Moscow Deputy Mayor Aleksandr Gorbenko, who has been heavily involved in negotiations with opposition leaders over an upcoming rally on February 4, said the square would only be opening because the contract to build a parking garage there will be expiring within the next week.

“Neither the Moscow mayor’s office nor the Moscow city government held any deliberate intent to freeze construction work on Triumfalnaya Square,” he said.

The announcement came a day after approximately 30 people were arrested during a Strategy 31 protest in defense of free assembly on the boundaries of the square.

Oppositionist activists in the Strategy 31 campaign have long contended that the decision to fence off their traditional meeting space was a politically motivated attempt to drive protesters out to more secluded parts of the city. There were no signs of construction being carried out since the barrier was erected.

Since city authorities refused to grant organizers a permit to hold the rally, police cordoned off Moscow’s Pushkin Square to prevent protesters from gathering. However, the approximately 1000 people who showed up in spite of the ban were allowed to enter the square after passing through a police inspection point.

After being denied their permit, rally organizers said they were reclassifying the rally as a public meeting with State Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomarev from the A Just Russia party, who is also a member of Udaltsov’s Left Front movement. Speaking to the crowd, Ponomarev addressed the issue of political prisoners in Russia.

“Today in Russia there are around several thousand political prisoners. These people are persecuted under administrative and criminal charges, although it’s obvious that the motives for the persecution are purely political,” Ponomarev said.

He added that while prisoners such as Udaltsov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are widely known, the vast majority of persecuted individuals receive little or no publicity.

While organizers asked ralliers to leave politically-charged posters at home to keep police interference at a minimum, a number of activists came armed with banners and prominently displayed them to the press. The police, however, did nothing in response.

Rallies in support of Udaltsov, who has been on a dry hunger strike for nearly a month, are being held all across Russia.

On December 25, Moscow’s Tverskoy Regional Court sentenced Udaltsov to a third prison sentence of ten days, this time for disobeying police orders at a rally back in October. Earlier in the month he was convicted of “jaywalking.”

Where the Russian justice system has failed to step up to the plate, the Financial Times has taken up the slack:

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Documents from Mr Kolesnikov, together with a Financial Times investigation, help to lift the veil on the history of Bank Rossiya, whose shareholders include several men with close links to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s supreme leader, including the son of his cousin. Yury Kovalchuk and Niko­lai Shamalov, two of its biggest shareholders, were co-founders with Mr Putin of a lakeside dacha enclave outside St Petersburg.

These men from Russia’s second city are seen by many businessmen and bankers as the core of a new generation of Putin-era oligarchs, combining wealth with links to the country’s top leadership just as their predecessors during the Boris Yeltsin years had done. This is despite Mr Putin’s pledge nearly 12 years ago to eliminate oligarchs as a class.

Now that Mr Putin plans to return as president in elections next March, after four years as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, claims of a new system of crony capitalism are under scrutiny.

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The paper trail Mr Kolesnikov has disclosed to the FT appears to show for the first time how two Bank Rossiya shareholders – Mr Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov, a former KGB colonel – received via an offshore company funds originally donated for equipment for St Petersburg hospitals, just as they bought their bank stakes.

The documents then appear to show that these same funds and offshore companies may have helped finance the first in a string of Bank Rossiya acquisitions of financial assets from Gazprom, the state-controlled gas producer. Some investors allege the deals that followed were quasi-privatisations that helped to drain billions of dollars in value out of a gas group that had come to symbolise Russia’s commodities-fuelled resurgence. Bank Rossiya rejects this as “nonsense”, saying its growth is due to its professional management and successful strategy as a universal bank. The bank’s assets stood at Rbs274bn ($8.9bn) by October 1, up from Rbs6.7bn at the start of 2004 – a compound annual growth rate of more than 60 per cent.

Read the full article at the Financial Times.

“It’s a sign of the ineffectiveness of the system of government on the whole when, in order to resolve a basic question, one needs to appeal to the president, governmental representative or governor of a large region,” he said.

He also complained that “governors find out about decisions made by the government from the media – decisions that concern them personally, not things about what the socio-political course is going to be like over the next ten years or about international decisions, but about concrete economic decisions,” Medvedev stressed.

“The authorities have become alienated from one another,” he went on. “Even the governors, who I speak to often – they’re also falling out of the global flow of communication.”

“This means that our structures are bad; they don’t work,” Medvedev said in sum.

The comments come after the president’s recent announcement that he would not be running for reelection in March 2012, and that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would be running in his stead. Moreover, the two admitted that they had already agreed on this course of action at the beginning of Medvedev’s presidency in 2008.

Over the course of his tenure, Medvedev has often made liberal-spirited statements that project an image of progressive leadership and contrast with Putin’s more overtly authoritarian sensibilities. While analysts have long clashed over whether the president’s sentiments actually have any bearing on state policy, the revelation that he was never intended to remain in office longer than four years gives credence to the view that they were never much more than show.

The decision was announced at a press conference on Wednesday, which the oppositionists used to discuss cooperative tactics and strategies. “Under the current conditions, we feel that the December 4 parliamentary elections will be illegitimate,” says the declaration. “We call on citizens to boycott these shameful ‘elections’ in any rational way.”

“We call on all honest citizens to come out on December 4 to protests that will be held on the central squares of Russia’s cities and villages,” the declaration goes on.

Among the signees to the document were Solidarity co-leader Garry Kasparov, the organization’s political council organizer Denis Bilunov, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, Islamic Committee of Russia founder Geydar Dzhemal, and leading activists Yury Mukhin, Anatoly Baranov, and Aleksandr Krasnov.

Garry Kasparov said that Russians must ignore the elections and begin building a parallel political reality using contemporary technology, referring to Leonid Volkov’s internet project “Democracy 2.”

Aleksandr Krasnov proposed using December 4 not as an election day, but as the beginning of an act of civil disobedience that would end with the resignation of the ruling authorities. He insisted that the creation of a new political reality is only possible once the current one has been destroyed.

To express their discontent with the illegitimacy of the elections, Krasnov noted that voters can also de-register to strip themselves of voting rights or obtain, but not use, absentee ballots (which in Russia are available from polling stations) to symbolize that they will not be participating.

Anatoly Baranov argued that the only way to carry out the boycott is for every citizen to take their absentee ballot and bring it out to a protest.

A recent survey carried out by the Levada Center showed that more than half of Russians don’t believe that the upcoming elections will be free or fair. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they were certain that the December 4 proceedings will be no more than an imitation of an election and that the government determines who will hold seats in the State Duma.

On Sunday evening, about 100 people gathered to protest across from the Sochi railway station, many with their children. Posters were raised that read “government of the RF, step down!”, “the government is scorning the people!”, “the Olympic law is against the constitution!” and others.

Addressing the crowd, lead protesters explained that entire families in Sochi were being thrown out onto the streets, their homes and land being taken away, and their belongings crushed by bulldozers – in their words, hundreds of Sochi residents have been made homeless.

Much was said about the lawlessness of the judicial and executive branches of government, corruption in the law enforcement system, and that the ruling party will use any excuse to drive out Sochi residents if it means there will be more room for the wealthy. The protesters also issued a call for people to not vote for the “anti-people” party United Russia in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Irina Brovkina, who organized the event, said local authorities have thus far ignored their protests because the group has been speaking out against the leading United Russia party.

Despite an invitation from organizers, no officials from the United Russia leadership showed up at the protest.

The protesters suffered from numerous provocations during their demonstration, with groups of young people verbally harassing them and two passers-by attempting to grab their megaphone and shout pro-United Russia slogans.

The preparations for Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Olympics have been fraught with violations to human and civil rights, labor rights, and the environment almost since day one. A federal law regulating the organization of the preparation for the games was passed in December 2007, which has then been amended to include provisions allowing land and property to be confiscated by the state if it lies in the way of plans for Olympic facility construction. According to the amendments, a property owner has one month to decide what amount of compensation he wants for his property, which will then undergo analysis by an independent assessor contracted by the state-owned corporation Olimpstroy and the Krasnodarsky Krai regional government. If the amount of compensation does not suit the owner, the case is to be looked at by a court, whose decision is to be immediately carried out.

However, many families have complained that the amount of compensation proposed by the authorities is low or that alternative housing – in rural mountain villages or adjacent to airport radar beacons – is incomparable to their homes in the seaside Imeretinskaya Valley.

Meanwhile, according to Kasparov.ru, Russian authorities say that the problem of compensating the evicted residents is practically resolved.

“There, behind my back, in the past, remains bribery, abuse of authority, corruption and all that is negative – today there is none of that,” he announced during a meeting with Kostroma city police.

A ministry-administered “reassessment” of Russia’s police officers was carried out across the country on August 1, during which “issues of questionable declarations of income, real estate and financial transactions came to light,” Nurgaliyev explained.

Of the more than 875 thousand officers who underwent the reassessment, about 183 thousand were fired.

According to the minister, “only the best of the best remain in the new structure.”

Worth noting is that Vice Minister of Internal Affairs Sergei Gerasimov admitted on August 2 that there had been incidents of corruption during the reassessment procedures, albeit “minimal” ones.

The new federal law “On the Police,” Which went into effect March 1, renames Russia’s police forces from the “militsiya” to the “politsiya” and tightens control over how they operate. Part of the reforms involves cutting 22% of the force by 2012 down to 1,106,472.

On August 9, a Moscow regional court threw out a slander case by investigator Pavel Karpov against a group of human rights activists who say Karpov was found to have stolen budgetary money during the Magnitsky investigation.

Meanwhile, another slander lawsuit by Federal Prosecutor Andrei Pechegin against Magnitsky’s colleague, lawyer Jamison Firestone, is still ongoing. Pechegin is demanding that Firestone recant his statements that the prosecutor worked to hinder an objective investigation of the theft of 5.4 billion rubles from the Russian federal budget – which Magnitsky was investigating prior to his death – and also for persecuting Magnitsky.

Also on Tuesday, Magnitsky’s colleagues made a request for materials on 20 rejected complaints that he had made while being held in a Moscow pretrial detention facility, mostly regarding his deteriorating health condition.

For example, Magnitsky filed formal complaints that he was being denied medical procedures to treat pancreatitis and gallstones, that he was being unlawfully persecuted, and that his other rights were being violated. However, Prosecutor Pechegin had rejected these complaints and responded that there had been no physical or psychological pressure on Magnitsky and that there was no basis for any reaction on his part.

Russia has recently come under increasing international pressure as a result of Sergei Magnitsky’s death. On July 27, the US State Department announced a visa ban on several dozen Russia officials connected with the case, including a number from Russia’s federal security services, which the US considers party to Magnitsky’s “torture and murder.”

Russia responded with a statement that it would be introducing retaliatory sanctions against a group of American officials. Reports surfaced on Wednesday that the list had been prepared, which the Russian Internal Ministry denied.

On June 22, a small group of protesters stood outside the Moscow mayor’s office holding posters reading “We had a beekeeper for a mayor and now we have a tile layer,” “put a stop to the tile aggression” and “Sobyanin! Enough digging around in the budget money!”

“There are serious grounds to suspect an element of corruption,” said Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, present at the protest. “Stones are being laid at a rapid pace, the quality is low, the stones are swelling up, some parts are collapsing.” He called for the work to be temporarily halted until an experiment could be carried out on the tiles.

Police initially tried to detain the protesters, but chose not to in the end.

At the end of this past February, Moscow Vice Mayor Pyotr Biryukov announced plans to tear up 4 million cubic meters of sidewalk pavement and replace it with stone tiles in 2011.

The Russian press explains the mayor’s interest in the project as connected with the fact that his wife, Irina Rubinchik, owns a stone tile business. Whether or not the stones being laid in Moscow were purchased from her company is unclear. But according to Novaya Gazeta, the entire center of Tyumen was laid with stone tiling while Sobyanin was governor of Tyumen Oblast between 2001 and 2005.

“Many participants of the forum, including myself, were confronted with the fact that mobile phone service entirely disappeared at the entrance to the camp in the Khimki Forest,” Belyakov said on the website of A Just Russia on Tuesday. “Certain police officers told me under condition of anonymity that ‘jammers’ are definitely being used. They even told me where one of them was.”

Belyakov added that he took photographs and video footage of the devices used to jam cell phone service.

“I’ve already sent Ministry of Internal Affairs Chief Rashid Gumarovich Nurgaliyev a deputy inquiry demanding an explanation of the goal of the operation to suppress the mobile phone signal in the Khimki Forest,” he said.

ITAR-TASS reported late on Tuesday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs is denying that any jamming devices were used at Anti-Seliger and accused Belyakov of speaking “rubbish.”

The forum, dubbed “Anti-Seliger,” was held in the Khimki Forest outside Moscow from June 17-20. According to organizers, the goal of the event was to give oppositionist, environmental, and other activists an opportunity to share their experiences and learn from one another. Approximately 3000 people took part.

Over the course of the forum, lectures were given by prominent journalists, political analysts, and human rights activists, including Leonid Parfyonov, Artemy Troitsky, Stanislav Belkovsky, Oleg Kashin, Aleksei Navalny, Yelena Panfilova, Valery Panyushkin, and Igor Chestin.

Anti-Seliger was organized as an alternative to Seliger, an annual forum held by Russia’s Federal Agency for Youth Issues (Rosmolodezh) and the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi. Seliger is notorious for its grotesque displays of anti-oppositionist propaganda; past targets of harassment have included United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov, leading human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Nashi leaders have admitted that the group – and, by extension, the forum – were created “to prevent an Orange Revolution” ahead of Russia’s 2008 presidential election. According to public records, Rosmolodezh head Vasily Yakemenko plans to spend no less than 178 million rubles ($6.37 million USD) on Seliger 2011.