Tag: anti-Putin protests

Mercy

Aung San Suu Kyi will appear in court virtually today for a hearing, postponed after Myanmar’s military junta blocked mobile-data networks. Ms Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader until she was deposed in last month’s coup, faces at least five charges, including corruption. They are probably designed to disqualify her from the election promised by the junta after the year-long state of emergency it declared ends. The real emergency is in the streets. Many Burmese have heeded the call to arms of Myanmar’s parallel government, formed by members of Ms Suu Kyi’s party elected to the parliament last November. Protesters defend their barricades with slingshots and Molotov cocktails. Soldiers respond by dragooning neighbours into dismantling them, while rampaging through cities, kidnapping and shooting protesters and non-protesters alike. Over 260 Burmese have been killed. Businesses were asked to join a silent strike today, after a seven-year-old girl was shot dead in her home in Mandalay yesterday.

Source: The Economist Espresso, 24 March 2021

Crooks lay in a weighted state waiting for the dead assassin while the rust pure powder puffs, a shimmering opaque red. Papers spread, no-one driving, we hurled direct ahead, the windows dark-green tinted, the hearse a taxi instead. Snow storms forecast imminently in areas Dogger, Viking, Moray, Forth, and Orkney. Keeping cover in denuded scrub, the school destroyed raised the club, panic spreading with threat of fire. Crowding beneath a layer of foam, refugees intertwined, alone. Within the institution walls, in pastel blue, clinical white, slashed red lipsticked, mercy nurse tonight. Seems like dark grey stockings in the raking torchlight with a four a.m. stubble, a midnight transvestite.

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On Tuesday, the Kuibyshev District Court of St. Petersburg handed down the first sentence to a participant of the unsanctioned protest action on January 23.

Protesters then gathered, among other places, on Nevsky Prospekt. Petersburg resident Andrei Lomov was found guilty of pushing Russian National Guardsmen during an attempt to break through a police cordon.

The court took into account the extenuating circumstances (Lomov has seven children) and did not satisfy the state prosecutor’s request to sentence the Petersburger to three years in a penal colony, instead ordering the protest rally participant to serve two years of probation.

Source: Delovoi Peterburg

Спустя неделю, 31 января, Невский и прилегающие улицы оградили так, что участники митинга не могли подобраться к главной городской магистрали. Зато они дошли до Мариинского дворца. A week later, on January 31, Nevsky and the surrounding streets were fenced off so that protesters could not get close to the city’s main thoroughfare. But they did get as far as the Mariinsky Palace. Photo: Sergey Yermokhin/Delovoi Peterburg

Translated by the Russian Reader. The emphasis is mine.

Special Detention Center Days

Special Detention Center Days: How the Security Forces Have Tried to Intimidate Protesters
Sonya Groysman
Proekt
February 15, 2021

After three “unauthorized” protest actions in support of Alexei Navalny (January 23 and 31, and February 2), more than a thousand people were sentenced to serve time in jail: this is a record for [post-Soviet] Russia. In this video, protesters who have already been released tell us how their days in police departments and special detention centers went. Do they now regret having been involved in the protests? Most importantly, were the authorities able to intimidate them?

24 mins, 19 seconds. In Russian, with Russian subtitles

At the 21:00 mark, an unidentified young man, just released from a special detention center, says the following on camera:

“Russia is definitely going to be free. […] They didn’t intimidate anyone in the slightest [by arresting and jailing them]. On the contrary, folks banded together even more. [The authorities] only incited more hatred. […] We are young, after all, and time is on our side. It’s only a question of time. We’ll even the score.”

Translated by the Russian Reader

The City of St. Peter the Apostle

MBKh Media Northwest
Facebook
February 12, 2021

On Palace Square, accompanied by an orchestra, Vyacheslav Makarov, chair of the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly, presented letters of thanks and certificates of honor to the soldiers and officers of the Special Police Regiment who worked at the pro-Navalny protest rallies. This news was reported on the parliament’s website.

“Your faithfulness to the call of duty and exemplary attitude to the performance of your duties vouchsafes the defense of law and order, and the protection of the lives and safety of our citizens. You have been entrusted with the huge responsibility of being the guardians of our beloved city of St. Peter the Apostle,” Makarov said.

According to OVD Info, the security forces detained 575 people at the protest rally on January 23 in St. Petersburg, and 1,336 people at the rally on January 31.

Photos courtesy of the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly’s website. Thanks to Nancy Enskaya for the link. Translated by the Russian Reader

Halfway to Ashgabat

Blue dogs have been spotted on the road near the city of Dzerzhinsk. Photo: Twitter/Moscow Times

Kirill Martynov
Facebook
February 12, 2021

Here are two news items from the last few days.

Security forces officers were sent to the home of [Anastasia Proskurina], a Novosibirsk research institute employee who had told Putin [on February 8] about the low salaries she and her colleagues received to find out who had “coached” her.

[Natalia Yolgina], a schoolteacher who teaches in the class attended by the Sevastopol governor’s son complained about her salary: she was fired and questioned by “anti-extremism” police.

The ridiculous desire of officials and members of parliament to smash the “flashlight protests” on February 14 obscures much more important processes underway in the country.

After federal authorities outright declared Navalny a foreign spy and, without hesitation, tried him for thought crimes, local authorities were given carte blanche to search for spies throughout the country.

If you think that your salary is low and you dare to state your unfounded suspicions in public, then it is quite obvious that you work for NATO. Basically, any problem in the country is directly explained by foreign interference and requires intervention of the competent authorities. For example, if, from your point of view, there is a pothole in the road near your house, then this is cause for a GRU operation to unmask you.

This is the most ambitious project for ultra-politicizing garden-variety discontent in Russia’s modern history. Now it won’t be possible even to sneeze without provoking suspicious of “foreign interference” and triggering an expensive criminal investigation.

They say that similar things happen in Turkmenistan and North Korea, where if you wipe your butt with a piece of newspaper containing an image of the great leader, you are declared a traitor to the state, despite the fact that there is no toilet paper at all, just as there are no newspapers not emblazoned with the great leader’s face.

For now, however, it seems to me that we will end up halfway to Ashgabat. It is impossible to bamboozle a large country utterly and at length. If a small salary makes you a foreign spy, then all the “spies” should become friends.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Russian Media Ordered To Delete Reports On Planned ‘Flashlight’ Protest
RFE/RL Russian Service
February 12, 2021

MOSCOW — Russia’s federal media regulator has ordered media outlets, including RFE/RL’s Russian Service and Current Time TV, to delete all reports about a planned mobile-phone “flashlight” protest against the jailing of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.

The official order from Roskomnadzor was received by media groups on February 12. It says Russian authorities consider any reporting about the planned flashlight protest to be a call for people to take part in an unsanctioned public demonstration and mass disorder.

Roskomnadzor’s order also was sent to online newspapers Meduza and Open Media, and the TV-2 news agency in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

Navalny’s team in Tomsk said they also were warned by the city prosecutor’s office on February 12 that they could be held liable for staging an unsanctioned protest.

Navalny’s team has called on people across Russia to switch on their mobile-phone flashlights for 15 minutes beginning at 8 p.m. on February 14 — shining the light into the sky from courtyards and posting pictures of the protest on social media.

Leonid Volkov, director of Navalny’s network of teams across Russia, announced the change of tactics on February 9 in response to police crackdowns against mass street demonstrations that have led to tens of thousands of arrests across Russia.

The “flashlight” protest is a tactic similar to what demonstrators have been doing in neighboring Belarus following brutal police crackdowns targeting rallies against authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

Volkov says it is a nonviolent way for Russians to show the extent of outrage across the country over Navalny’s treatment without subjecting themselves to arrests and police abuse.

The 44-year-old Navalny, a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on January 17 after returning to Russia from Germany where he had been treated for a nerve-agent poisoning he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin denies it had any role in the poison attack against Navalny.

Navalny’s detention sparked outrage across the country and much of the West, with tens of thousands of Russians taking part in street rallies on January 23 and 31.

Police cracked down harshly on the demonstrations, putting many of Navalny’s political allies behind bars and detaining thousands more — sometimes violently — as they gathered on the streets.

A Russian court on February 2 ruled Navalny was guilty of violating the terms of his suspended sentence relating to an embezzlement case that he has called politically motivated.

The court converted the sentence to 3 1/2 years in prison. Given credit for time already spent in detention, the court said Navalny must serve another 2 years and 8 months behind bars.

That prompted fresh street protests across the country. But Volkov called for a pause in street rallies until the spring — saying weekly demonstrations would only result in more mass arrests.

Authorities have criticized Volkov’s call for flashlight protests.

Kremlin-friendly political observer Aleksei Martynov accused Navalny’s team of stealing the idea from commemorations of Soviet war veterans.

Blockade

“See the rally? It’s there.” How downtown Petersburg was cordoned off with snowplows and fences, although there were no protests
Anastasia Rozhkova
Bumaga
February 6, 2021

On the afternoon of February 6, downtown Petersburg was cordoned off with fences and snow removal equipment. Public transport did not run on the Nevsky and the surrounding streets, and the subway stations Nevsky Prospect and Gostiny Dvor were closed for entry and exit. People had to descend to the icebound Fontanka and Moika rivers to cross the road. No protests were held, however.

Bumaga shows and tells you what the city center looked like on Saturday afternoon.

On Friday evening, fences were installed on Nevsky Prospect and Palace Square. On Saturday morning, even more fences appeared, on Gorokhovaya Street and the Fontanka and Moika embankments. Security forces were also sent into the city center.

At 1:00 p.m, Nevsky Prospekt and Gostiny Dvor subway stations were closed for entry and exit. Around the same time, vehicular traffic was stopped on Nevsky Prospect and surrounding streets. Buses, trolleybuses, and trams were switched to shortened routes. The map of road closures looked something like this.

It was impossible to turn onto Nevsky Prospekt from Liteiny Prospect. Security forces told people to go to Ploshchad Vosstaniia [Insurrection Square] and from there to take Ligovsky Prospect.

Even ambulances had trouble getting through.

Bumaga’s Twitter account: “Vosstaniia Street is closed from Zhukovskogo to Nevsky. A reader reports that even an ambulance was not allowed through for several minutes.”

Last Sunday, downtown Petersburg was also shut down, but the security measures had to do with protests in support of Navalny and against the current government. This weekend, the opposition leader’s headquarters had not planned any rallies, and the authorities were unable to explain the restrictions.

The governor’s press secretary, Inna Karpushina, told Bumaga that questions about the street closures should be addressed to the local Interior Ministry office, where we were told this was not the case and referred to the city transport committee. However, earlier in the day, on its official Telegram channel, the transport committee had published a message saying that the subway would be closed by order of the Interior Ministry.

A Telegram message from the Petersburg city transport committee, informing readers that Nevsky Prospekt subway would be closed at 1:00 p.m. n orders from the Interior Ministry

The city center was shut down because of messages on Telegram, Fontanka.ru‘s source at the Smolny [Petersburg city hall] said. There had indeed been posts announcing a protest action on February 6: unknown organizers had asked people to bring flowers to the Monument to the Victims of Political Repression on the Voskresenskaya Embankment. Due to the road closures, the event was canceled, and consequently only seven people attended the event.

Flowers and a sign reading “It must not be repeated” on the Monument to the Victims of Political Repression in Petersburg. Photo: Yevgeny Antonov/Bumaga

Petersburgers furiously criticized the closure of downtown. People complained that they could not get to their jobs and doctor’s appointments. One social media user wrote, “For the first time in my life I made my way to a museum through the courtyards.”

“This is me this morning with a marshmallow cookie in my month reading the news that Nevsky and the subway stations from which I go to work on Nevsky were closed.”

Because of the road closures, Petersburgers were forced to take to the ice. “The Fontanka and the Moika [rivers] were completely blocked, so people just walked on the ice. At some point on the Moika, [the police] shouted through a megaphone about safety and ordered people to leave. Everyone was escorted off the ice, but five minutes later, there were a lot of people out there again,” Mediazona correspondent David Frenkel told Bumaga.

Petersburgers walking on the Fontanka River near Nevsky Prospect, 6 February 2021. Photo: David Frenkel

The street closures immediately became the subject of memes. Petersburgers joked about “phantom rallies,” which the police and the Russian National Guard had come out to disperse.

“See the rally?” “No.” “It’s there.”

In the morning, police searched the homes of thirty people in connection with a criminal investigation of the “blocking of roads” on January 23. [The “crime” allegedly committed by anti-Putin protesters in Petersburg on January 23.] Police raided the homes of former Vesna Movement press secretary Artem Uimanen, former municipal district councilor Svetlana Utkina, and other opposition activists. Some of them had their electronic devices confiscated.

“Terrific! In Petersburg, the day has begun with [police] searches of the homes of activists as part of the ‘roadblocking’ case, and then the pigs blocked the roads and closed the subway themselves.”

By evening, there were almost no traffic jams downtown Petersburg, and the fences installed earlier were being removed.

_______________

Read about the January protest rallies in Petersburg. To summarize, there are more and more dissatisfied people, the security forces and protesters have become more aggressive, and the authorities are not open to dialogue. Here you can read about the spontaneous protest rally that took place on February 2, at which police used stun guns on people.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Evil vs. the People

Khabarovsk, January 31, 2021. Photo: Yevgeny Pereverzev. Courtesy of Vitaliy Blazhevich

Vitaliy Blazhevich
Facebook
February 5, 2021

The most important observation of the last few weeks is that there were more than enough riot police for all the cities: each detainee was dragged away by five or six riot policemen. They have enough batons, shields, and paddy wagons, they have stun guns, rubber-bullets pistols, and even combat firearms. Evil was prepared for the new wave of protests. Evil did not sit idly by all this time: it built up its strength and increased its forces. Evil has stolen enough from the people to maintain and equip this vast army.

Well, never mind, we’ll see who comes out on top. After all, it is quite obvious that this time Putin is not opposed by a particular social stratum, by a particular political force, or by one region. The entire country and the entire people have risen up, and Putin’s “power vertical,” including the riot police, cannot be regarded as part of the people.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Buy Russian Art, Support Russian Protesters


Nick Teplov
Facebook
February 1, 2021

Thoughts from the darkroom:

How can we make posts and likes on social networks more effective?

As an analog experiment, you can buy any* black-and-white photo featured on my Instagram page (@bureau44), which I will print by hand. This can be either a classic print, an indigo twist, or a lithograph print on vintage paper from the 60s-80s (see the pictures here).

The format is 18 x 24 cm.

You can suggest you own price.

I will donate 50% of this amount to OVD Info to help people detained at protest rallies in Russia.

The prints will be delivered by any method you prefer.

This is a limited offer, as they say.**
______

* You must check with me whether a particular negative is available.
** Limited, that is, by my supply of paper and chemicals.

____________________

Yana Sergeeva
Facebook
February 3, 2021

I am signed up make recurring donations to OVD Info and send them as much extra money as possible, but now I want to do something more.

So, if you want to buy my ceramics, write to me. I will give you cups and plates, and you will send the money for them to OVD Info or Apologia for Protest.

Alexandra Vorobyova has made a helpful list of the donation pages of the Russian organizations who provide legal aid and other assistance to people detained while protesting and/or report on these issues. I can personally endorse all of these organizations, whose human rights work and journalism have been featured on this website many, many times in the past.

OVD Info: https://donate.ovdinfo.org/en
Mediazona: https://donate.zona.media/
Open Russia Legal Defense: https://orpravo.org/#help-project
Apologia for Protest: https://apologia.pro/
Team 29: https://team29.org/donate/

Keep in mind that, with the exception of OVD Info’s donations page, the others are in Russian only. It might also be the case that some of them only accept donations from Russian bank cards. However, I was easily able to donate money to OVD Info and Mediazona via PayPal. Write to me if you have questions about how to donate money. And let me know of similar undertakings by artists or anybody else, and I will add their details to this post. || TRR

There Are No Exceptions to the State of Exception

Sergey Abashin
Facebook
February 2, 2021

I have always said that many practices that are later transferred to Russian citizens are first tested out on “migrants.” Mechanisms for securing human rights and ordinary social rights and living conditions first stop functioning for migrants. They were the first to get what amounted to criminal punishments for administrative violations. They were the first to be stripped of their rights as workers. They were the first to be subjected to a universal system of total electronic surveillance. It is hard not to notice, for example, the link between the concept of “illegals” and the concept of “foreign agents.” It is symbolic that people illegally detained in Moscow for coming out to protest an anti-constitutional regime are now being transported to Sakharovo, a place where foreign nationals are imprisoned, often illegally. It’s very simple: there can be no human rights and rule of law if even one group is (initially with the public’s general consent) excluded from the protection of these laws and rights. Sooner or later, the exceptions will apply to everyone else.

Darya Apahonchich
Facebook
February 1, 2021

Re: the police search

THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) WAS CREATED AND (OR) DISTRIBUTED BY A FOREIGN MASS MEDIA OUTLET PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT, AND (OR) A RUSSIAN LEGAL ENTITY, PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT

While have never been a neat freak, I have never let things get like this. I had collected the posters for the Museum of Political History, and now I am sorting them out. Thank you for your words of support and anger: they help a lot. The children are still with relatives: I want to clean the place up before they come back. In the meantime, I have restored our SIM cards and bought new phones for myself and my daughter.

You ask how you can help? Stop by if you’re going to be near Vladimirskaya subway station today or tomorrow: we’ll drink coffee and rummage through my things. I’ve also been asked whether I need money to buy computers. [The police confiscated all the electronic devices in Apahonchich’s flat.] Of course, they’re obliged to return them, but in practice they often take their time doing it. They might turn them over in six months or give them back broken.

And I want to say a huge thank you to the advocates who were on duty in the help groups. Yesterday I watched how these wonderful, brave people work, and I was filled with admiration for them.

I am very worried about all the victims [of the mass arrests on Sunday, January 31].

I’m writing my [Sberbank] card number down here. If I get more money than I need for new computers, I will transfer the surplus to Mediazona and OVD Info.

4276 5500 7321 7849

Although I look rumpled (I didn’t sleep for almost two days), I’m in good spirits.

Svetlana Prokopyeva
Facebook
February 1, 2021

More than two years ago, I wrote a column about how the law enforcement system in our country had turned into a system of repression, and the state’s monopoly on violence had been turned against ordinary citizens who had grievances with the regime. As an example, I cited the arrest of Artyom Milushkin, the organizer of an authorized rally against corruption. On his way to the rally, he was thrown face-first into the mud by two men, who didn’t identify themselves. It later transpired that they were police officers.

It seems like such a minor thing today, doesn’t it?

And it is not surprising, given that the official response to my opinion piece was a criminal case against me, not an attempt to explain or discuss anything.

Of course, I was not the first to catch this trend, but it seems that I was the first to get such a clear and abrupt response. It was my text, the ideas I expressed, and my individual judgment that were declared the corpus delicti. My criminal case seems to have marked a watershed: we can no longer have our own opinions. People are tried for their opinions. Don’t ask questions.

What is happening on the streets today shows how cohesively the state repressive machine has crystallized. I don’t know what kind of orders those dashing fellows in helmets receive before going to disperse the guys and gals, but it is clear from the confident swings of their billy clubs that they see the enemy before them. The regime they serve has declared war on those who accuse it of theft and murder, although it seems that they already constitute a majority.

This is the death certificate for public politics in Russia, which was the point of my column “Crackdowns for the State.” For publishing it, I was found guilty of “condoning terrorism” (punishable under Article 205.2 of the Russian criminal code) and fined 500,000 rubles. I have an appeals hearing tomorrow at 10 a.m., but I don’t think we’ll be able to overturn the verdict, especially at a time like now.

I wrote that column in the belief that dialogue was possible, that it was not only necessary, but a real possibility, that it was still possible to prevent and stop what was happening, to force the authorities to think hard. Unfortunately, I no longer have that feeling.

(The photo, above, shows me halfway to the paddy wagon, but I never made it there because “Sorry, we didn’t figure out right away [that you were a journalist].”)

Translated by the Russian Reader

The Empire Strikes Back

. . . in the heart of the old imperial capital, Saint Petersburg.

We can thank Vladislav Ivanov for the “footage.” (And I thank Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko for sharing it with me.) In keeping with the message of this video, if not its jocular tone, a friend in Petersburg just wrote to me, “Tomorrow we are going for a ‘walk’ on the Nevsky. It was already flooded with police and National Guardsman on Saturday. It’s scary. But we try and overcome our fear, taking our cue from the younger generation.” \\ TRR

 

Putin’s Base

Jenya Kulakova
Facebook
January 30, 2021

A random interlocutor told me about their friend, a Russian National Guardsman. Last Saturday, he worked the protests in St. Petersburg from 9 am to 10 pm without a single lunch break. After the elections in Belarus, his unit was taken to Pskov, where they removed all their insignia: if necessary, they could be shipped to Belarus to beat up the protesters. For a week, two hundred of them lived in a school, sleeping on mattresses tossed on the floor: “It was great way to get covid! But nobody gives a shit.”

They weren’t exported to Belarus, so they went home. The friend makes 40 grand a month. [40,000 rubles is approximately 435 euros at the current exchange rate.] “Do you think he loves Putin? No. But he took out a mortgage, and he has to pay it back.”

I wonder: do they really do what they do for forty thousand rubles a month and humiliating “working conditions”? Or do they do it out of conviction?

But they are now being forcibly vaccinated, and so the friend is thinking about quitting. Not because he has to harass peaceful fellow citizens, mind you.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

Dmitry Gudkov
Facebook
January 30, 2021

All day I was planning to write about the awful things that the regime has done, but every time it seemed that they couldn’t do more and go lower, it turned out that no, they could, and then some. So, now I will summarize what were probably the most egregious things that happened during the day to remind you once again that we are not dealing with “police,” “judges,” and “prosecutors,” but with people (?) who are ready to commit any crime in order to preserve their power, salaries, and AMP license plates.

In Tver, the security forces came for the deputy coordinator of Navalny’s local HQ, Pavel Kuzmin. When he refused to come out, they cut off his electricity and internet, and then grabbed his fiancee. He surrendered.

In Yakutsk, the security forces came for Sergei Tikhy and Viktoria Postnikova, a couple who support the shaman [Alexander] Gabyshev and have a large family. The security forces shined a laser in their windows (apparently they had the family in their sights), and it seems that they still have not left.

In Moscow, the security forces came for the editor-in-chief of Mediazona Sergei Smirnov when he was out walking with his young child. Now he is in the holding cage at the Tverskaya police precinct, a place I know well. He is accused of participating in the demonstration on January 23, although at the time he was at home coordinating his website’s news coverage of the event.

In Nizhny Novgorod, the security forces came to the special detention center to visit the coordinator of Navalny’s local HQ, Roman Tregubov. They threatened him into reading on camera a text renouncing the protests (which he has now disavowed). I should explain that Roman had every reason to take the threats seriously: Nizhny, which is only three and a half hours from Moscow by train, is known for the insane torture that the local “anti-extremism” police practice. They made one guy sit naked on an anthill, and then for a long time publicly mocked him on “anonymous Telegram channels.”

The security forces in Nizhny also came for my friend Mikhail Iosilevich, who had already been charged with two felonies for cooperating with Open Russia and for not informing the authorities about his dual citizenship. Terrible crimes! Today, a court changed his pre-trial restrictions and remanded him in custody to a pre-trial detention center, and in this case too they hastened to mockingly report this fact on an “anonymous Telegram channel.”

It was after her apartment was searched as part of the case against Ioselevich that Irina Slavina set herself on fire and died.

This story is very personal to me. I know Ioselevich and knew Slavina, and I like visiting Nizhny. Mikhail was always willing to help me and local activists, and he had fun founding the local branch of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Church. But only cops—angry, offended, and embittered—can “have fun” in Russia nowadays.

I used to appeal to the reason of the “other side,” but now I understand that it’s like admonishing a mad wolf to go vegetarian. It’s useless. The conversation is over, and the wolf, no longer a man, has pounced.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Translated by the Russian Reader