Day: November 17, 2019

Riot Cops Raid Ivan Khutorskoi Memorial Tournament in Moscow

khutorskoi

Riot Police in Moscow Disrupt Ivan Khutorskoi Memorial Tournament: Fifty People Detained
Radio Svoboda
November 17, 2019

Law enforcement officers in Moscow have disrupted a martial arts tournament organized by antifa activists in memory of Ivan Khutorskoi, one of the antifa movement’s leaders.

Eyewitnesses report that two buses loaded with riot police drove up to the tournament venue. The police officers, who wore masks, burst into the facility and forced all the event’s participants and guests to line up against the wall face-first after confiscating their mobile phones. The detainees were then transported in several groups to police precincts in the Sokol, Airport, and Khoroshovo districts of Moscow.

At one of the precincts, the antifascists were told they had been detained after a particular BOLO was issued. Currently, police are photographing their internal passports and checking their names in the Interior Ministry database. In total, around fifty people have been detained.

Ivan Khutorskoi, a leader of the antifa movement, was murdered in the stairwell of his own apartment building in Moscow on November 16, 2009. Police investigators believe he was killed by Alexei Korshunov, a member of BORN (Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists), which was responsible for a dozen high-profile murders.

After the murder, Korshunov fled to Zaporozhye, where he died in September 2011. Local authorities allege that he blew himself up accidentally during a morning jog with a grenade he carried with him.

Translated by the Russian Reader

A “Political Hit Job” in Petersburg

vishnevskyBoris Vishnevsky. Photo courtesy of Deutsche Welle

Petersburg City Councilman Boris Vishnevsky Accuses Prigozhin Media of Slander
Deutsche Welle
November 14, 2019

On Friday, November 14, Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko Party deputy in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, filed a complaint with the Primorsky District Internal Affairs Department, requesting it open a criminal slander investigation into articles published by Patriot media holding company, whose board of trustees is headed by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, as reported by Vishnevsky himself on his Facebook page.

Novaya Gazeta has reported that, beginning on November 7, Patriot’s media outlets have been running stories claiming that, in his capacity as a professor at the Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University (RGPU), Vishnevsky had sexually harassed first-year female students.

The basis of the charges is, allegedly, an email from a young woman named Kristina, who identified herself as an RGPU alumna and claimed Vishensky harassed her and other female first-year students in 2014.

On November 12, the national TV channel Rossiya 24 told viewers there had been “widespread complaints” against Vishnevsky, and students had been holding solo pickets against him outside the Legislative Assembly.

Meanwhile, RGPU has issued a press release. It stated there were no first-year students named Kristina enrolled at the university in 2014, Vishnevsky had never taught courses to first-year students there, and no allegations of sexual harassment had ever been made against him.

Vishnevsky has called the scandal an obvious “political hit job.”

“This is the regime’s revenge for my political activities and political stance, for exposing fraud involving the city budget and utilities rates, for fighting to save the city, for defending political prisoners, and for Yabloko’s victories in the municipal district council elections in the Central District,” he wrote.

Translated by the Russian Reader