As the Moscow Times reports:

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has asked investigators to look into whether law enforcement officials helped hackers break into his e-mail and Twitter accounts this week.

Navalny, in a letter addressed to Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin, said investigators might have shared passwords acquired during searches of his house and office with hackers to gather evidence for a possible criminal case against him

Navalny also said the hacking attack might have been a reprisal by “crooked officials” after he called on Bastrykin on Monday to check for misconduct by investigators.

“My e-mail has been broken into, and through that, my Twitter,” Navalny wrote on his LiveJournal blog early Tuesday. “It’s obvious it was [hacked] from the computers and iPads seized during the search.”

Navalny’s Twitter account was taken over by a foul-mouthed impostor who spewed insults at his supporters and claimed that he had been working for President Vladimir Putin all along.

The hacker also changed the account’s avatar to a photograph of d’Artagnan, the hero of Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” with the caption “You are all pedophiles, and I am d’Artagnan!” and a new profile description: “Crook and thief Alexei Navalny 2.0.”

Navalny published his appeal to Bastrykin on his LiveJournal blog and Facebook page, which were evidently not hacked into.

A notorious cyber hooligan calling himself “Hell” took responsibility for the break-ins and posted screen shots of the innards of Navalny’s Twitter and Gmail accounts on his blog.

Navalny “is a thief, a crook and an informer, and on top of that, he lies constantly. That was reason enough for me,” Hell said in comments posted Tuesday on Izvestia’s website when asked why he decided to hack into Navalny’s accounts.

Hell has been implicated in a string of recent attacks on opposition leaders’ e-mail accounts and blogs. In October, he claimed to have hacked into Navalny’s e-mail account, leaking hundreds of personal e-mails onto the Internet.

The hacker railed against Navalny in a blog post that briefly appeared on the Public Chamber’s website last month. The post, written in a squeaky-clean style unseen on Hell’s profanity-laced blog, was quickly removed, but not before fueling speculation about whether the hacker had links to the government, a claim Hell denied in the Izvestia interview.

Hell also has been linked to a hack of Boris Akunin’s LiveJournal blog in December, replacing the opposition writer’s image with the same photograph of d’Artagnan used Tuesday.

In a statement Tuesday, the Investigative Committee denied involvement in the hacking attack and accused Navalny of attempting to “pressure and discredit” an investigation into clashes between protesters and riot police at the “March of Millions” on May 6.

Navalny and other opposition leaders have been repeatedly questioned as witnesses in connection with a criminal investigation into violence at an opposition rally on May 6.

On Tuesday, Navalny was questioned about extremist slogans chanted at rallies on Dec. 5 and 24, his spokeswoman said on Twitter.

Opposition activists have long accused law enforcement officials of colluding with cyber criminals and yellow journalists.

Photographs of a cash horde seized by investigators in opposition-minded television host Ksenia Sobchak’s apartment earlier this month appeared on the Kremlin-friendly tabloid Lifenews.ru shortly thereafter.

Hacked e-mails belonging to Lilia Shibanova, head of the independent Golos election-monitoring group that has come under fire from Kremlin supporters, appeared on Lifenews.ru in December, days after her laptop was seized at Sheremetyevo Airport.

The authorities have denied wrongdoing, and nobody has ever been brought to justice in connection with the hacker attacks or leaks.

According to Solidarity member Sergei Davidis, the organizational committee of the March of Millions concluded that the march would go on as planned, regardless of the actions of security officials.

Since Ilya Yashin was scheduled to be one of leaders of the march but may now be unable to attend because of a subpoena, the committee named State Duma Deputy Dmitri Gudkov from A Just Russia as his replacement.

According to Interfax, Russia’s Investigative Committee issued subpoenas to march organizers Aleksei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov, and Ksenia Sobchak in addition to Yashin, ordering them to appear on at 11 am on Tuesday to “undergo investigation” in regards to riots in Moscow during an mass opposition protest on May 6 that ended with about 650 arrests and 47 injured activists.

The subpoenas were issued after investigative units raided (or attempted to raid, as some residents weren’t home) 10 Moscow apartments, purportedly in connection with the riots. In addition to the aforementioned activists, the apartment of Voina art activist Pyotr Verzilov was also raided. A number of computers, iPads, cellphones, and other materials were confiscated from Navalny and Udaltsov, as was Navalny’s t-shirt that read “United Russia is the Party of Swindlers and Thieves” and an item from Udaltsov with the Left Front logo on it.

Police also took 1.5 million euros from Sobchak’s apartment, on the vague basis that “the source that the funds were acquired from has not been established.” Sobchak was not one of the organizers of the May 6 protests.

The office of the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption, created by Navalny, was also raided, as was the apartment of the parents of his fiancé.

A trio of Duma deputies from A Just Russia compared the raids to Soviet tactics of repression. “We feel that this might provoke an irreversible rise in tension in society and close the path to the constructive evolution of the political system in Russia,” said the statement released by Gennady Gudkov, Dmitri Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev.

Svirid filed the charges following an article in the December 2011 volume of Esquire magazine, in which Navalny made what RIA Novosti characterized as “unflattering” comments about members of the United Russia party. Among other things, Navalny said in the issue: “If you join United Russia, you are a thief. And if you’re not a thief, then you are definitely a swindler, because your name is protecting the other swindlers and thieves.”

“The plaintiff asked for the defendant to retract statements made by Navalny on LiveJournal and also compensate him with one million rubles for moral harm.” said Maria Balakshina, press secretary for the Lyublinsky Court. “The court partially satisfied Svirid’s claims.”

The same court dismissed similar charges against Navalny by Svirid in October 2011. In that case, the deputy argued that Navalny’s phrase “United Russia is a party of swindlers and thieves” caused him moral harm.

Navalny first used the phrase on the radio station Finam FM, saying that this was his “value judgment” of the party. It was this incident that Svirid referred to in his case.

It is largely because of Navalny that the title “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has become popularly known as the opposition’s appellation for United Russia, the party led for most of its history by Vladimir Putin and now by Dmitri Medvedev.

Vladimir Burmatov, another State Duma deputy from United Russia and chair of the Committee on Education, called on other party members to follow in Svirid’s footsteps.

“In connection with this, I would propose that all of our party members should create their own sort of flash mob. Let everyone appeal to the courts with identical suits against Navalny… And if everyone wins 30 thousand rubles – and we have two million people in our party – then it’ll turn out that Navalny, who insults honest people so frivolously, will owe us all a total of 60 billion rubles,” or 1.8 billion USD, Burmatov said.

Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday, Poser said that he would not tolerate further censorship of his program. The most recent instance occurred when management at Channel One decided to nix a part of a February 6 interview that discussed Alexei Navalny – a leading opposition figure and one of the organizers of a massive opposition protest over the weekend.

“It might be that at the end of the day it’s not as a result of [the incident concerning] Navalny, but if anything else like this happens, I might just tell them – that’s enough!” Posner said.

At the same time, the host expressed hope that it wouldn’t come to such an extreme measure.

He also promised that if the show is cancelled, a press conference would be held to explain the specific reasons why.

“I’m very glad that, thanks to the Internet, anyone who’s interested can see: here is the program and here is what they cut out of it. It’s becoming meaningless to cut things out,” Posner said.

The host admitted that February 6 was not the first time he’d agreed to air a censored episode. While it happens “relatively rarely, this is one of the compromises that I sometimes make,” he acknowledged.

The interview in question was with fellow television host Tina Kandelaki, during which Posner asked whether or not she thought that he would be allowed to interview Aleksei Navalny on his own show: “I could call up Aleksei Navalny, but what do you think, would they let me?” According to Gazeta.ru, this fragment was cut out of the episode that aired in most of Russia, with the full version only broadcasted in the Far East, where it is regularly airs live.

According to Agora, Russia was home to 730 rallies, demonstrations, and pickets attended by a total of more than 400 thousand people during 2011. Of those participants, more than four thousand were detained before, during, or immediately after the event.

The group found that 117 civil activists, made up mostly of bloggers, anarchist or antifascists, and members of the banned National Bolshevik Party, were subjected to criminal prosecution in the past year. They were mostly incriminated under Russia’s controversial “extremism” laws, which critics denounce for their broad, vague wording, and also under laws against slandering or insulting government figures. Among the persecuted activists was music critic Artemy Troitsky, Novosibirsk artist Artem Loskutov, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaev of the art group Voina, and Tyumen State University professor Andrei Kutuzov.

Three activists were killed in 2011: in May, editor Yakhya Magomedov of the Avar-language Islamic newspaper As-Salam; in June, Rector Maksud Sadikov of the Institute of Theology and International Relations was shot along with his nephew in Makhachkala; in December, Gadzhimurad Kamalov, a journalist and founder of the independent newspaper Chernovik, was murdered in Dagestan.

Agora also recorded 45 incidents of beatings and other attacks.

The most at-risk groups were ecologists (primarily members of the Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest and opponents of environmental damage due to Olympic construction in Sochi), LGBT activists, and activists and participants of protests in the North Caucasus.

There were also 42 arrests, most commonly of members of the National Bolsheviks, Khimki Forest activists, and members of the electoral watchdog Golos. Irina Teplinskaya, a vocal critic of Russia’s treatment of drug addicts, was arrested in a Kaliningrad airport in August, and Golos head Liliya Shibanova was arrested in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in December. Noting the arrests of blogger Aleksei Navalny, oppositionist Ilya Yashin, and pianist Fedor Amirov, analysts at Agora said that from December 5-7, Russia for the first time began detaining people en masse and sentencing them to the maximum term of administrative arrest, with more than 100 people turning up in Moscow holding facilities during that time.

Additionally, 2011 saw 25 police searches of NGO offices and activists’ apartments.

The searches included a firm owned by Khimki Forest activist Yevgenia Chirikova and her husband, the office of the opposition movement Solidarity, and the Ulyanovsk branch of the Memorial human rights center.

The 850 cases of persecution recorded by Agora in 2011 followed 603 such cases in 2010, 308 in 2009, and 144 in 2008.

Yashin was released on Wednesday at 2:30 am in northwest Moscow. According to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, he was feeling fine.

Navalny was released from another facility at 2:35 am to a waiting crowd of journalists and supporters. The whistleblowing blogger said that intends to file a complaint against police for forcibly transferring him from a detention center to a police station.

“Ilya Yashin and I were asked if we’d like to go to the police station, but we declined. Several hours ago I was called supposedly to sign a document, after which someone in a t-shirt and flip-flops forced me into a car and took me away,” Navalny said. “I consider this to be unlawful and am going to complain about these actions by the police.”

Both oppositionists were arrested on December 5 following a mass rally at Moscow’s Chistye Prudy and sentenced to 15 days in jail for supposedly “violating police orders.” They were among 300 other demonstrators arrested out of a crowd of approximately 10,000; about 60 were given jail sentences from between 10 and 15 days each.

Oppositionists have scheduled another mass rally to protest the election results for December 24.

Predicable as it may be, then, it was nevertheless surreal to hear the news on Sunday that the Kremlin-loyal opposition party A Just Russia had been charged with violating public transportation laws for a bus advertisement that officials say contained “agitation against United Russia.” Under Russian law, it is illegal to spread negative propaganda against a political party or candidate, and it was on this basis that the charges were filed. But while A Just Russia had recently taken up the slogan “For Russia Without Swindlers and Thieves” and included it in the offending ad, there was no explicit mention of United Russia itself. The Russian authorities, it seems, have begun to take the connection between United Russia and “swindlers and thieves” for granted.

A Just Russia candidate Alena Popova posted a scan of the official charges online. The red check indicates the article the ad supposedly violates, reading “advertisement information (interior, exterior) without client’s agreement;” the handwriting reads “agitation against United Russia.”

As the Moscow Times reports:

Whistleblowing blogger Alexei Navalny has sued the Investigation Committee for failing to officially notify him of its decision to reopen a fraud case against him.

Navalny, who has stepped on many toes with his corruption exposés, said he took legal action because he has not been presented with details of the charges against him, as required by law. The court has scheduled the first hearing for June 22 to evaluate Navalny’s claims against the Investigation Committee.

“A suspect has the right to know what he’s being suspected of exactly,” Navalny said on his LiveJournal blog Thursday, adding that he can’t defend himself without an official charge. “Nevertheless, the only information I got about the case was from the media.”

The 2-year-old case alleges that Navalny forced Kirovles, a state-owned timber company in the Kirov region, into a harmful contract in 2009 that cost the company 1.3 million rubles ($46,000) in monetary damages. It relies solely on the testimony of former Kirovles head Vyacheslav Opalyov.

Navalny, who plans to cancel his trips and conferences abroad until the case is settled, said his lawyer tried repeatedly to request details about the case but was ignored. He said he did receive a two-sentence letter from the Investigative Committee on Wednesday, but it was hardly the official document he was supposed to receive.

Navalny has suggested that state-owned bank VTB, state pipeline monopoly Transneft or the ruling United Russia party might have fabricated the case against him, allegations they deny.

On Tuesday, a user of the website HabraHabr living in Ulyanovsk complained that he was unable to access the LiveJournal blog of noted whistleblower Aleksei Navalny. When the user asked his internet provider, Telekom.ru, for an explanation, he received a letter in response: “Access to the resource navalny.livejournal.com has been temporarily suspended by order of the FSB.”

Upon further inquiry to Telekom.ru, Gazeta.ru discovered that the company had blocked access not only to Navalny’s blog, but to LiveJournal entirely.

“The company has limited access to LiveJournal by order of the FSB,” a technology support specialist from the company told Gazeta.ru. However, he could not explain on the basis of what sanction the FSB asked the company to block access to the website.

This is not the first time Russian authorities have blocked access to social media websites. In July 2010, an ISP in Komsomolsk-on-Amur received a court order to block access to YouTube; in the same month, a court in Ingushetia ordered providers to block access to all of LiveJournal.

Prominent blogger Aleksei Navalny has been involved in an ongoing row with government authorities in connection with his status as Russia’s chief whistleblower. Most notably, Navalny used his shareholder earnings in the state-owned oil pipeline company Transneft to reveal an alleged $4 billion of embezzlement. Last week, federal investigators filed criminal charges against the blogger for having allegedly defrauded a state-owned timber company. On Wednesday, investigators announced that an “unspecified culture studies institute” had determined that his website’s logo was a desecration of Russia’s coat of arms.

According to the Moscow Times, Telekom.ru is now blaming technical difficulties for the lack of access to LiveJournal, despite previously admitting that the FSB issued an order to block it. The FSB denies issuing a complaint about Navalny’s blog, but it is unclear whether or not they deny complaining about LiveJournal itself.

In the past, activists have proposed boycotting elections, turning in spoiled ballots, and raising awareness of the obvious fraud the government carries out. In one year of particularly blatant falsifications, deputies from the three parties besides United Russia that held seats in the State Duma walked out in dramatic protest. In the end, President Dmitri Medvedev brushed off all objections and claimed the election results “reflected voter preferences.”

With a new set of elections in Russia’s regions coming up in March, famous activist lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny has proposed a new strategy for the opposition: get out the vote for any party besides United Russia. He explained his reasoning on a blog post on Thursday:

Election day is going to be in March. The “elections” are being held in ten regions.

Afterwards, at the end of 2011, there will be federal “elections” for the State Duma.

We all understand perfectly well that these aren’t real elections – it is simply an unlawful process that results in representatives from the Party of Swindlers and Thieves – United Russia informing us that “we’ve received 65% of the vote.”

What is to be done in this situation?

I am forced to admit that my most dearly beloved topic – boycotting elections – has failed. It just doesn’t work.

That is to say: nobody, of course, goes to the polls – not because they’re boycotting them, but because they simply don’t pay any attention to them.

I think that, for all the normal people in our country, the time has come to change political strategy.

Our new conception should be: GO TO THE POLLS AND VOTE AGAINST UNITED RUSSIA.

That is to say, for any other party – it makes no difference.

You don’t need to explain to me that A Just Russia is no different than United Russia, that Zhirik [LPDR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky – ed.] is awful, and that the Communist Party is ancient.

It makes no difference in the slightest. You are voting against the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.

We need to ruin United Russia’s monopoly over the government.

Why should we do this if they’re going to “draw in” 65% anyway?
Elections are, in any case, a source of stress for this vile government. Falsification is a difficult process that involves many thousands of people (members of the electoral commission, etc.).

Administrations in the regions where elections are going to be held in March will be doing basically nothing besides creating administrative falsifications. It’s hard enough to draw in 65% from the real 35%. Drawing 65% from 20% is going to be even harder. We need to exacerbate their stress.

Will this be successful in creating problems?
And how. Right now, 15-20% of the population actually goes to the polls. There’s a very large amount of absentee (read: fake) voting. That is to say, to put it simply, the vote for United Russia is the vote of 7-10% of voters. If we bring 1% of the population that didn’t go earlier to the polls, we create a big problem. If it’s 5% – a colossal one. If it’s 15%, then

How is this better than a boycott?
Because this kind of action will be supported by all activists of various parties and we won’t have to deal with the long, pointless ruckus of arguing with them over a boycott. We will actually get hundreds of thousands of supporters of our campaign right away.

The goal of the campaign is simple. Using online and offline methods to maximally promote two simple messages:

1. United Russia is a party of swindlers and thieves.
2. Go to the polls without fail and vote against United Russia. For any other party.

To promote the campaign, Navalny has begun a poster competition:

Strictly speaking, the coming elections and their results mean nothing for us.

And in general, all of this can be done without strain in an entertaining way that would be fun.

To start, I would propose holding a contest for a trash poster.

There are three requirements:

– Posters should be in a4 format, so that everyone can print them on a home (office) printer and hang them in entryways, elevators, next to desks in offices, in office cafeterias/bathrooms. Bring one to your grandmother and hang it on her door so the old lady remembers how to vote.

– The poster can show whatever, but it should clearly deliver two basic messages: 1) United Russia is a party of swindlers and thieves 2) Go to the polls and vote for any party, but against United Russia.

However the message gets through is unimportant. Whether it’s with pictograms or holograms.

You could, in fact, use verse from the poetry contest on Twitter. They can be found there under the #er tag.

Stuff like:

– Get your relatives a job in the Council of Directors!
Join the Party of Swindlers and Thieves!

– Not afraid to rob in front of the entire public?
We need you for the party of swindlers and thieves!

Navalny plans to eventually draw up a list of all the submissions and a corresponding poll, but for now, here are a few worth noting:

“United Russia – party of thieves and swindlers”

“He voted for United Russia. Shameful! Don’t repeat the mistake!”

“We’re eating Russia. Soon we’ll eat everything.”

“He always votes for United Russia. If ordered, he’ll also kick you in the face.”

“This is what the Great Wall of China would look like if it was built by specialists from the party United Russia”

“Method No. 34: Sell a third of all exported oil through your personal friend’s company. Learn more about this and other methods of sawing up Russia at rospil.info”

“Don’t rock the boat! Vote for United Russia!”

“Before they swipe your last pair of pants, vote against the party of swindlers and thieves! ‘United Russia’ ‘Any other party'”