The man was being held in a cell for administrative detainees at Moscow’s Khorosheva-Mnevniki station. A federal warrant had been issued for his arrest.

Federal investigators said an investigation into the incident was underway. They added that preliminary information suggested the cause of death was heart failure.

The detainee’s death is particularly suspicious because three police officers from the same station were arrested last October on suspicion of murdering a 22-year-old Muscovite. The officers allegedly had a conflict over money with the victim, whose body was found with nearly 80 stab wounds on September 11.

In connection with the murder case, the chiefs at the Khorosheva-Mnevniki station were summarily fired on October 31. A commission from Moscow’s central police headquarters was sent to reevaluate the station’s entire staff.

This latest death also comes one month after a man died in a Krasnoyarsky Krai hospital after providing evidence to investigators at a police station. During their discussion, police say the man acted aggressively and tried to leave the station. One of the officers forced him back into his chair. Soon after, the man began to complain that he felt ill. Police called an ambulance and he was sent to a hospital, where he died two weeks later. The cause of his death is still under investigation.

Deaths in police custody figured as one of the largest scandals of 2012 in Russia. In particular, a man detained for public intoxication died after police sodomized him with a champagne bottle, leading to the dismissal of Tatarstan’s chief of police. The cases also serve as a reminder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose death in pretrial detention sparked a dispute that has evolved into a diplomatic firestorm between Russia and the United States.

The figures came in a statement released by the Russian Federal Investigative Committee on Sunday.

“Within the period analyzed, investigative agencies worked before filing charges to determine compensation for the state, citizens, and legal entities in return for damages caused by corruption,” said the statement. “The damages consisted of 7.9 billion rubles, compensated by 1.3 billion rubles [42.1 million USD]. Property totaling 1.2 billion rubles [38.9 million USD) was seized.”

According to the investigation, there were 16,603 criminal corruption cases against civil servants in 2012. Among these figures were some who held particularly high legal statuses:

• Sub-federal legislative agency deputies: 13
• Municipal electoral agency deputies: 210
• Municipal agency election officials: 261
• Judges: 2
• Electoral commission members: 19
• Prosecutors and prosecutor aides: 19
• Federal Investigative Committee employees (the same committee that released this report): 13
• Russian Interior Ministry preliminary investigation managers and investigators: 56
• Federal Drug Control Service investigators: 7
• Lawyers: 39

The release of the report coincided with International Anti-Corruption Day, which began under the auspices of the United Nations in 2003.

The report also comes on the heels of a wave of corruption cases against members of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The cases evoked such a wide resonance in Russian society that the Investigative Committee asked the ministry to refrain from “spinning” the case and turn over all relevant information to the committee.

Earlier this week, deputies from the United Russia party introduced a bill that would label non-governmental organizations that accept foreign funding as “foreign agents.” While the bill’s sponsors claim that the law is intended to inform the public of which organizations are purely Russian and which are financed from abroad, analysts and oppositionists are furious that it will effectively, as Mark Urnov put it, “allow people to discredit any organization that is not United Russia or that displeases the authorities.” The bill comes right on the heels of one that significantly increases fines for violating regulations on holding public protests, much to the chagrin of the recent wave of anti-government political activists.

Writing for Yezhednevny Zhurnal, journalist Anton Orekh delves into the blatantly illogical nature of the Kremlin’s newest project.

Enemies or Fools
By Anton Orekh
July 4, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

Now they’re in just as much of a hurry to pass a law concerning “foreign agents.” Just like they rushed to pass the new law on public protests, now they’re all in a flurry over this one. It will, of course, be passed. They’ll require us to take account more often, to take the label of “foreign agent.” They would love, of course, to add more labels as well. Like when during the war signs saying “provocateur” or “partisan” were stuck on people about to be hung, or six-pointed stars were sewn onto the shirts of Jews in the ghettos and camps. So that everyone knows that this non-profit organization employee is a “foreign agent.”

Naturally, they’re making references to the experiences of other countries. It’s characteristic of us to refer to other countries when we need to limit something or introduce insane fines or punishments. Never when there’s something positive to adopt. The creation of a system for the courts, or the parliament, or the army, or for science and education – there’s a great deal that’s good there. Nope, we’re just interested in the fines. Fines comparable to ones they have abroad – when we have incomparable salaries.

There’s only one way that our people interpret the phrase “foreign agent.” Spy! The agent of a foreign intelligence agency or something like that. Which is to say – an enemy. And in telling the public that your organization is a “foreign agent,” you, as the author of the law intended, are thus telling everyone that you are an enemy. An enemy of Russia.

A wave of awareness is now on the rise. People are saying, what’s the deal here, what is it you’re doing?! Because if this law is passed, even Putin’s favorite foundation Give Life and the less loved but universally known and “significant” Gorbachev Foundation would fall under the definition of “foreign agents.” And most importantly – the Russian Orthodox Church! It also fits the description of a “foreign agent!” A real horror, isn’t it?

Don’t you worry. The law will be passed all the same. But, just like all of our laws, it’s going to be interpreted loosely. It wasn’t written in order to interfere with our bureaucrat priests or Chulpan Khamatovа or Mikhail Gorbachev. Their institutions will get off, at the very worst, with a write-up. But most likely the government will just close its eyes. There’s no saying who under what circumstances will fall subject to which laws. Laws are instituted not in order to regulate our lives (but in normal countries normal laws are needed for just this reason), but in order to repress those the government deems to be undesirable, to make their lives harder, to put obstacles in their way, and to shove sticks in their tires. This is all done so that, if the need arises, they can apply rules that don’t even actually exist in the law. And that’s why Pussy Riot is locked up right now, for something that they didn’t actually do.

The intent of the authors of the law on “foreign agents” is something I can understand. What I don’t understand is another thing. Why are they hiding the enemies of the people? Why are they limiting themselves to taking half-measures? They’re giving the status of “spy” and “enemy of the state” to a huge swath of different offices. These are spy agencies that are financed from abroad. They are financed with a single goal: to undermine our system, to break Russia apart – and when Russia does break apart, to dismember her, occupy her, take control of her natural resources, and…it’s scary even to imagine what they want to do to our people. Right? And if that’s not right, then why are foreign governments setting up sabotage organizations on our territory?

So what do we have here? An entire network of hostile, subversive organizations are at work in Russia, but the state, instead of defusing them, is only requiring them to increase their financial paperwork and write up twice as many certificates. What kind of way is this to deal with our enemies? Instead of catching and punishing them, we’re going to make them hang tags on themselves and send them off into the world to keep on crapping all over it?!

I’ve had questions like this for a while. Remember what a whirlwind rose up after a group of oppositionists visited the American embassy. And it turned out that a visit to the American embassy was an incident of treason. So why is this embassy still functioning in general? If the very act of going there constitutes treason? Why do we still have relations with a country whose embassy carries out no functions besides radically extremist ones?

Forgive me, but I just don’t see any other logic. If a trip to the American embassy is treason, then it means that America is our enemy. Why should we have the embassy of an enemy in Moscow? If anyone who gets money from abroad is officially – officially! – considered to be a foreign agent, which is to say an enemy, then why aren’t these people in the Kolyma Gulag, and why aren’t their organizations closed down?

I believe my logic to be beyond reproach, and the authors of these laws are either the accomplices of our enemies or they’re simply fools. Here, there’s simply no other option.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

“We are going to the interrogation on Friday. We are going to demand a return [of the money] because we consider its confiscation to be absolutely illegal,” said lawyer Genri Reznik.

“I am a rational person and I make a good living. I don’t have stock in Gazprom; I earn money through hard work. And where I keep this money – in envelopes, in a box, in jars – that’s my personal business,” Sobchak told journalists.

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, the activist also said that she preferred to keep her money on hand because she doesn’t trust the Russian banking system. “What’s criminal about me keeping my savings in envelopes? Where else should they be, in toilet paper or in magazines?” she asked.

The cash was confiscated on June 11 as part of a ten-apartment raid by Russia’s Investigative Committee. At the time, officials said the money was taken because “the source that the funds were acquired from has not been established.” Investigators now say that they are looking into whether or not Sobchak has paid due taxes on the money, and also checking if it is counterfeit.

The raids, which were mostly on apartments belonging to organizers of a tumultuous May 6 protest, came a day before the largest anti-government protest that Russia has seen in years, with estimates ranging between 50 and 200 thousand participants, 650 arrests, and 47 injured protesters.

—

“An Experiment,” or “Our Police Watch Over Us”

Everyone knows what insanity is going on in our capital, now already for the fourth day in a row. People are arrested for having any type of opposition symbols. For instance, my friends were taken to a police station on May 7 just because they were walking around the city with white and red ribbons.

So consider this: my good friend Pavel Tarasov was walking around the city on May 9 with a lifelike model of an AK-74. He walked from Lubyanka to Pushkin Square past the State Duma, past Manezh, along Tverskaya, past the mayor’s office, along Pushkinskaya. And not a single cop stopped him!!!! Not one! To see this happen was amusing and terrifying. If I’d had a white ribbon, I would’ve been detained after going 10 meters. But a man hanging out with an AK doesn’t stand out to anyone. The police officers just looked at him and then looked away to the side.

I would like to ask what it is that our police actually does? Detain students and beat women? Or does it protect public order? At the end of the day, the work of the police gets a greasy, solid F for effort. Not even a D. They haven’t earned it. And they get an F for arresting people walking around with white ribbons, since they’re obviously looking to blow up the Kremlin.

And moreover, in this case it was just harmless Pasha, but what if it was an ill psychiatric patient or a terrorist?

Here are the photos.

Near a police bus in Gazetnaya Alley:

We even stopped to eat in McDonalds:

Walking along Tverskaya:

Pasha is angry that the police have no reaction to his gun:

Outside the mayor’s office:

We even passed a cordon. No inspection:

Walkway underneath Pushkin Square:

On Pushkin Square:

As Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports:

When Moscow City Court Judge Svetlana Gavrilina scolded three government inspectors this week for issuing construction permits to build on the site of a federally protected park, it was clear that an unusual ruling was on the way.

“More and more monstrous buildings are springing up all across Moscow! More and more trees are being chopped down and there is less and less air to breathe!” Gavrilina said. “If you want your children to die of cancer, then that is your right. But I won’t have it!”

Still visibly angry nearly an hour later, Gavrilina ruled that the Moscow city government illegally felled hundreds of trees to make way for a three-story building on the site of a park at the historic Stroganov estate in Moscow.

The ruling was an unusual rebuke to city hall from Moscow’s usually docile courts. It was also a most unlikely victory for Sasha Andreyeva, a newly elected opposition deputy in Moscow’s Lefortovo District Council.

Andreyeva, a former English teacher who has been in office for a little more than a month, has decided to take on what she believes is a widespread practice in which city officials skim off kickbacks by commissioning construction projects on any available patch of land in the capital.

Her battle with the mayor’s office is a sign of things to come in the Russian capital following big gains for opposition candidates in Moscow’s district council elections last month, analysts say. Such grassroots assertiveness is also something likely to be seen more often across the country in the wake of opposition victories in mayoral elections in Tolyatti and Yaroslavl.

“This is democracy in action,” says Pavel Salin, an analyst at the Moscow-based Center for Political Assessments. “Politically and socially active citizens are standing up not only for their own interests but the interests of others who live around them.”

Salin says the Andreyeva case gives cause for optimism. “First, that a person has defended their interests against the Moscow authorities in a Moscow court,” he says. “And second, that this person was elected to the municipal assembly.”

With Prime Minister Vladimir Putin set to be reinaugurated as president on May 7, the fight over the Stroganov estate construction project is the latest indication that the era of tightly managed top-down politics he established more than a decade ago might be coming to a close.

As the authorities focused all their efforts – and administrative resources – on securing Putin’s victory in Russia’s March 4 presidential election, hundreds of opposition candidates slipped under the radar and won a third of the seats in Moscow’s 123 district councils on the same day. Their ranks include colorful figures like professional poker player Maksim Kats to ordinary citizens like journalism student Vera Kichanova and Andreyeva, a former English teacher.

With scant financial resources, the 32-year-old Andreyeva campaigned door to door and focused on bread-and-butter issues whose increasing social currency reflects the political awakening that Russia has undergone since the mass protests following December’s disputed parliamentary elections.

Andreyeva, who has lived her whole life in eastern Moscow’s Lefortovo District, told RFE/RL that she was inspired to enter politics because she wanted to have a tangible impact on issues that touch the everyday lives of Muscovites.

“You can’t constantly run around with a bucket trying to catch all the drips from the holes in the ceiling. You have to acquire political power and not rely on others,” she says. “You need to work to make sure that the law functions normally so you don’t have to resolve situations like [the Stroganov construction project] in court. You have to make sure that such things could never happen in the first place.”

The Stroganov project attracted Andreyeva’s attention months before she even considered seeking a district council seat. In June 2011, she and other local residents discovered that a prized patch of land on the grounds of the Stroganov estate had been earmarked for a three-story building that would dwarf the 18th-century estate. Three hundred trees were rapidly felled and within months construction was under way.

Following the April 23 court ruling, it appears that construction will be stopped and the building scrapped, although lawyers for city hall say they will appeal the ruling.

Andreyeva isn’t the only Moscow district council deputy locking horns with city hall over construction projects. Yelena Tkach of the capital’s Presnya District and Natalya Chernysheva of the Gagarinsky District have also sided with local residents in respective campaigns against buildings commissioned by the city administration.

And in a bid to decentralize political power in Russia’s two largest cities, 15 district council members in Moscow and St. Petersburg appealed to the Constitutional Court on April 25, seeking to dissolve two government bodies controlled by citywide authorities and have their powers transferred to district councils.

Read the full story at RFE/RL.

“Everyone wants to continue working, which is simply wonderful. Whether or not we want to enter the new council or not is generally not an issue. That is the prerogative of the elected president. Everyone is considering this situation very sensibly. That is not a secret. First of all, let other people give it a shot… And secondly, I wouldn’t want to be part of the council in the form it’s going to take for a whole set of moral and ethical reasons,” Panfilova explained.

“I think that, considering the changes that are happening in our country, I’m going to be more useful as a civil activist or member of another group of experts,” she added in an interview with Interfax.

The last session of the current council under President Dmitri Medvedev was held earlier in the day on Saturday. The new council will be formed after Vladimir Putin’s inauguration as president on May 7.

The Presidential Council on Human Rights was originally created in 2004 on the order of then-President Putin. Its ostensible purpose is to cooperate with the head of state to uphold laws concerning human and civil rights, inform the president of the state of affairs in that area, facilitate the development of civil society institutions, and to present proposals to the president to further these ends. However, it is a purely consultative body and lacks any authority to implement its own recommendations, and has been criticized as providing the regime with a mere facade of concern for human and civil rights.

Yashin is also scheduled to speak at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute tonight, April 4 at 5:30 pm.

Watch the talk in full below (in Russian with English interpretation):

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.