In an article published Thursday in the Kommersant newspaper, an anonymous source in the presidential administration said that the routine crackdowns in Moscow of the opposition’s Strategy 31 rallies in defense of freedom of assembly have nothing to do with President Dmitri Medvedev or any of his officials.

The statements were a response to the intentions of Aleksei Venediktov, a member of the Public Council on the Moscow City Police and Editor-in-Chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, to appeal to a presidential deputy “to put an end to the slaughter” that happens routinely at the hands of the police during the rallies.

According to Kommersant’s anonymous source, Venediktov is barking up the wrong tree.

“The degree of activity of the police is determined by the administrators of the Moscow police and the city of Moscow,” said the source. “To see the Kremlin’s hand in the crackdown of demonstrations and to see this as a manifestation of any kind of personal ambitions would be to drastically oversimplify the situation.”

Therefore, Venediktov’s appeals to the presidential administration are unlikely to garner any results, he explained.

The statements come as tensions between the Kremlin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, whose tenure has now stretched into its eighteenth year, have reached a height that analysts say may finally mark his demise.

In the past several months, the mayor has been lambasted by criticism from not only oppositionists, but the Kremlin, the leading United Russian party, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Most recently, the timing of his end-of-summer vacation – which he took in the midst of a heat wave and forest fires that wreaked havoc on the capital – and revelations about government money spent on his private beehives have made him an easier target than usual.

The Moscow mayor’s office is officially responsible for handling applications to hold rallies, protests, and other such events in the city. Luzhkov has routinely defended the decisions to deny sanction to Strategy 31 organizers on the basis of ensuring public safety, but has been caught in serious inconsistencies on multiple occasions.

Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, made the remarks at a session of the Moscow City Police Public Council on Tuesday. As he later clarified on his radio show, the editor felt that while the Russian government’s routine prohibition of opposition events on the square is illegal, it is necessary for opposition organizers to “take a step back” if they want to reach their goal of achieving the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of assembly.

The comments come a week after police detained 170 protesters at a rally in defense of free assembly, part of the Russian opposition’s ongoing Strategy 31 campaign. Dozens of activists were beaten, and at least two were hospitalized. The rally, like the others before it, had not been sanctioned by Moscow city authorities, who said that they had already granted permission to pro-Kremlin youth activists to hold a rally in support of blood drives on the square that day.

Venediktov characterized the ongoing conflict over Triumfalnaya Square, which Strategy 31 organizers say has become their traditional meeting place, as a “mutual obstinacy” that, realistically, can only be resolved by “nulling the situation.” Since neither the government nor the oppositionists are willing to cede the square, “it simply must be given up,” he said.

Konstantin Kosyakin, a Strategy 31 co-organizer, rejected the proposal and told Kasparov.ru that the activists plan to hold their ground.

“People already automatically come to Triumfalnaya at six o’clock on the 31st of the month,” Kosyakin said. “The government is afraid that this place will become an attraction for all oppositionist and civil rights forces. Therefore, if we compromise, the people will think that we have betrayed them.”

“This government is a government of thieves and bandits, and you cannot meet them halfway,” he added.

Gazeta.ru Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin, also a member of the Public Council, told news website Grani.ru that he wholly shared Venediktov’s position. He said that if large gatherings on Triumfalnaya Square truly hinder traffic – one of the reasons Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has given as to why Strategy 31 rallies are routinely prohibited – then both Strategy 31 rallies and blood drive rallies organized by pro-Kremlin youth groups should indeed be banned.

Meanwhile, Moscow Helsinki Group head and Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva also attended the Public Council session and refuted that Venediktov asked for Triumfalnaya to be closed to protesters. “It’s possible that he said something else afterwards, it’s written on the Ekho Moskvy website, but there he said that everyone needs to be put in the same conditions: ‘Either nobody is allowed, or don’t just allow [the government’s] favorites.’ I’m told that it’s written on the website that he demanded that Triumfalnaya Square be closed. I heard nothing of the sort,” she said.

Denis Bilunov, executive director of the opposition movement Solidarity, said that Venediktov’s statements play into the hands of the authorities by calling for concessions by the opposition.

“We can make concessions when, for example, [Russian President Dmitri] Medvedev or Luzhkov speak unequivocally about the illegality of refusing to sanction protests on Triumfalnaya Square and begin to investigate this,” he said.

Correction – June 9, 2010:  This story originally reported that the event held by pro-Kremlin youth groups was a blood drive. It was, in fact, a rally in support of the idea of a blood drive; no blood was donated at the event. The article has been corrected to reflect as much.

The meeting in question took place on August 29th at Putin’s residence in Sochi, where 35 media heads gathered to speak with the prime minister. Remnick reminds readers that Putin regularly held these types of gatherings during his presidency.

According to an account from the Washington Post, Putin spent several minutes berating Venediktov in front of the group, reading excerpts of what he found wrong in Ekho Moskvy transcripts. “I’m not interested in who said these things,” one participant recalled Putin telling Venediktov. “You are responsible for everything that goes on at the radio station. I don’t know who they are, but I know who you are.”

Afterwards, Venediktov approached Putin in the hallway and told him he was being “unjust.” Putin responded by pulling up a handful of transcripts and reportedly saying “You have to answer for this, Aleksei Alekseevich!”

Remnick writes that the editor was concerned, but “calculated that Putin would never have invited him to Sochi with the rest of the delegation had he intended to get rid of him or Echo of Moscow. That could have been accomplished with a telephone call.”

“Afterward, we met one on one, and there Putin’s tone was more positive,” Venediktov told Remnick. “But he made his point. He was demonstrating his ability to do whatever he wants with us at any time.”

Having returned to Moscow, Venediktov told the station’s staff that they should “pay careful attention” to how they report on events, checking their facts and making sure to air enough government views.

The day after the meeting in Sochi, Venediktov announced that Ekho Moskvy would not be inviting Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a dissident politician, to appear on air for the rest of the year. The politician had made remarks which seemed to “sing the praises” of Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord who claimed responsibility for the 2004 Beslan school siege. Venediktov also gave orders to remove all transcripts and audio recordings of Novodvorskaya’s appearance on the station. The politician, in turn, assessed the move as “slanderous accusations of a criminal offense (that is, publicly justifying terrorism).”

Ekho Moskvy is primarily host to serious news and talk radio, including social commentary and political discussion. The station is often the first source for interviews with prominent opposition politicians, and is widely seen as the only independent news broadcast with a national reach in Russia. A running joke is that media figures exiled from state-controlled television and newspapers subservient to the government eventually end up as co-hosts. The station broadcasts out of Moscow and reaches around 2.5 million people across Russia through partnerships with local stations. Its broadcast is also heard in other countries of the former Soviet Union.

Still, Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, remains as a majority shareholder in the station. While journalists and anchors on the station have worked to maintain integrity and independence, Venediktov himself calls the Kremlin “our main shareholder.”

The whim of the Russian authorities, then, and Putin himself is all that keeps Ekho Moskvy from going permanently silent.

—
Background reading

Aleksei Venediktov, interviewed in the Izvestia newspaper on September 3rd. (excerpt)

All of us understand that the bloody conflict was unleashed by Saakashvili. The shelling and murder of peaceful residents is not a topic for discussion. But the rest can be given consideration. During the conflict, we sought an interview with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov and Georgian Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili. We did not receive one neither here nor there. So what did we do? We took an 8 minute interview from EuroNews with one representative of authority, took the same from another [from the other side], combined this and sent it out on the air. And after [we ran] an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, our radio station was shut down in Tbilisi. Why? It is unclear. It must be said that this is entirely characteristic of weak rulers who are hiding the truth from their people.

…“Ekho Moskvy” is a platform for discussion, where different points of view must be heard. And I only welcome the word “biased.” Who needs a commentator who doesn’t have their own point of view? We have different ones here –from Yevgenia Albats and Yulia Latynina to Maxim Shevchenko and Aleksandr Prokhanov.

In my opinion, one must speak about risks, about potential ambushes, and not to operate like the American Fox channel, which always supported the Republican administration in the war in Iraq. But in that same America there’s the NBC channel, which gives a different point of view, and which was even called Vladimir Putin’s “fifth column” in the US by a Fox commentator. There is a platform for discussion. If discussion is happening in the country and different arguments are sounding, it allows the right decisions to be made with fewer mistakes. Nevertheless, Valeriya Novodvorskaya has been entered into Ekho’s “stop list” for her statements about Shamil Basayev.

translation by theotherrussia.org