Russia: the price of independence
Website Ingushetia.org has lost a second owner in just over a year to violence. Maria Eismont reports
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Russia: Pro-Kremlin youth group sues four European papers
The pro-Kremlin youth organisation Nashi has launched a legal offensive against four European newspapers over allegations that its activists issued death threats against a journalist. Le Monde, Le Journal du Dimanche, The Independent and Frankfurter Rundschau reported that journalist Alexandr Podrabinek was the target of intensive harassment from Nashi after he wrote an article criticising the Kremlin’s attempt to rehabilitate Russia’s Soviet past.
Nashi refused this allegation and demanded a retraction or 500,000 roubles (£10,500) from all four newspapers in damages. Podrabinek also faces legal action from a World War II veteran, Viktor Semenov, and the Communist Party for his article. (RSF/Guardian)
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Russia: last private TV channels to fall under state control
REN TV and St Petersburg’s Fifth Channel, the last semi-independent private TV stations, will come under state control next year. According Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, news bulletins on both channels’ news bulletins will be restructured next year. The state-owned, pro-Kremlin English language television station “Russia Today” will take over responsibility for their news broadcasts from 2010.
Campaigners accused the Kremlin of killing off the last vestiges of independent television in Russia.
“This means independent TV will be destroyed. It will disappear,” said Oleg Ptashkin, a former correspondent with Russia’s state-run Channel One TV who now runs an independent journalists’ union. (Guardian)
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Fresh assault in Russia's "history wars"
This is a guest post by Orlando Figes
It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons.
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