Today, for the first time in my life, I was a social defender [obshchestvennaya zashchitnitsa] in court. I wanted to record my experience here at least: six months ago (or fewer), it would have been hard for me to imagine doing such a thing. The hearing was perfect for starters: an appeal against charges filed in connection with the events of June 12. It was impossible to lose. However, it was just as impossible to win.
I was a bit worried yesterday evening: my first hearing was just round the corner. Lovely Alina told me that, first, I should treat it like having to deal with the housing management authorities, and second, she wished me success. When I asked her what success would look like, she said, “If you get a judge who isn’t too strident.” That was exactly the kind of judge we got: not too strident. The judge listened attentively to my babbling about the principle that forbids punishing someone twice for the same offense. She looked straight into my eyes and nodded. Finally, she asked whether we had anything else to say. And then she rejected our appeal. As usual, there is nothing interesting about any of this.
The human factor is much more interesting. Suddenly, you seemingly find yourself in the same boat as a complete stranger. There was no one besides us in the large courtroom, and the huge wooden table really resembled the deck of a ship. The “perpetrator” was a middle-aged man. As he put it, there had been only two “geezers” among the June 12 detainees in the police precinct where he had been taken. A few years ago, he was happy when Crimea was occupied, but later he changed his mind. June 12 was the first protest rally in his life, and, right off the bat, he was detained. He says he has no regrets. His colleagues at the small firm where he works concealed from management where he was while he served his jail sentence. The fact he travels a lot for a work made that possible.
On the way back from the hearing, I told him about the solidarity of the Crimean Tatars, and he told me about his wedding to a Georgian national, which almost didn’t come off, because the war suddenly broke out, and the embassy closed. His wife is now a Russian national and quite patriotic. After he was arrested, they even had a falling out, but they have made up. They have four small children. The judge was almost affectionate when she agreed to add a certificate to this effect to the case file.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Ms. Kulakova for her kind permission to translate and publish her remarks on this website. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
“They Have Really Gone After Us” After returning to Krasnodar Territory, participants of tractor convoy feel the heat from the very people against whom they complained
Anna Bessarabova Novaya Gazeta
August 28, 2016
The farmers after their tractor convoy was dispersed. They have been sentenced to three to ten days in jail. Not a single independent human rights activist came to their court hearings in the village of Kazanskaya. Photo courtesy of Anna Artemieva/Novaya Gazeta
The farmers were threatened during the convoy. We will stage a second Novocherkassk massacre for you and dice you like cattle in a slaughterhouse, they were told by security officers, who after the protest was dispersed have been zealously carrying out checks of their homes and farms.
Around thirty FSB officers raided Nikolai Borodin’s farm in the village of Kazanskaya, which they turned upside down. The tax inspectorate has been looking into property owned by the relatives of protest leader Alexei Volchenko. Other men have been interrogated by the prosecutor’s office. Nina Karpenko escorted her driver Seryozha Gerasimenko, a young fellow with three small children, to the detention center. He has been jailed for three days. The other men were also issued misdemeanor charge sheets: the authorities even went to the trouble of delivering the documents to their homes. The hearings took place on the weekend (Saturday) in the Kavkazsky District. Sergei Gorbachev was jailed for five days, Slava Petrovsky, for four days, Andrei Penzin and Semyon Smykov, for three. The rest of the protesters are waiting their turn.
“Nearly everyone in the villages has been paid visits by prosecutors and police,” farmer Ludmila Kushnaryova told Novaya Gazeta. No one knows what they are looking for. Or what the charges will be, either. The pressure has not stopped.”
“I cannot believe this is happening to us, in our country. We had no idea it would be so frightening,” said Nina Karpenko. “They have really gone after us. The deputy chief of the district traffic police escorted my tractor drivers and me to the hearings. He followed us for 250 kilometers. Whatever for? There were two people working in the courthouse on Saturday: the judge and the chairman. Didn’t they have anything else to do?”
Nikolai Maslov and Oleg Petrov, two convoy participants jailed for ten days, have been transferred to Novocherkassk.
“Dad called early this morning. He said everything was alright. But who knows. Maybe he just didn’t want to scare us?” said Igor Maslov, worried about his father. “We still haven’t found lawyers for them. How much do you think they’ll gouge us?”
Alexei Volchenko’s colleagues and friends have been looking for him. He has not been answering calls to any of his phones. He is not to be found in his home village. He has disappeared. The last thing the farmers heard was that Volchenko had been fined in Rostov Region. He made it back to Kuban, where he was detained again and sentenced to ten days in jail in Ust-Labinsk. The authorities are now, allegedly, preparing to charge him with extremism.
The Russian government, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Russian Investigative Committee have been pretending nothing is happening in Kuban. The official TV channels have been airing election campaign spots about the ruling party’s ability to listen to people, but they have not aired any stories about the events in Krasnodar Territory. They have maintained their silence for a week.
Alexander Popkov, a lawyer with the Agora International Human Rights Group, Boris Titov, federal commissioner for the rights of entrepreneurs, former Federation Council member Ivan Starikov, and Russian Federal Public Chamber chair Georgy Fyodorov have promised to help the participants of the tractor convoy.
“Obviously, the farmers have committed no offenses, and the wild imitation of law enforcement involving riot police and arrests for a ‘rally’ in a cafe are aimed at suppressing a peaceful and reasonable protest campaign,” said lawyer Alexander Popkov. “The first thing we are going to do is file appeals, and then we are going to see whether there is any point in beating our heads against the courts in Russia or whether we should immediately file a class-action complaint with the European Court of Human Rights.”
“I have been in contact with the farmers, their wives, and their children. They are drafting an appeal, and next week we plan to hold a big press conference in Moscow,” Ivan Starikov informed Novaya Gazeta. “Their problem needs to be solved systemically. People’s land shares are being confiscated, and there are around 300,000 victims of this practice nationwide.”
According to Valentin Pyshkin, attorney for convoy participants Nikolai Maslov, Oleg Petrov, and Sergei Vladimirov, the farmers have filed an appealed against the court decisions that sentenced them to ten days in jail.
“But we won’t get an answer earlier than Monday,” the lawyer explained. “On August 26, I was not admitted to the Novocherkassk detention center and allowed to talk with my clients, because, you see, according to their internal regulations, prisoners are entitled to representation by a lawyer only from two to four in the afternoon. It is an odd rule. But at four o’clock I had a court hearing in Aksai. Rustam Mallamagomedov from the Association of Russian Carriers (OPR) was on trial. On August 24, he had gone to the police station on his own to find out what had happened to the detainees, and the police didn’t let him back out of the station.”
Truckers Ready to Fight for Farmers
Andrei Bazhutin, chair, Russian Association of Carriers (OPR):
“We arrived from Petersburg to Moscow, where we were getting ready for a car convoy through Siberia. We learned about the arrest of the tractor convoy on the morning of August 23 and changed our plans. We went to support the tractor drivers. We were stopped by police for eight hours on the Moscow Ring Road, and eight hours in Voronezh Region. Along the way, we were written up for violating Article 20.2 of the Misdemeanors Code [“Violation of the established rules for organizing or holding an assembly, rally, demonstration, march or picket” — Novaya Gazeta], but they did not stop us from traveling further.
“By the time we got to Rostov, two of our activists [who had been with the tractor convoy from the beginning — Novaya Gazeta] had been sentenced to ten days in jail, while another two had been fined 10,000 rubles. Now we are here in Rostov: we have four big rigs and some cars. We are working with the lawyers and human rights activists and trying to help the guys out. We think it is necessary to gather journalists and advance on Krasnodar Territory to draw attention to these court hearings. Center ‘E’ [the Interior Ministry’s Center for Extremism Prevention — TRR] has intimidated everyone here.
“We have also contacted the miners on hunger strike in Gukov and agreed to support each other. Our demands will be voiced at their next picket too.”
Translated by the Russian Reader. Read my previous postings about the protest by Krasnodar farmers and the regime’s crackdown against it.
The Kavkazsky District Court in Krasnodar Territory has ordered the jailing of Alexei Volchenko, leader of the Polite Farmers movement, and eleven other participants of a planned tractor convoy to Moscow. Quoting Olga Golubyatnikova, a member of the Krasnodar Territory Public Oversight Committee, the news website Caucasian Knot reported the arrests on Sunday, August 28.
Volchenko will spend ten days in jail for not authorizing the convoy with Krasnodar Territory authorities. The other farmers will spend between five and ten days in jail. According to Golubyatnikova, the leader of the Polite Farmers admitted his guilt “due to pressure from the police.” According to her, Volchenko said at his court hearing that a policeman had threatened to charge him with extremism.
Golubyatnikov also reported that Volchenko would be serving his administrative arrest in the Ust-Labinsk detention center.
On August 24, the Rostov Regional Prosecutor’s Office organized an inquiry into the legality of the farmers’ protest.
The Krasnodar farmers’s convoy set off on August 21. Fifty people in seventeen tractors and several passenger vehicles left the village of Kazanskaya in Krasnodar Territory’s Kavkazsky District and headed towards Moscow. They had planned to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to solve the problem of the courts, which, in their view, issued unjust rulings [sic]. On August 22, the activists were invited to meet with Kuban authorities and temporarily halted the procession. On August 23, they were detained by police officers.
Translated by the Russian Reader
See my previous dispatches on the ill-fated Krasnodar tractor convoy:
There Are Still Real Women in the Russian Villages bloger51.com
March 8, 2016
A court has overturned the dismissal of Irina Iskorneva, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pechenga
A magician friend once told me a joke about his trade. During a performance, an illusionist is doing the trick where he saws a woman in two. Halfway through the trick, someone in the hushed auditorium comments, “Think about what you’re doing, dude. You’re about to make two problems out of one.”
Why have I told his story? Because right around the new year, the Pechenga District administration fired Irina Iskorneva, editor of the local newspaper.
Last year, as regular parishioners of our little blog will recall, Iskorneva wiped the floor with Ivan Tsipilyov, mayor of Zapolyarny. She informed readers about road repairs near Tsipilyov’s house, which went right to his front door.
Tsipilyov found this outrageous. Deeming himself personally insulted and humiliated, he went to court, where he got a kick in the ass. A month later, he got another kick in the ass, this time in the regional court.
The Pechenga District Court confirmed Iskorneva’s version of events.
As the court also pointed out, “Criticism of authorities is an inalienable right of citizens, and every politician agrees to become a target of criticism.”
The court explained in detail how the parties could resolve their conflict.
“In case of disagreement, the criticized party has the right to respond in the very same mass media.”
In November of last year, Irina Iskorneva strongly opposed a 9.3% increase in utilities rates for 2016. (The regional authorities have been using deputies on local councils to set rates higher than the ceiling established by Moscow.)
According to Iskorneva, this was the reason she was dismissed as editor right before the New Year, on December 29.
“Don’t awaken the beast in me. Well, and if you are asking for it be prepared to defend yourself. I will show no mercy,” reads the motto on her profile page on the VKontakte social network.
And so it happened. In mid January, she uncovered the amounts of the bonuses the district’s top official had paid themselves. According to Iskorneva, they had ranged from 70,000 to 200,000 rubles. [That is, from approximately 900 to 2,600 euros—TRR.]
Two court hearings took place in Pechenga District Court on March 2 of this year.
In the first, Iskorneva was listed as the defendant. The district administration was trying to recover damages allegedly caused by Iskorneva in the performance of her duties. The court rejected the suit, thus indicating that the charges were groundless.
Consequently, Iskorneva’s dismissal from her position was also illegal.The court ruled that Iskorneva should be restored to her position as of March 3, 2016, should be compensated for wages forfeited during her forced absence, and should be financially compensated for pain and suffering.
Irina Iskorneva: “Don’t awaken the beast in me. Well, and if you are asking for it be prepared to defend yourself. I will show no mercy,”
When the editor of a municipal newspaper forces two local administrations to bend four times in the last six months, it is cause for respect, at least.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Photos courtesy ofBlogger51 and Barents Observer. Thanks to Comrade VZ for the heads-up
