nearly their only connection to life, so you can write letters to the prisoners. If you don’t want to write and send a paper letter, you can send an electronic letter via FSIN-Pismo and RosUznik.
We are recruiting volunteers and organizing the systematic delivery of care packages to each prisoner in our chat room on Telegram.
Attend court hearings in the case: this is a really good way to support the prisoners. We will be publishing the schedule on Facebook, VK, and Telegram, as well as on this website.
If you want to join the campaign and you have ideas and the energy to support the prisoners and their loved ones, write to us on our chatbot.

What About Money?
Prisoners of the Article 212 Case is a volunteer project. We realize, however, that the people jailed in remand prisons need care packages, and their families need assistance. This costs money, sometimes at short notice, and that is why we are launching a campaign fundraiser in the coming days.

Our support of the Article 212 Case prisoners and their loved ones would be impossible without our friends from OVD Info, Moscow Helsinki Group, and Team 29.

You can contact the project team on our chatbot.

Design
Visual identity: Sergei Tidzhiev
Website: Irina Nikolaeva

Source: delo212.ru. Translated by the Russian Reader

One of the many young people in Russia who, according to Anne Applebaum, are leading the latest tiny, Moscow-centered pro-democracy movement there. The slogan on his t-shirt reads, “Fuck off.” Photo by Vadim F. Lurie, who captured this image during the “authorized” fair elections march in Moscow on August 10, 2019.

What was I just saying about leaky arguments on behalf of Russia’s courageous but incredibly tiny fair elections movement?

I always had famous Anne Applebaum pegged as a real Russophobe, not a fake one like me, someone who has constantly run afoul of the liberal and leftist Russia discourse police and been crossed off their Christmas card lists many times over. But it turns out Applebaum is such a “Russophile” she is ready to turn reality on its head by comparing the truly grassroots, popular, massive, well-organized pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong with the minuscule ragtag non-movement in Russia.

In Russia, where propaganda also attacks the West and derides democracy as chaotic and anarchic, protesters have focused very directly on the most fundamental of democratic institutions: they are demanding the right, simply, to vote for independent candidates in local elections. Just as in Hong Kong, Russian protests are being led by younger people [sic], none of whom can remember any other leader except Vladimir Putin: “I am 20 years old, and in my entire life there has not been a single day of freedom,” one of them told reporters, according to Meduza, an independent website that covers Russia. They, too, are well organized, using up-to-the-minute apps to keep in touch with one other, deploying a phalanx of lawyers and a carefully planned social media campaign [sic]. Like the young Hong Kongers, young Russians aren’t just dedicated; they are organized, thoughtful and well prepared [sic].

There are some obvious explanations for this East-West paradox. Clearly, the inhabitants of stable democracies find it hard to appreciate what they have: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” isn’t just a song lyric; it’s an expression of something fundamental about the human brain. Like wealth or health, political freedom may simply be something that people don’t value if they’ve always had it [sic].

But it may also be that the young protesters of Russia and China are simply ahead of us. We’ve gotten used to the idea that political influence flows from West to East, but are we so sure that is still true? A generation of Eastern dissidents has thought harder than we [sic] have about how to self-organize, about how to operate in a world run by secretive, kleptocratic elites who go out of their way to create distraction and apathy. Remember that they, too, are fighting regimes that seem in hock to moneyed interests and wrestling to cope with the pace of technological change. It may be that we in the West simply haven’t thought about what tactics ordinary people need [sic] to deploy to compete in a world where money is offshore, power is invisible and apathy is widespread. It may be that we need to learn from people who have.
—Anne Applebaum, “Hong Kong and Russia Protesters Fight for Democracy. The West Should Listen and Learn,” Washington Post, 16 August 2019

For the sake of rapping the sock puppet known as “the west” on the knuckles, Applebaum conveniently forgets to compare the numbers of people involved in demos and other protest actions in a city of seven million people, on one hand, and the world’s largest country, on the other.

She claims “the west,” where, she alleges, everyone has suddenly given up on democracy, can learn something from “the east.” How is that someone who has written so eloquently about the Soviet Gulag has no clue that the people spearheading the Russian non-movement, people from Moscow and Petersburg, overidentify with “the west” and regard their cities, wrongly or rightly, as European cities, not “eastern” cities?

Wrongly or rightly, and unlike Applebaum, they overidentify so strongly with the nonexistent west that they almost never show any sign they have anything to learn from “the east.” Maybe I have the wrong friends and follow the wrong people and groups on Russian social media, but I have not seen anyone talking about the lessons Russian protesters can learn from people in Hong Kong or, say, Puerto Rico. Forgive me if I don’t spell out, for the thousandth time, the darker side of the disdain many members of the Russian liberal and left intelligentsia have for “non-westerners,” especially “non-westerners” who make them look bad by fighting more fiercely and in much greater numbers for their freedom.

It is only possible to learn a real lesson when our teacher has all her facts straight. Unfortunately, when it comes to Russia and its “western” discourse police officers, including Applebaum, complexity, subtlety, and a basic grasp of facts go straight out the window. For reasons I have never been able to fathom, normally decent editors fall asleep at the wheel when their reporters and op-ed contributors write about Russia, especially when they have the cachet of someone like Applebaum.

It seemingly never occurs to anyone in “the west” or “the east” (i.e., Russia) that this bizarre mixture of total indifference, willful ignorance masked as insider knowledge, and desperate cheerleading does nothing for the minority of people in Russia who have the courage to confront their country’s criminal regime. // TRR

Thanks to Boycott Russia Today for the heads-up and Vadim F. Lurie for the fabulous photograph.

Day: August 19, 2019

Prisoners of the Article 212 Case

I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About, But I’m Famous, So It Doesn’t Matter