Krasnodar farmers speaking to the press before heading out on the first protest convoy, last August. Photo courtesy of Meduza
Farmers Plan Another Tractor Convoy Rosbalt
March 13, 2017
Krasnodar farmers intend to hold another protest against the illegal seizure of land on March 28, Alexei Volchenko, chair of the grassroots organization Polite Farmers, announced at a press conference at Rosbalt News Agency. According to Volchenko, the tractor convoy will set out from the village of Kazanskaya in the Krasnodar Territory’s Kavkazsky District and spread to other regions.
“You’ve all heard about the African Swine Fever that has been making its way around Russia. Farms are being destroyed, subsidiary farms are being destroyed, and people are simply going hungry. They take out million of rubles in loans to get their farms going, and as we see now, due to the fact these farms are being destroyed, people are hanging and shooting themselves. It’s a total mess,” said Volchenko.
The tractor convoy will be held as part of nationwide strike by truckers. Earlier, strike organizers announced their intention to call for the abolition of freight charges on federal highways and an amendment of the regulations concerning freight haulage. If the authorities do not react to the strike, the truckers will call for the government to resign.
According to Volchenko, organizers of the protest have faced pressure from officers of the regional Investigative Committee and the FSB. Criminal cases have been opened against several of the activists.
“This convoy is mainly about the fact that the squeeze has been put on farmers. Instead of helping farmers in some way (in fact, the problems of farmers are not so great: they canbe solved), criminal charges are filed against them,” Volchek added.
Polite Farmers activist Nikolai Maslov underscored the fact that the convoy participants so far have no plans to make political demands, insisting only that their legal rights are honored.
“We would like the situation resolved. For the time being we are not making political demands,” he said. “We don’t want a revolution, we know our history. We just want to solve our problems through dialogue.”
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up
Kuban Farmer Shoots Himself over Illegal Seizure of Land
Gella Litvintseva Proved.rf
October 1, 2016
A farmer in Krasnodar Territory has committed suicide because he was unable to get back a thousand hectares of land that had been illegally seized from him, according to Alexei Volchenko, organizer of the August 2016 tractor convoy and a farmer from the Kalininskaya Distrist.
“Nikolai Gorban, a farmer in the Timashyovsk District, shot himself. It happened three days ago. A thousand hectares of land were confiscated from him by court order. The man wrote a suicide note in which he named the people he blamed for his death. Prior to this, gangsters came to his place, threatening him and promising to do away with his family. His loved ones are now preparing for the funeral,” says Volchenko, head of the Kalininskaya District Peasant Farm Enterprise.
According to Volchenko, the victim received the land plot after buying the shares from the land’s owners. After the court ruled the land confiscated, he tried to get it back, but failed.
“The farmer had his own land. He had bought it from other shareholders, like himself, and had it marked off and registered. But later the meeting of shareholders [at which they had decided to sell the land to Gorban — TRR] was declared null and void by the courts, and the land was returned to the collective farm, which Oleg Makarevich has been trying to get his hands on. The farmer went to see Natalya Kostenko, of the Russian People’s Front [a pro-Putin astroturfed “civil society” organization — TRR], to ask for help. He went personally to see her twice, and he called her. He went to see Andrei Korobka, deputy governor of Krasnodar Territory, and asked him for help. He met with me. He said, ‘I’ve lost everything. I’m going to put a bullet in my head.’ I told him not to do anything, that all was not lost, that in the end it wasn’t worth his life. I told him we would tough it out, we would beat them come what may. But he said, ‘I don’t want to live.’ I tried to dissuade him, but now we’ve found out it’s all over,” recounts Volchenko.
On September 23, convoy participants were in Moscow. Scheduled meetings with the president and the agriculture minister did not take place. They only managed to have a small get-together with Kuban officials. At the beginning of the week, Volchenko announced the farmers would be meeting with a presidential envoy in Yeysk on September 28, but ultimately this meeting did not take place, either.
“We got ready and went to Yeysk. I went into the hotel where the event was going to take place. They looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Young man, are you smoking something or popping pills? What presidential envoy? What journalists? We have nothing scheduled.’ I went outside and saw cars with tinted windows, FSB officers walking around, and Vyacheslav Legkodukh (the Krasnodar governor’s envoy for farmer relations) sitting in a cafe and eating. I got the picture. I went to the farmers and said, ‘This is a setup. Let’s leave for home on the sly.’ They wanted us to gather outside the hotel so they could arrest us again for holding an unauthorized assembly,” recounts Volchenko.
Earlier, the protesting farmers met with Alexander Chernov, chair of the Krasnodar Territorial Court, who promised he would review all the cases the farmers requested. For now, he is their only hope.
“All the judges say Chernov is a very decent man, and keeps his word. Currently, farmers have won some of the cases that were before the courts. There are positive results, but it’s not clear whether this will be enough, because right now several farmers are under tremendous pressure, Nikolai Maslov, for example. Certain media outlets have been writing that he is a raider, that he has been trying to grab land from Shestopalov and his honest Dmitriyevskoye Agricultural Enterprise. But people just want to mark off and purchase their own land, 200 bloody hectares. Tremendous pressure has been exerted through the press. Andrei Koshik, a Kuban journalist, went to Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow and tried to get the journalists to publish this garbage. They refused and wrote about it on Facebook,” says Volchenko.
The problems of Kuban’s farmers became widely known in the spring, when they decided to travel to Moscow by tractor to tell the president about illegal land seizures in Krasnodar Territory and about corruption in the local courts and district councils. To capture the president’s attention, over the course of seven months the farmers released doves with messages for him, held several rallies in a field, set off for Moscow in tractors, and wrote to the president’s public relations office. Their tractor convoy in August ended on day two in Rostov-on-Don, when the farmers were jailed and fined. Subsequently, convoy participants have been subjected to continual pressure from local authorities and law enforcement agencies.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Anatrrra for the heads-up. Photo courtesy of Viktor Pogontsev and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where the caption to the photo reads, tellingly, “Record grain harvests in the Kuban region in recent years have bothered certain local farmers. They have been demanding a new redivision of the land.” Rossiyskaya Gazeta is the Russian government’s daily newspaper of record.
Rustam Mallamagomedov in an ambulance after being beaten. Village of Dorozhnyi, August 22, 2016. Photo by Anna Artemieva
Arrest Dagestani Trucker Refuses to Report to Jail Voluntarily
Dmitry Rebrov Novaya Gazeta
September 16, 2016
The Rostov Regional Court ordered the arrest of a Dagestani trucker who took part in the tractor convoy of Krasnodar farmers, but law enforcement officials “forgot” to detain him.
On September 16, the court considered Dagestani trucker Rustam Mallamagomedov’s appeal of an August 26, 2016, ruling by the Aksay District Court. The court had found the activist guilty of violation of Article 20.2.6.1 of the Russian Misdemeanors Code (involvement in an illegal political rally) and arrested him in absentia for ten days.
The regional court judge confirmed the district court’s ruling, despite the fact that, by law, a ruling of this kind can be issued only in the defendant’s presence. Mallamagomedov was not present at either hearing. According to his attorney, Valentin Pyshkin, this is the source of the conflict. The police “forgot” to detain the trucker preliminarily, so in spite of the administrative arrest issued against him, Mallamagomedov continues to remain at liberty to roam the streets [sic], and has no intention of voluntarily “correcting” the mistake made by law enforcement officers.
“The thing is there no standard procedure as to what the police should do now. An administrative arrest cannot be issued in absentia. This is nonsense. For an individual to be put under administrative arrest he has to be present in the courtroom. At any rate, he is not obliged to report to jail himself. He bears no responsibility for failing to report to jail. Moreover, he cannot be detained and sent there forcibly, either, since this is not stipulated by Russian law,” said Pyshkin.
“Only arrest on criminal charges can be ordered in absentia,” the lawyer stressed.
In this case, the court can issue a detention order before the defendant is detained, Pyshkin explained. But this principle is not valid in the case of administrative [misdemeanor] violations. The lawyer was hard pressed to say what law enforcement officers would do now. In his opinion, it would be easier just to abolish the questionable ruling. That, however, is not what has happened.
“The Rostov Regional Court did not listen to our arguments, nor, when the case was heard on the merits, did it want to examine any of the witnesses we had brought to the hearing. And all our motions were rejected,” said Pyshkin.
When our correspondent asked about the trucker’s current whereabouts, the attorney declined to answer, saying that the telephones could be bugged. He did confirm, however, that Mallamagomedov was currently not in Rostov Region.
Beaten by the police when the tractor convoy was dispersed, the trucker himself does not admit his guilt.
“Aside from the fact we didn’t organize any political rally, it was the police who didn’t let the farmers and us leave our camp. I was elsewhere the day our other comrades were arrested,” Mallamagomedov explained to Novaya Gazeta by telephone.
“On August 22, the day before the convoy was dispersed, I was beaten by the police guarding the camp. After that, I went to the hospital and the Investigative Committee, where I stayed until the evening of August 23. On the morning of the 24th, I went to the police station to find out how the guys were doing. I was detained there, but police did not draw up an arrest sheet. I felt sick while I was sitting there and left again in an ambulance,” he added.
Nevertheless, during his time at the precinct, police officers confiscated the driver’s internal passport without explanation. Apparently, it was then they drew up the charge sheet that was the basis for the Aksay District Court’s August 26 ruling to arrest the missing activist. After receiving medical treatment, the trucker had no intention of returning to the police station voluntarily, since he had been held there without processing of the proper papers, that is, illegally. He could not attend the August 26 hearing, either, because he was undergoing outpatient treatment.
When it is a matter of arrest, the individual is usually detained first, and then taken before a judge. Then he is sent from the courtroom to jail for ten days. The court’s administrative ruling is thus implemented. The majority of truckers and farmers detained during the tractor convoy were taken to the police station and sentenced to jail terms ranging from five to ten days, in that order. They have served their sentences and returned home long ago.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Anatrrrafor the heads-up
According to Jim Jarmusch, director of the film by this name: “Down by law, at the time in the mid-80s, was kind of in use on the streets as meaning a very close connection with somebody. If somebody was down by law, they were close to you or you would protect them. I know that, earlier, in prison slang, if somebody was down by law, and they got out before you, they would contact your family or look after people outside if you needed them to. So it meant something very close or a code. I really liked the contradiction of that, being something that sounds like being oppressed by the law, which of course under that condition is where the slang came from. So, I liked that contradiction of it. And I liked it also in terms of the film being contradictory in that they are oppressed by the law but they also become down by law with each other.”
“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:
Police stop protesting Krasnodar farmers near Rostov-on-Don. Photo courtesy of BBC Russian Service
Krasnodar Farmers Say Convoy to Moscow Blocked
Grigory Naberezhnov and Dmitry Nosonov RBC
August 22, 2016
The Farmers told RBC that over a hundred police had blocked the tractor convoy from Kuban to Moscow near Rostov-on-Don. The farmers had complained of “large agricultural holdings taking away land from farmers.”
Police have halted a tractor convoy of Krasnodar farmers headed for Moscow, according to rally organizer Alexei Volchenko.
According to Volchenko, the farmers “were blocked every which way,” and “probably half the Rostov police force had been sent out.”
A total of seventeen tractors, two heavy truckers, and a number of passenger vehicles have been trapped in the road block. According to Volchenko, twenty patrol cars and 150 police officers were involved in the road block.
“The officers did not inform us of the reason for the stop,” Volchenko added. “I tried to figure out why a tractor cannot travel freely through the Russian Federation. They couldn’t give us an explanation.”
Ekaterina Vasiltsova, duty officer at the press service of the Interior Ministry’s Rostov office, told RBC they were “verifying information” about the incident.
The tractor drivers had been stopped in the village of Dorozhny near Rostov-on-Don, Volchenko told the BBC.
The farmers now plan “to travel to Krasnodar and have a chat with our governor,” he told RBC.
According to Volchenko, the president’s envoy to the region had promised them that if authorities were unable to reach an agreement with the farmers, “the road to Moscow would be open to them.”
If the road is not opened, “then I will publicly declare him a liar,” said Volchenko.
“In Krasnodar Territory alone, they stopped us seven or eight times for long stretches of between forty and fifty minutes. They would sometimes take two hours to check our papers and write up tickets,” he said.
Volchenko has told the Peasant Gazette (Krestyanski Vedomosti) that a “vicious practice” had taken root in Krasnodar Territory in recent years.
“Local authorities have refused to allocate their legal [land] shares to land owners, illegally leased them to third parties, usually large agricultural holding companies or they have violated their property rights altogether,” he told the paper.
“The large agricultural holding companies take land away from farmers and shareholders, and basically bring [the rural areas] to their knees, because the villages live on the money farmers spend, while the agricultural holdings are all registered as offshore companies in Cyprus and so on,” Volchenko told RBC in an interview.
The principal demand of the protesters was to “restore order through the courts.”
“She persuaded us to abandon the protest,” Volchenko told the Peasant Gazette. “[She] promised to speak with regional leaders about restoring order in land relations. [However,] six months have gone by, and basically nothing has changed.”
Translated by the Russian Reader
More proof, as if more proof were needed, that President Putin could care less about his wholly fictitious “base” in the wholly fictitious “Russian heartlands.” These tropes have been used by journalists and “experts” too willfully blind (?) to see the Putin regime was in fact an authoritarian smash-and-grab police state junta that was quickly switching to autopilot. It had no need then of real popular support, and it has much less need now. It does, however, generate the illusion of popular support through sham elections, self-fulfilling opinions polls, wars, and relentless mainstream and social media propaganda. But my experience in talking to lots of different people and my intuition tell me it is actually deeply unpopular among the folk who are supposedly its biggest supporters, like these farmers from the Kuban region. The regime’s real support comes from the officials and businessmen who have made out like bandits these past 17 years. They are its real base. TRR
Krasnodar Farmers Head to Moscow in Tractor Convoy
Olga Nadykto RBC
August 21, 2018
Farmers from Krasnodar Territory have set off on tractors to Moscow. The total number of tractors in the convoy is seventeen. This is the second attempt by the farmers of Kuban to organize a “tractor march” on Moscow
The Krasnodar farmers’ tractor convoy has left for Moscow, Vasily Melnichenko, one of the protesters, reported on his Twitter account.
Before the convoy set off, the farmers held a rally in the village of Kazanskaya in the Kavkazsky District of Krasnodar Territory. As reported by Novaya Gazeta, after the rally was over, a convoy of seventeen tractors and a few dozen cars headed for the neighboring Rostov Region on the federal highway. The newspaper reported that protesters intend to meet with federal authorities in Moscow.
As a co-organizer of the tractor convoy, Alexei Volchenko, earlier toldKrestyanskie Vedomosti (Peasant Gazette), the protest has been coordinated with the traffic police.
“There was moaning and groaning, and nerves were on edge, but we got the traffic police to sign off on the tractor convoy. They promised an escort, as the rules says they should,” said Volchenko.
According to Volchenko, the farmers are protesting the violation of their property rights and transfer of land to major agricultural holding companies.
The farmers of Kuban had initially tried to carry out a tractor convoy to Moscow in March of this year. Around a hundred farmers from nine districts in Krasnodar Territory announced plans to drive their tractors to Moscow, where they intended to deliver a petition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, the farmers later declined to carry out the protest.
The Russian Reader 
