28 Dec 2011 | Russia
Opposition leader Sergey Udaltsov has spent much of December under arrest and on hunger strike — but the unity of his supporters grows stronger as his health continues to deteriorate. “The authorities are trying to silence me, but they cannot silence tens of thousands people who got to know me because of my illegal arrest,” Udaltsov told Index.
Sergey Udaltsov is an activist and a leader of the Left Front public movement. He has been frequently arrested for holding peaceful, but unauthorised actions of protest. Amnesty International considers him “a prisoner of conscience“, who should not be detained at all.
Russian authorities grew used to arresting Udaltsov during the past few years and journalists even joked that he was likely to make friends with policemen who never gave up a chance to detain him. But this December, Udaltsov’s arrests are no longer the subject of jokes, and rights activists now fear for his life.
Udaltsov was arrested on 4 December while protesting with the masses demonstrating against allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections. He was sentenced to administrative arrest until 9 December and subsequently went on hunger strike and was sent to a hospital. He was then detained again sentenced again on 9 December for having allegedly escaped from police custody after protesting two months prior. On 25 December, Udaltsov was arrested once more for the same October protest, which has puzzled rights activists.
The incident in question occurred on 24 October. Udaltsov was detained while attempting to hold a one-man picket near the Central Election Committee building. But before he started, the police arrested him while he was speaking to journalists. Udaltsov was then sentenced to 10 days of administrative arrest for allegedly having tried to hold an unsanctioned rally. He immediately went on hunger strike, and was subsequently hospitalised. He was discharged from the hospital not long before his arrest term expired, and a judge ruled in December’s proceedings that he had escaped while under arrest in October.
Many journalists and rights activists are certain that Udaltsov’s arrests were made to prevent him from participating in the two biggest rallies in post-Soviet Russia against unfair parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, it has almost been a month since the start of Udaltsov’s hunger strike. His stomach ulcer continues to worsen, and a pre-existing kidney condition is now aggravated.
Journalists and human rights activists expressed concern, as they were barred from the court room on 25 December, where Udaltsov was sentenced once again. Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov filed inquiries to Moscow state court chair Olga Egorova as well as Arthur Parfenchikov, the Russian Bailiff’s authority head, to ask for an explanation.
Judge Olga Borovkova, who sentenced the ill Udaltsov, is notorious for convicting opposition leaders and human rights activists during the past few years. Udaltsov’s supporters are now spreading leaflets with the slogan “Does Borovkova have a conscience?” The slogan angered Russia’s Upper House speaker, Alexander Torshin, who blasted the campaign for being “a pressure on the judge,” and alleged that journalists and activists had “broken down the door in the court room,” a charge refuted by witnesses.
Udaltsov says that police try to prevent him from talking on the phone and meeting visitors. While he is expected to be released on 4 January, there is not much confidence that he will not be arrested again for past activism that could hardly be regarded as illegal. “Anyone could be in my place”, Udaltsov told Index. The authorities have grown used to persecuting opposition leaders.
Ecologist Yaroslov Nikitenko, one of the activists gathered in front of the court house in support of Udaltsov on 25 December, was detained and arrested for 10 days for “having failed to follow a lawful order of policeman,” the same reasoning used to arrest Udaltsov in October. Nikitenko denies the accusation. Moscow authorities today refused to sanction a rally Udaltsov supporters planned to hold on 29 December, but supporters plan to rally anyway, risking the same fate as Nikitenko.
“Their stupid repression policy only unites opposition and angers citizens”, Udaltsov said. His wife Anastasia, also a Left Front activist and one of the organisers of the rallies on 10 and 24 December, agrees with her husband: “It seems like the officials are incapable of analysing the current political situation and the general protest feeling — they are harming themselves by making a hero and a martyr out of Sergey.”
Despite problems with his health, Udaltsov finds value repression from the state, as he believes that it “will only do good for the awakening of the civil society in Russia.”
25 Dec 2011 | Russia
According to opposition leaders, at least 120,000 people gathered in the centre of Moscow on 24 December to demand new and fair parliamentary elections, and that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin retire. Police report that 29,000 were present at the rally.
The rally yesterday was the follow up to what was the biggest rally in post-Soviet Russia held on 10 December. According to the protesters, the 4 December parliamentary elections were fraudulent, that is why they called for a new election to be held. They also demanded the immediate release of political prisoners, allow for the registration of opposition parties, and the resignation of Vladimir Churov, chair of the Central Election Commission.
The European Parliament supported the demands of protesters, and passed a resolution calling for a new election as well as an investigation into charges of alleged fraud in the election. While Russian officials rejected both demands, President Dmitry Medvedev recently proposed to pass a law simplifying parties’ registration and to restore governors’ elections (which were stopped in 2005)—but only after 2013. People’s Freedom Party cofounder Boris Nemtsov welcomed Medvedev’s proposals, but said they were not enough, and said that the reforms would not have come without the protests.
During yesterday’s rally, politicians, musicians, public figures and journalists all expressed their concerns about allegations of fraud in the election, and called on people to unite as election watchdogs for the presidential elections in March. Former Minister of Finance Alexey Kudrin also delivered a speech at the rally, demanding a fair election, echoing the demands of average citizens.
The speakers suggested that people create working groups or, as Russian popular writer Boris Akunin said, a nongovernmental organisation called “Fair Russia” to prevent Vladimir Putin from becoming president. Akunin asked the crowd if they wanted to see Putin as president, and if they liked his reaction to the 10 December rally, and his questions were met with whistling from the crowd. Following the first rally, Putin alleged that the protesters were actually paid to attend the rally.
According to Akunin, the demands from the 10 December rally “were the minimal conditions” of protesters, and failure of authorities to comply with protester’s demands showed that “there is no use to put up with Putin’s regime.” Art Troitsky, Russia’s leading music critic stressed the significance of mystery around Putin’s family, and said that because he hides his family, he lives like an “illegal spy” and is not to be trusted.
The protesters were from a wide range of backgrounds, including nationalists, antifascists, communists, and liberals, did not represent any one political party. All came together to add one more demand to the initial requirements from the 10 December protests. They called for a campaign to prevent Vladimir Putin from coming to power in the 2012 presidential elections, as well as heavily monitoring the election for fraud.
22 Dec 2011 | Russia
A leading online tabloid has published opposition leader Boris Nemtsov’s private phone conversations, during which he denigrated other Russian opposition activists. Nemtsov claims his phone was illegally bugged and that the Kremlin is behind the leak.
Nemtsov is one of the leaders of the unregistered opposition group the People’s Freedom Party. He took an active part in organising a rally against unfair parliamentary elections on 24 December. He has called the publication of the phone conversations “a provocation” and an attempt by prime-minister Vladimir Putin and Kremlin chief of staff Vladislav Surkov to “wreck the rally on 24 December and sow discord into opposition involved in organising the rally”.
The allegation has been bolstered by the fact that the tabloid LifeNews is a part of the National Media Group controlled by tycoon Jury Kovalchuk, known as a Putin supporter. The Russian Investigative Committee announced they would begin “procedural checking” into the publication of Nemtsov’s phone conversations. But despite the fact that the calls were illegally recorded, LifeNews is unlikely to face the same sanctions as the British tabloid The News of the World: those loyal to Putin don’t usually lose in Russian courts.
LifeNews didn’t specify how it had obtained the recordings of the phone calls, but such publication violates articles 137 and 138 of the Russian Criminal Code (invasion of personal privacy and violation of personal correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraphic and other messages). Together with human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, with whom his conversation LifeNews published, Nemtsov said he would file a suit against the tabloid.
Life News editor-in-chief Ashot Gabrelyanov defended the publication on business grounds: audience and advertising increase. “News about Nemtsov is in great demand” Gabrelyanov told Lenta.ru news agency.
Most of the conversations published by LifeNews relate to preparations for post-Soviet Russia’s biggest anti-Putin rally on 10 December and an even bigger rally, expected on 24 December. Nemtsov vilified other activists including environmental campaigner Yevgeniya Chirikova; Left Front activist, A Just Russia deputy Ilya Ponomarev and popular blogger and minority shareholders’ rights advocate Alexei Navalny. Nemtsov published an apology on his blog soon after the publications, saying that “he did wrong” and that “one should control his emotions even when talking to friends on the phone”.
His addressees accepted apologies stressing that the Kremlin would have done anything to split popularity, and affirming that the attempt had definitely failed. Alexey Navalny, who was released on 21 December after 15 days of administrative arrest for having participated in a protest rally, said “nobody was likely to have illusions of how they comment on each other off the record”.
In public, Russian opposition is still united to achieve one common aim: fair elections.
19 Dec 2011 | Russia
The first meeting of Russia’s newly elected State Duma will be held on 21 December. Tens of thousands of Russians protested the parliamentary elections, based on claims that they were unfair. This week protesters will take to the streets again with a rally against election fraud on 24 December.
The European Parliament echoed the protesters’ concerns, and passed a resolution calling for new parliamentary elections in Russia, as well as a thorough investigation into all reports of alleged fraud on elections held on 4 December. The Russian authorities rejected the EU parliament’s intervention.
Prime-minister Vladimir Putin said the protesters had been paid to attend the 10 December rally, which was the biggest in post-Soviet Russia. Putin added that opposition leaders had referred to them as “sheep” from the stage. Both allegations are untrue. President Dmitry Medvedev said that the EU parliament resolution supporting protestants’ demands “meant nothing”, and former deputy head of State Duma international committee Leonid Slutsky told ITAR-TASS news agency that the resolution was “gross interference in the affairs of a sovereign state”.
The controversial resolution mostly covered the context of the recent elections, but it also highlighted “concerns, regarding the human rights situation in Russia, the rule of law, independence of the judiciary and the repressive measures taken against journalists and the opposition”.
The resolution merely captured the bitter truth of the situation, as proved by events last week. In the Republic of Dagestan — a federal subject of Russia — journalist Khadzhimurad Kamalov, founder of Chernovik, an opposition newspaper, was shot outside his office on 15 December. Kamalov was remembered as a brave man, respected for the risks he took by investing in the independent media. He inspired people to write about corruption and human rights abuse in North Caucasus. His colleagues along with Memorial, an international human rights society said his murder was “political” and motivated by his work. His articles and investigations he made public in Chernovik were widely quoted in Dagestan. Makhachkala city administration filed an open letter to Kamalov in September, accusing him of “libel, deception and mutual distrust fomentation”, which Chernovik journalists regarded as an attempt to silence them.
The detention of one of Russia’s opposition leaders, Sergey Udaltsov further confirms the statements of the EU parliament resolution. Udaltsov was arrested on 4 December while attempting to protest in the rally against violations of election laws, and sentenced to administrative arrest until 25 December. Since his arrest, Udaltsov has been on a dry hunger strike, and his health is under serious threat according to his wife and attorney. He is now in the resuscitation department of one of Moscow’s hospitals. Human rights activists and opposition leaders have expressed concern for his life.
Musician Vassily Shumov, also famous for having held a concert to support music critic Art Troitsky, planned to hold a concert in support of Sergey Udaltsov and other prisoners rights activists considered to be “political”, but was suddenly rejected by the club which had previously agreed to carry it out. Shumov suggested that the club might have declined to participate based on pressure from the authorities.
Opposition leaders, rights activists and public figures are now preparing for the rally on 24 December. It is meant to be the public’s response to authorities, who have ignored their demands to set political prisoners free, hold new and fair parliamentary elections, and to protect freedom of expression. Their primary objective is to encourage citizens to overcome fears of repression for expressing their views, and to build confidence in their ability to influence Russian government policy through publicly expressing their discontent. Christmas Eve will determine whether or not they succeed.
