Monthly Archives: March 2007

Human Rights Watch slapped both Russia and the United States in the face this week. The first slap was the release of a 43 page report detailing how the US sent seven “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay to Russia. The result was all seven, Rustam Akhmiarov, Ravil Gumarov, Timur Ishmuratov, Shamil Khazhiev, Rasul Kudaev, Ruslan Odizhev, and Airat Vakhitov, were repeatedly tortured and brutalized by Russian police and security forces. The second slap was a press release condemning Bush’s meeting with Russian Major-General Vladimir Shamanov.

The HRW report, “The Stamp of Guantanamo,” didn’t spare either party from vilification. First, the United States for “stamping” these seven men with the elastic label of “terrorist” and for the “torture and ill treatment” they suffered at Guantanamo. According to the British human rights group Reprieve, this included:

beatings; deliberately inflicting serious pain upon ..read more

Just as readers at Siberian Light are discussing communist names, the NY Times is reporting about the President of Tajikistan’s effort to ban names with Slavic endings. President Emomali Rakhmon’s (the President formerly known as Rakhmonov) decree to drop “-ov” from family names is yet another nationalist attempt to remove the vestiges of Russia/Soviet influence over Tajik society. As Ilan Greenberg of the NY Times writes,

Amid a series of idiosyncratic decrees aimed at removing traces of Soviet influence, the president of Tajikistan announced Tuesday that he had dropped the Slavic “ov” from the end of his surname and that, henceforth, the same must be done for all babies born to Tajik parents.

Most Tajiks added a Slavic ending to their surnames when the country came under Soviet rule early in the last century.

The president, Emomali Rakhmon — formerly Rakhmonov — also banned certain school holidays and traditions ..read more

Lyndon linked me about Nashi’s “Connecting with the President” or the “President’s Liaison Officer” campaign, so I’ll return the favor by liking his lucid breakdown of Nashi’s marketing-activist tactics. As he concludes:

The idea of using Nashi partisans as electronic “go-betweens” to/from the President (the passers-by receive special SIM-cards which will also be able to receive “all essential information about the movement’s activities,” per this description of the event) is an intriguing modern take on the Soviet idea of a loyal vanguard, though it’s supposedly an exercise in “modern democracy” (“sovremennaia demokratiia”).

I agree. What strikes me is not only how media savvy this all is, but also how these methods can be found among activists on the left and the right all over the world. The question all this poses for me is how much of Nashi’s participation in Russia’s “modern ..read more

I haven’t given an update on the investigation of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in a while. The problem is that there have been few new developments. Given the Russian authorities track record in solving journalists’ deaths, we shouldn’t hold our breath. Nor should we be so quick to substitute dramatic fantasy for truth. For example, Kommersant is reporting that the head of the Movement for Human Rights Lev Ponomarev received a letter implying that “Movladi Baisarov’s Highlander special division, FSB agents and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov were involved in her killing.”

Ponomarev told Kommersant that the letter was received at the electronic address of his organization, and he forwarded it to Novaya gazeta and other media outlets. The letter is allegedly written by former members of the Highlander division – Timur from the village of Kirov, Aslambek from the Lenin state farm, Imran ..read more

As a few of us discovered yesterday, the website for the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi is blocked for users with non-Russian IP addresses. Entering www.nashi.su into your favorite browser will turn up a “403 Forbidden” error. I’ve had limited success getting around this block using Russian proxy servers. While it happens that some websites and blogs are blocked by some countries (as Nathan Hamm at Registan.net recently discovered), I assume it seems less common that a site will block access to readers outside the host country.

Then again, one wonders if the problem has deeper meaning. According to a report from February a number of Russian nationalist sites have been blocked by the authorities. Hackers have retaliated with targeting pro-Kremlin sites.

The websites might also be out of service because of hackers’ back-to-back attacks on behalf of the ..read more

As I wrote almost a year ago, youth politics in Russia is polarized between two youths. And the two “actions” this weekend, one in Nizhni Novgorod and the other in Moscow, prove that among political youth the chasm between pro and anti-Putin youth is vast.

For example, take the first action in Nizhni. Hundreds of activists from Other Russia were swarmed by truncheon wielding police. City officials denied the organizers a permit to hold the protest in the center of the city but allowed it to be held in its outskirts. To their credit, the organizers held the protest anyway, though it is possible the lack of a permit made the turnout in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Reports say that the police outnumbered the crowd of mostly youths. Thirty protesters were arrested. And like always police engaged in preemptive ..read more