While it would be ideal to rely on the Russian justice system to bring these people to justice, time has shown that some type of additional pressure is needed. Enter Sergei’s Law, a US congressional bill that would bar the Russians involved in Magnitsky’s death from entering the United States:

If passed, the bill would send a signal to the Russian government that the treatment of people like Magnitsky is simply unacceptable and will not go without tangible consequences.

As the video shows, more information on how you can help get Sergei’s Law passed can be found at SergeisLaw.com.

—

“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:

Kasparov: “The May 5 rally and the regime’s crackdown tell the same story from two sides: Putin’s days are numbered. The people are sick of him and won’t quit and the Kremlin is panicky and confused. The regime’s overreactions – bringing in special forces from outside of Moscow to pressure the crowd, raiding cafes and harassing people on the street for wearing ribbons — will only increase the public’s anger. The Kremlin’s senseless crackdown is the opposition’s best recruiting tool.”

Kasparov: “Historically speaking, it takes a while for the Russian people to wake up and rouse to action, but once they do, watch out! That point has been passed now. People are getting arrested twice in one day! They aren’t giving up, they aren’t scared anymore. Putin has no plan for this so he falls back on the KGB playbook of violence and repression. [Alexei] Navalny and [Sergei] Udaltsov were released quickly because the regime is panicky and unable to chart a stable course. People sense this change in the atmosphere.”

Kasparov: “Being at the rally was a special feeling because of all the flags mixed together from start to finish. There were the red flags of left, the orange flags of Solidarity, all side by side and chanting “Putin must go!” This is the ultimate vindication of the United Civil Front concept I was vilified for in 2005 when I said everyone who was against Putin should be welcome, regardless of ideology. This kind of unity is unheard of in Russia. The ideological divides have been so big and deep they have been easily exploited by the ruling regimes to split the opposition. Now the opposition is united and our power is magnified tremendously.”

Kasparov: “In the Soviet days, a common slogan was “the five-year plan in four years!” A new slogan is that we can finish Putin’s six-year term in two years!”

For further reference:

Garry Kasparov on Twitter & Facebook
Report and photos on Boris Nemtsov’s blog
Video of police raid on the Jean-Jacques café

Many citizen videos show that the heavy police lines were well inside the rally’s official perimeter long before it was scheduled to conclude at 7:30 p.m. This illegal presence served no purpose other than to provoke conflict. All of the clashes and all of the arrests took place inside the authorized protest zone. Tensions were already high with the city paralyzed under such heavy police presence that it approached martial law. Several of the protest’s leaders, Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, and Sergei Udaltsov, were actually arrested at the stage of the rally. Another protest leader, Garry Kasparov, asked, “Why is there such police pressure against an officially sanctioned rally? Every single one of our marches have been peaceful, so why provoke clashes now? The only reason is that they are nervous and want to portray us as dangerous radicals.”

The Kremlin’s repression tactics were the same they have used against the “Strategy 31″ marchers, but the results are very different when there are tens of thousands of protestors instead of hundreds. The protestors were not the “extremists” advertised by the state-controlled media. They were citizens fed up with years of lies and corruption. Today’s events make it clearer than ever that Russian society will not be satisfied with anything less than Putin’s exit from power, and that the protests will continue until he is gone. It is equally clear that Putin has chosen the path of confrontation and that he will not shy away from violence against the Russian people.

Videos and further reading:

Beaten protestor carried away as crowd chants “Murderers!” at police
Frank Luntz was at the rally and reports for Fox News
Photo gallery of the day’s violence
Remarkable photo of a child facing rows of riot police

Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov and three other activists were driving to a meeting on April 29 in the Russian city of Yaroslavl when police stopped their vehicle and demanded that it be checked for weapons and narcotics.

“On the way to Yaroslavl, where a meeting between civil activists and representatives of opposition movements to plan for [protests on] May 6 was planned for today, our car was stopped by traffic police,” Udaltsov wrote on his Twitter account. “We spent more than an hour at their post – supposedly to check the car for weapons and narcotics.”

“Our plans are ruined – we’re not going to be on time for the meeting,” he wrote later.

According to Udaltsov, the police eventually admitted that they found nothing in the car and even issued an apology to the activists.

“I believe that their aim was to disrupt the meeting. But we’re going to Yaroslavl anyway,” he said.

Russian opposition forces are planning to hold a massive march – dubbed the “March of Millions” – in Moscow on May 6, the day before Vladimir Putin is set to be reinaugurated as president. The march is planned to begin at 3 pm and go from Triumfalnaya Square down Tverskaya Street and end next to the Kremlin on Manezhnaya Square.

Organizers applied for a permit from Moscow City Hall on April 23, but city authorities rejected the application, saying that the march would disrupt preparations for the May 9 Victory Day parade. Instead, they proposed that it be held on the Frunzenskaya Naberezhnaya – outside of the center of the capital. Nevertheless, organizers continue to insist on holding the march in the original location.

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.

Olga Shorina, press secretary of the Solidarity opposition movement, said on Wednesday that “the relevant paperwork is currently being completed.”

Mokhnatkin was greeted at the gates of Torzhka’s Penal Colony No. 4 by civil and political activists and supporters.

The prisoner was arrested after stepping in to defend an elderly woman from a police officer who was “dragging her towards a bus” during one of the most notoriously brutal Strategy 31 crackdowns in the history of that protest movement. Mokhnatkin was arrested and sentenced to 2.5 years confinement for “using force against a government representative.”

He was among 37 political prisoners on a list given by opposition leaders to the president to pardon a month earlier in the wake of massive protests.

President Medvedev signed Mokhnatkin’s pardon on April 23 – almost two years after he was sentenced.

As Mokhnatkin said at the time he was charged, he was not taking part in the Strategy 31 rally, but simply happened to be walking by and felt the need to come to the defense of the 70-year-old woman being mistreated by the police officer.

A court in Saratov fined Aleksandr Strygin 500 rubles (~17 USD) for posting the picture five times on Facebook and LiveJournal, declaring him guilty of an administrative statute against “propaganda or public demonstration of Nazi symbols.”

While the amount of the fine is not itself very damaging, Strygin worries that his planned electoral run for Saratov Regional Duma representative may now be in jeopardy. As an activist from the local branch of the unregistered oppositionist People’s Freedom Party, the blogger said that the court’s ruling might be used as an excuse to keep him from running for the post in the upcoming October election.

The case against Strygin was filed by the Saratov branch of the federal Center for Extremism Prevention, commonly known as Center “E.” The center is notorious for persecuting opposition figures under the guise of fighting extremism.

Strygin noted that when it became clear he would be charged for the posts, he came to woe the fact these are the sort of “crimes” that Russian taxpayer money is spent to uncover.

A group of supporters of former Astrakhan mayoral candidate Oleg Shein from the A Just Russia party were gathered on the southern city’s central square when provocators from a pro-Kremlin youth group began to harass them. When police refused to intervene, the protesters were forced to defend themselves.

News of the arrest came from activist Georgy Alburov, who posted numerous photographs of the rally on Twitter.

Also through Twitter, A Just Russia deputy Dmitry Gudkov reported that Yashin was released later Wednesday evening. It was unclear if he faced any charges or if any of the provacators had also been arrested.

Earlier in the day, deputies from A Just Russia left the State Duma in protest after receiving an unsatisfactory answer from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in regards to Shein’s hunger strike.

When A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov asked what Putin thought about the situation, Putin responded that he didn’t know all the details but had “been informed about all of it.”

Putin continued to respond to other questions as the A Just Russia members left the hall. When a loud murmur arose, Putin complained that he found it “difficult to communicate.”

Oleg Shein began his hunger strike on March 15 after losing what he says was a corrupt mayoral election. The winner, Mikhail Stolyarov, is a member of Putin’s leading United Russia party. A number of supporters have joined Shein in his strike. Gudkov told RIA Novosti on Wednesday that the ex-candidate’s condition has since markedly deteriorated.

While Astrakhan regional governor Aleksandr Zhilkin has said that a reelection would be the best way to end the dispute, Stolyarov would have to agree. The latter has thus far refused, arguing that even if there were some falsifications during the election, the majority of Astrakhan residents still supported him.