This week’s Russia Magazine column, “The Kremlin’s War against the Russian Left,”
Two weeks ago, Aleksandr Ivakhnik argued that over the last year Russia’s security organs have waged a campaign to neutralize the radical left and in particular the Left Front. “The impression is that having made convenient use of the “Bolotnaya case,” security organs are attempting to weaken left-wing radicals,” he writes. “This is all the more of interest for the authorities because the ideology of the Left Front strongly conveys the social side of protest which will clearly become more attractive and all the more believable in conditions of economic crisis.” Indeed, the place of the Russian radical left as a target of Russian state repression is rarely reported. Not only has current trial of twelve Bolotnaya suspects, who face up to eight years for “mass disorder, physically assaulting police officers and disobeying police instructions” garnered little continuous coverage outside of Russia, so has the ongoing pre-trial detention of Leonid Razvozzhaev and house arrest of Sergei Udaltsov, both of whom stand accused of conspiring to overthrow the Russian government, nor the wider campaign that has sent left-wing activists into political asylum and apartment searches, seizure, and interrogations of activists in the provinces. As Andrey Tselikov recently wrote, the travails of the Russian left are “out of sight, out of mind.”
Image: Slon.ru
