On Monday night, the victim, Mikhail Vinyukov, explained the situation to a correspondent with the Kasparov.ru news portal. Vinyukov says he was walking to the store around 9 pm that night when an adult man came up and began whacking him with an metal bar for no ostensible reason. Vinyukov initially managed to fight back, but another man with a metal bar then approached him from behind and began hitting him over the head. The rights advocate eventually managed to escape and ran to a hotel and office complex, where an ambulance was called for him.

Vinyukov was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with “a concussion, a closed head injury, contusions and lacerations of the scalp,” as well as puncture wounds near his shoulder and bruises and lacerations on both legs, according to trauma nurse Mira Kheyshkho. The rights advocate was told he would have to remain hospitalized for an extended period of time.

Additionally, Vinyukov’s mother said that she was called after the attack by an unknown man who asked where her son was.

The activist said he believes that the attack was “organized by a criminal gang” that is working “against those who hinder corruption within government agencies” in the area.

Mikhail Vinyukov is the head of the local Public Service for the Defense of the Rights and Interests of Citizens. About two months ago, he was threatened with murder after releasing an audio recording of a conversation between the city’s resort service and tourism department head, Vladimir Shiroky, and the director of the Lazarevsky Otdykh tourism company, Gavina Panaetova. The recording resulted in Shiroky’s arrest on August 26 for taking bribes from Panaetova.

The recording itself was later posted on the website of well-known whistleblower cop Aleksei Dymovsky. It was recorded by accident when a local resident, sitting in a park near the Lazarevsky Otdykh building, overheard the conversation while making a recording of nature sounds. Dymovsky said the attack on Vinyukov was no doubt “an ordered crime. People don’t just attack people with iron bars. The task was either to kill him or cripple him.”

A host of social activists expressed certainty that the attack on Vinyukov was connected with his efforts to fight corruption, which has risen as a result of preparations for the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Valery Suchkov, founder of the Public Assembly of Sochi, said that Vinyukov’s attack was extremely similar to other recent attacks on anti-corruption public figures. “The cases known to the whole public of reprisals against Communist Party Deputy Lyudmila Shestak, Mestnaya newspaper Editor-in-Chief Arkady Landerov, and now the case of human rights advocate Mikhail Vinyukov, speak to the fact that these attacks were ordered,” he said. “Moreover, all the crimes have the same signature. The public must demand that both the perpetrator and the person who ordered the attack be found, and the situation be put under public control.”

The majority of the rallies took place on Saturday, and came in the wake of two explosions in the Raspadskaya coal mine in Russia’s Kuznetsk Basin on May 8 that left 67 miners dead. In one protest, about 150 opposition activists gathered on Moscow’s Chistie Prudy to stand in solidarity with the miners and demand a governmental response to their grievances. They asked for an objective investigation of the May 8 explosions, punishment for those guilty for the tragedy, and monetary compensation to miners for lost work time.

The Moscow protesters also demanded a stop to the persecution of miners and residents of Mezhdurechensk, a town close to the Raspadskaya mine where riot police arrested approximately 28 people in on May 14 during a protest made up of relatives of miners killed in the accident and their supporters. Criminal charges have been filed against some of those protesters for blocking off a railroad, a move they took out of desperation to draw attention to their grievances.

A rally meant to take place in Mezhdurechensk on Saturday, however, fell apart after an increased police presence intimidated miners into staying off the streets. Former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky, famous in Russia for his work exposing corruption in the country’s police forces, had arrived in the city to support the miners. At the designated time on Saturday, he told the Kasparov.ru online news site, approximately 70 journalists came to the local government building where the rally was supposed to take place. Only an hour later, however, did ten miners arrive and tell Dymovsky that the rest of them had been frightened away from coming to the protest. The police presence, which included officers brought in from other nearby towns, dispersed the ten miners after half an hour.

On Monday, opposition leader Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front issued a press release saying that another rally in support of the Kuznetsk Basin miners would be held in Moscow on May 25. “To this day,” reads the statement, “virtually none of the miners’ demands have been satisfied. Despite the fact that the participants of the demonstration [in Mezhdurechensk on May 14] have been released, the criminal suits against them have not been dropped.”

The organization commented on Saturday’s failed Mezhdurechensk rally by noting that local police and police brought in from other areas scared the population into submission, and referred to an apparent plan by the police dubbed “The Fortress” to intentionally stifle protests.

For more on the Raspadskaya mine explosions and their aftermath:

• Who to Blame in Russia Mine Deaths? – The Wall Street Journal
• Mine Director Replaced After Rebuke From Putin – The New York Times
• Russia’s mine accident relatives ‘targeted by gangs’ – BBC News

According to Dymovsky, the rallies are meant to support five Russians involved in three different criminal suits: two young men and a young woman from Novosibirsk who have been sentenced to 2-5 years in prison for supposedly beating 20 police officers at once, despite their claims that they themselves were the victim; Oleg Ivanov, a regional leader in Omsk who was charged with fraud, violence against a government authority, and abuse of authority after allowing Dymovsky to legally reside in his region; and Krasnodarsky Krai businessman Sergei Kolesnikov, who says that his business has been illegally taken away from him by the local police.

“I want to speak out in defense of real people, not abstract parrots,” said the former officer.

Dymovsky said that iterations of the June 12 rally will be held in Omsk, Novosibirsk, and the Krasnodarsky Krai, and also most likely in the cities of Volgograd, Novorossiysk, Samara, Sochi, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Where precisely Dymovsky himself plans to be that day, he didn’t say.

“Wherever it’s going to be more difficult, that’s where I’ll go,” he said.

Dymovsky added that he’s currently negotiating with a variety of social and political organizations to help coordinate and support the events. In particular, he said, opposition leader and Solidarity bureau member Garry Kasparov has promised to support the initiative. Solidarity Executive Director Denis Bilunov said that bringing his opposition movement and Dymovsky together was a “positive trend.” The ex-major was a featured speaker at Solidarity’s May Day celebration earlier this month.

The plans for the June 12 rally come a month after Dymovsky’s latest video message on April 12, when the ex-major called for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to establish order in the country by November 12, 2010, or face an angry mob on Red Square. While Dymovsky’s original video last November gained widespread media coverage, the ex-major said in April that a media blockade had forced him to resort back to the online video format instead of holding a press conference. The April video has been viewed on YouTube more than 100 thousand times in the past month, in addition to the number of people who viewed it on his website.

Aleksei Dymovsky was fired from the Novorossiysk police soon after posting two videos online that detailed corruption he witnessed within his agency. After fleeing to Moscow in response to threats to himself and his family, Dymovsky held a highly-attended press conference and revealed that he had secretly recorded more than 150 hours of audio in support of his allegations. He was arrested in January on trumped-up charges of fraud, which were dropped in April. His messages have spurred dozens of similar videos from other Russian police officers, state prosecutors, and other government workers from all over Russia. Many people who have come forward to help Dymovsky have found themselves persecuted for their actions. Neither President Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have publically acknowledged Dymovsky’s existence.

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, May Day events in Moscow that had been sanctioned by the city government included five demonstrations, three processions, and eleven rallies. One of the processions was organized by the opposition movement Solidarity, which counted members from a variety of other opposition groups and public organizations among its 500 participants. Prominent figures in the procession included United Civil front leader Garry Kasparov, former Deputy Prime Minister and Solidarity cofounder Boris Nemtsov, and former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky. Participants carried posters, political insignia, and a gigantic Russian flag spanning several meters in length while chanting “Russia without Putin,” “Moscow without Luzhkov,” “Putin is Brezhnev, Putin is Stalin,” “We need the Other Russia,” and “Putin must go,” among other slogans.

Although a smoke bomb was set off at one point during the procession, the police did not move to detain anyone. Protesters believe that a provocateur set off the bomb. Despite that, the procession successfully made its way to Moscow’s riverside Bolotnaya Square, where the event ended with a cultural festival. Police detained several people on the square without explanation, including Andrei Moiseyev, co-leader of Solidarity’s Moscow branch and one of the event’s organizers. Moiseyev was escorted away by police together with a reproduction of a painting by artist Dmitri Vrubel, entitled “The Kiss of Putin and Brezhnev” that he was holding. Also detained were artist activist Pyotr Verzilov, his wife, several musicians, and event co-organizer Sergei Davidis. Police gave no explanations for any of the detentions.

Elsewhere in Moscow, at least five thousand people turned out for a demonstration held by the Communist party. In addition to the Communists themselves, members of the Left Front, the National Bolsheviks, the anti-fascist group Antifa, and anarchist organizations also joined the protest.

The liberal opposition group Yabloko also held a demonstration in Moscow, with approximately 1200 participants. Chief among speakers at the event was Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin, who warned against allowing Prime Minister Putin to return to the presidency in 2012. “We need a new president who won’t rob the people of their rights and freedoms – who will fight not against the opposition, but against corruption,” he said to the crowd.

Another protest dubbed the Day of Anger was held in Moscow by the opposition group Left Front. A wide variety of oppositions, human rights advocates, environmental activists and social justice advocates came together to express their collective grief with Moscow’s ruling elite – in particular, Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Governor Boris Gromov.

Controversy had surrounded plans for the Day of Anger all last week. Left Front leader and event organizer Sergei Udaltsov had said on Wednesday that the city had sanctioned the event, but the mayor’s office denied this the next day. It remained unclear up to the end whether the rally had really been officially sanctioned or not – a vital factor, since participating in an unsanctioned rally in Russia is punishable by law, and many unsanctioned rallies end with participants being beaten and/or arrested by the police. In any case, the rally went on, but Udaltsov was detained at the end. The official reason cited by police was that more people had taken part than Udaltsov had indicated on the application for sanction. According to Left Front press secretary Anastasia Udaltsova, the unofficial version for Udaltsov’s detention, as told by several police officers, was that “representatives of the Moscow government would like to have a chat with him.”

In the city of Kaliningrad, approximately three thousand demonstrators took part in a rally of various opposition groups. According to Kasparov.ru, what began as a traditional May Day demonstration evolved into an anti-government rally. Participants brought signs to the event reading “Peace, work, May – no work, no housing,” and held up tangerines, which have become a symbol of public protest in the city in recent months. Following that, however, protesters began chants demanding for the federal government to resign.

In St. Petersburg, a procession planned by democratic opposition groups was banned by city authorities. Olga Kurnosova, executive director of the pro-democracy group United Civil Front, said that the reason involved the slogan that the protesters had planning to use, which called for St. Petersburg Governor and Putin favorite Valentina Matviyenko to resign. Supposedly, the slogan did not correspond with the slogan written on the application to hold the rally that was filed with the city. Therefore, the procession was banned altogether. Despite that, about seven hundred oppositionists held a stationary demonstration where the procession was supposed to take off from.

A photo gallery of the various events in Moscow is available here at Grani.ru.

Dymovsky is notably more heated in this latest video than the original clips he posted online last year – not surprising, considering that those videos resulted in him being promptly fired from the Novorossiysk police department and forced to flee to Moscow, where he was then arrested and charged with laundering money from the police department’s operational budget. Those charges, which Dymovsky and his supporters maintained were ridiculous and obviously politically motivated, were finally dropped earlier this month.

“You know, from the moment that my first video address was released, already five months have passed,” says the ex-major, addressing President Medvedev. “I think that in that time you could have paid some kind of attention.” But indeed, the Russian president has not once publicly acknowledged the existence of either Dymovsky, his videos, or his allegations. And they certainly would have been hard to miss: Dymovsky’s press conference when he first arrived in Moscow was packed beyond capacity, as few sectors of Russian society disagree on the need for drastic reform of the police. But while Medvedev has made several proposals in the past few months to that end, experts question their efficacy and positive results have yet to be seen.

Dymovsky goes on in his video to accuse the president of “jumping around abroad” and ignoring problems in his own country, before launching into a tirade against a swath of high-ranking government officials, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, for spending their time fighting over money to buy up Pacific islands and “wiping their feet on the Russian people.” Appealing to Medvedev “as a man,” the ex-major asks Medvedev to bring criminal charges against Putin for a number of national tragedies in which, according to Dymovsky, the prime minister has direct responsibility. Evoking such incidents as the Nord-Ost theater siege in 2002, the Beslan school massacre in 2004, and the Moscow metro bombings just last month, the ex-major insists that “for every drop of blood spilled, someone should be punished.” Russians, he says, want to live in a country that is safe for themselves and their children.

Since Dymovsky posted his first video exposés last November, police officers from all over Russia have come forward with similar videos and accusations of institutionalized corruption throughout the ranks of the Russian police. The wave of videos reflects a recent trend in which ordinary Russian citizens, feeling that their grievances will go unheeded by government institutions, post videos online detailing police abuses of authority. Some of the clips, such as a recent one in which a man details how he was used by traffic police as a human shield in a hunt for armed robbers, have gone viral and sparked outrage in many Russians.

In his closing remarks, Dymovsky gives the president a deadline to rectify such problems or face an angry rally on Red Square. “Nobody will forgive you for what’s happening in Russia today,” says the former officer. “Remember every mother’s teardrop, remember every baby’s teardrop, starting from 1917. The Russian people remember it. So that said, I advise you to establish order by November 12, 2010, or to step down together with your cabinet. How many more facts do you need, how many more videos do you need about the fact that lawlessness is stirring in Russia? That a genocide of the Russian people is being committed?”

If Dymovsky does follow through with his plan to stage a massive demonstration – especially on as high-profile a place as Red Square – he will be faced by the same basic organizational problem faced by Russia’s entire political opposition: according to the Rosbalt newspaper, Dymovsky says that journalists have been prohibited from writing about him altogether. It was this media blockade that forced him to film another internet video instead of holding a press conference, he says.

But Dymovsky is a man who has voluntarily given up his career, risked his own and his families lives, been forced out of his home, been charged with a variety of nonexistent crimes, and been sent without proper clothing in the middle of winter to sit in a criminal investigative detention center for more than two months – and he still isn’t backing down. The resolve in Dymovsky’s voice as he issues his final line to Medvedev is undeniable: “Remember who you are, and who we are.”

Dymovsky’s video in Russian can be viewed by clicking here.

A press release on the website for the Krasnodarsky Krai Investigate Committee said on Sunday that Dymovsky was being released because investigators had finished looking into the allegations of fraud against him.

Dymovsky had been both fired and arrested shortly after posting two videos on YouTube in November addressed to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, detailing corruption in the Novorossiysk police department. His efforts triggered a slew of similar videos from police officers around the country. The official pretext for his arrest was a suspicion that Dymovsky appropriated 24 thousand rubles (about $800) from the Krasnodar police department, and he was placed in a local criminal investigative detention center (SIZO) on January 22. Dymovsky has categorically denied the charges, asserting that he has documents proving his innocence.

Authorities also said in late February that it was necessary to detain Dymovsky because he lacked a job and permanent residence.

“The decision to release Dymovsky from the SIZO is a good sign,” said Lev Ponomarev, prominent rights activist and head of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights. “We’re going to see to it that he remains free.”

“It would be good if the persecution of those who helped Dymovsky ended as well,” he added.

According to RIA Novy Region, Dymovsky said on Sunday evening that prison guards in the Krasnodar SIZO had illegaly detained him for five additional hours after he should have been released. “It was probably some small measure of revenge for the SIZO officers,” Dymovsky said.

In a move that was both practical and symbolic, activists had prepared 50 thousand copies of the Russian constitution to hand out to police charged with manning the event. Renowned rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was detained in a New Year’s Eve protest despite being 82 years old, had signed each copy with the phrase “in kind remembrance.”

None of the officers present turned down their copy of the document.

A wide variety of opposition movements were represented at Saturday’s rally, and many made speeches chronicling their clashes with police violence and abuse of authority.

“I very much love the police that protect me, but I rarely see them,” said writer Viktor Shenderovich. “More often, I see the cops that beat and murder.” He stressed that the necessity for drastic police reform is a result of Russia lacking free elections, a free press, and free courts.

Referring to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s stated goal of wiping out corruption, White Ribbon movement representative Lyubov Polyakova pointed out that whistleblowing officers, such as Aleksei Dymovsky, had been poorly received when responding to the president’s call. “Look what they’ve done to them!” she said. “You don’t want to get rid of corruption; you say that we’re rocking the boat.”

“Yes, we’re rocking your rotten boat, which you, like beetles, have already completely eaten through,” Polyakova concluded.

Major Dymovsky was detained not long after posting two videos on YouTube in November that detail corruption in the Novorossiysk police department.

Sergei Davidis, coordinator of the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, appealed to the officers themselves. Remarking that the rally was calling for rights for the officers, he asked whether they really wanted to work for such paltry salaries and extort bribes to get by, and whether they really, after all, wanted people to hate them.

Solidarity movement member Anastasia Rybachenko stressed the importance of new methods for hiring law enforcement officers. “People who enter the police force intend to get police batons and power,” while others join simply to avoid Russia’s mandatory draft, she said. With the Internal Ministry scraping the bottom of society’s barrel and paying officers next to nothing, it follows that the resulting police force is less than ideal.

Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s federal designate on human rights issues, was noted among those present at the rally.

A resolution taken at the end of the demonstration called for the management of the Internal Ministry to be fired, that political persecution of whistleblowing officers be put to a stop, and that police force not be used in political investigations.

Two groups of counter-protesters attempted to disrupt the rally. Some cast leaflets into the crowd that were printed to look like hundred dollar bills, reading “these dollars are payment for the collapse of the police in Russia.” Members from one group were detained.

While the Russian police have long been notorious for their violent abuse of authority, they came under particularly harsh criticism after Major Denis Yevsyukov killed three and wounded dozens more in a Moscow supermarket while drunk late last April. With the renewed wave of media attention to police abuses that followed, prominent government and public officials began calling for the Internal Ministry to be dissolved. Last December, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the Ministry to be extensively reformed, and in a January 24 statement said that the number of police personnel “needs to be reduced and wages should be raised.”

In the meantime, scandalous incidents of police brutality show no signs of slowing.

The decision to arrest ex-Major Dymovsky, who gained notoriety after publishing two video clips on YouTube exposing corruption in the Russian police forces, was handed down on Friday by the Primorsky City Court.

Dymovsky had made a prediction an hour before the judicial session began on Friday that it would end with him being taken to the detention center.

In a video clip published on his website, the former major stated that during an interrogation for the fraud investigation, he had been handed a subpoena to appear in court at 1:45 pm on Friday, where a judge would decide whether or not he would be detained.

Dymovsky has been under criminal investigation by Krasnodar regional authorities since the end of 2009 for appropriating money that had been budgeted for operational expenses. “Supposedly, I wrote them off for five years. And appropriated 24 thousand [rubles],” approximately $800, Dymovsky told Gazeta.ru at the end of December. He added that had documents that proved his innocence and said that the case against him had been “ordered.”

In his video blog, Dymovsky said that the arrest did not scare him. “I’m always with you. I’m being cheerful, happy, regular. Good luck!” he said before leaving for court. A supporter of the ex-major said that during the judicial session, investigators asserted that Dymovsky must be under guard since he had threatened them. “But the witnesses were officers from the criminal investigation department of the Novorossiysk police who had worked with him. So these are people dependent on and intimidated by their superiors, and therefore gave all the evidence that the investigators needed immediately,” the supporter said.

According to Dymovsky, the intimidation he is being accused of could not possibly have occurred: on Thursday, after a scheduled interrogation, he went to Krasnodar for a meeting with his supporters, and did not return to Novorossiysk until close to midnight.

“But this didn’t convince the court,” said the supporter. “They loaded Aleksei into a police van with an escort of several cars…and took him to the detention center. His wife and I think that he’ll hold up, but we’re scared that today he’ll wind up in a ‘press-hut,'” a term for a special cell where prisoners are tortured by other prisoners with the intent of extracting a confession.

Dymovsky’s lawyers plan to contend that the detention is illegal. Protestors are planning on holding a demonstration outside of the Novorossiysk police headquarters and the Primorsky Regional Court on January 25 in his support.

Officials in the Krasnodar regional investigative bureau confirmed Dymovsky’s arrest, but refused to give any further commentary.

Novorossiysk Police Major Aleksei Dymovsky gained notoriety in November when he released two videos on YouTube detailing widespread corruption within the Novorossiysk regional police forces. He was promptly fired. After facing threats to his family’s safety, Dymovsky left for Moscow, where his initial press conference was attended by a record number of journalists. Authorities have launched a number of efforts to prosecute the former officer, accusing him of exposing state secrets and of fraud. His movement to reform the police system in Russia has gained support across the country, including from many other law enforcement agents.

It is in this context that the feats of rights advocates and opposition activists can be fully appreciated. 2009 was the first full year of the existence of the Solidarity movement, a coalition of opposition forces that managed to achieve significant prominence in the Russian political sphere since its founding in December 2008. Leaders from the Other Russia coalition held a nationwide series of protests in defense of the constitutional right to freedom of assembly, which they held despite being unequivocally denied sanction from authorities. Novorossiysk Police Major Aleksei Dymovsky shocked the nation when he released two YouTube videos detailing widespread corruption throughout the police force, and has set out on a one-man campaign to reform Russia’s law enforcement agencies. Despite heavy censorship and brutal repression, oppositionists and human rights advocates continued to fight against the unhindered violence and tired series of false promises from the heads of Russia’s authoritarian regime.

The editors at theOtherRussia.org have compiled a review of notable events in Russia from over the past year.

Political Repression

• January 28: Russian Teacher Fired For Protesting
Yekaterina Bunicheva, a history teacher in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, was arrested and sentenced to five days of administrative arrest after attempting to enter a pro-government rally with a banner reading “Enough of Putin.” School officials then allegedly pressured Bunicheva to resign, threatening to strip her ability to teach at all if she refused.

• March 11: Russian Voters Defrauded With Disappearing Ink
After regional parliamentary elections throughout Russia, electoral monitors brought forth claims that voters in the city of Volgograd had been given pens filled with disappearing ink to cast their ballots with. The Russian Central Electoral Commission said in response that using such ink did not formally violate any laws. The pro-Kremlin United Russia party overwhelmingly swept the elections despite these and other violations.

• April 27: Sochi Election Results Called Into Question
Exit polls indicated a serious disparity between the official results of the mayoral election in the city of Sochi and the number of voters who claimed they had voted for opposition candidate Boris Nemtsov. Official figures give United Russia candidate Anatoly Pakhomov 76.86 percent of the vote, while only 46 percent of voters in the exit polls indicated they had voted for him – a number that would have triggered a run-off election.

• October 11: Rampant Fraud Plagues Regional Elections
Blatant fraud was documented in a set of regional elections throughout the country in October, in which United Russia once again was awarded overwhelming wins. The accusations of fraud were obvious enough that President Dmitri Medvedev admitted that the elections were “not sterile,” but refused to annul them regardless.

• November 18: http://www.theotherrussia.org/?p=3489 A criminal suit has been filed against an alleged employee of the Moscow prosecutor’s office who attacked a police officer with a crossbow, according to a press release by the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia on Tuesday.