Category Archives: Other Russia

Since everyone is afflicted with spymania at the moment, I wanted to make sure this little tidbit of news didn’t go unnoticed.

Well, as I assumed the copies of Putin. The Results. 10 Years seized by St. Petersburg police will be returned.  Reports Ekho Moskvy:

Executive Director of United Civil Front Olga Kurnosova reported to Interfax, a representative of the police have contacted her and said that all the copies would be returned today.

They found no extremism in them whatsoever.

Nah, really?  I could have told them that without even reading the damn thing.  So basically this whole scandal has boiled down to some zealous police minion giving Nemstov and Milov two week’s worth of free advertising.  Good job boys.

Score: Team Solidarity 3 : Putin 0

Solidarity may be band of “scrubby little opposition organizations [that] have no future,” but if things keep going the way their going, Boris Nemtsov will be wining and dining on American think tank honorariums, hobnobbing with US politicos, and testifying in front of Congress for years to come.  Wait, haven’t they done a bit of this already?

Well, let’s just say that Nemtsov’s future is looking a bit brighter thanks to his efforts to paint himself as a repressed dissident.  On Tuesday, Nemtsov reported that the cops seized another 100,000 copies of Putin. The Result. Ten Years. in Smolensk.  I’ve already noted how the cops seized 100,000 copies of the Nemtsov and Milov report last week in St. Petersburg.  The act was clearly a way to prevent activists from distributing the screed to potential investors at the St. Petersburg International ..read more

Two things hit me as I emerged from the Oktyabrskaya metro station on Saturday morning to check out the KPRF May Day march.  First was that God himself must have been smiling down on the KPRFers.  After several days of on and off rain, his holiness decided to part the clouds, let the sun shine through, and let Russian commies do their thing without the hindrance of rainfall.  The second thing that hit me was that unlike most, or should I say every political rally I’ve been to, the Communists began marching on time.  Who would have ever guessed Communists to be prompt.  And they say Leninist discipline is dead.  As soon as I pushed through the heavy glass metro doors, I had to quicken my step to catch up with the dancing red flags on the move.

Luckily, ..read more

The results of the mayoral election in Sochi were as expected.  United Russia’s candidate Anatoly Pakhomov won.  No repeat of  the Murmansk mayoral contest allowed. The losers, Solidarity’s Boris Nemtsov and the Communist Party candidate Yuri Dzaganiya, have already charged massive fraud, dirty campaign tricks, and use of a variety “administrative resources” to hoist Pakhomov to victory.  Both candidates were systematically barred from local television, their billboards removed, and campaign literature confiscated.  Local Sochi tv even smeared poor Nemtsov with a 20 minute film claiming he was a South Korean spy. And what dastardly plot was he hatching for the east Asian nation? Conspiring to move the Olympics to Seoul.  As if.

Early voting served as the perfect opportunity for stuffing the box in favor of Pakhmonov. And if that wasn’t enough to tip the balance, then mobile poll buses were dispatched to the Abkhaz border.  Last week, Sochi’s ..read more

The election circus in Sochi has some new developments.

The alleged polonium murderer Andrei Lugovoi won’t be running.  The LDPR announced that it will go with a different candidate.  According to the NY Times, the reason for the move is because Lugovoi “would have been at a disadvantage because he was not from the Sochi region, though it also seemed that his candidacy would have been awkward for the government.”  I guess that awkwardness doesn’t extend to having him in the Duma. Oh well . . .

But the big news concerns this week’s piss ammonia chloride attack on “Kremlin critic” Boris Nemtsov.  As I said in a post on the incident, Nemtsov immediately charged Nashi with the assault.  Nashi has not only emphatically denied the charge, they have also decided sue Nemtsov for court for the “slander.”  “The “Nashi” Movement is scandalized by the accusation,” reads a Nashi press release, “and ..read more

On Tuesday, Nashi pulled off its best prank yet on the hapless Russian opposition.  In the words of Nezavisimaya gazeta, the stunt “will undoubtedly go down in the history of Russian youth politics as the greatest failure in the last ten years.”  Nashi is known for its acts of political trickery and harassment.  Over the last few years they’ve hounded British Ambassadors, distributed toilet paper editions of Kommersant, and sent Christmas presents to foreign leaders.  But their latest salvo was priceless.

It went down as follows.  About a week ago, Mikhail Volkhonsky, a Nashi activist from Yaroslavl contacted Ilya Yashin saying he was willing to give testimony about Nashi’s spy operation against the opposition. Volkhonsky claimed to have been spying on the Yaroslavl chapter of Kasparov’s outfit, United Civil Front, as well as gathered information on the opposition in neighboring cities.  According to Yashin, Volkhonsky claimed that he had a video ..read more