On March 22, St. Petersburg police issued a summons to Other Russia party member Olga Zhukova to appear for interrogation before the federal Investigative Committee.

The summons asserted that if Zhukova did not appear she would be brought before investigators by force and possibly have her daughter turned over to social workers.

On their blog, St. Petersburg Other Russia members alleged that the threats were motivated by an upcoming anti-governmental demonstration. “For all intents and purposes, such activeness on the part of the ‘agencies’ is connected with the imminence of the March of Dissent. We remind you that a March for [St. Petersburg Governor Valentina] Matviyenko’s Resignation, one of the organizers of which is the Other Russia, will begin at the Gostiny Dvor metro station on 6 pm, March 31.”

The interrogation is being held in connection with a case filed against Other Russia members in St. Petersburg for “creating an extremist organization.” The case has been ongoing since November 2010.

According to the Other Russia party, the charges are based on information investigators gained from bugging an apartment where party activists held their meetings. Investigators believe the activists have rekindled the work of the National Bolshevik Party, which was banned in 2007 as an extremist organization. St. Petersburg authorities have raided the apartments of Other Russia party members multiple times and filed charges against ten of them. Both the National Bolshevik and Other Russia parties were founded by writer and controversial opposition leader Eduard Limonov.

Threatening to take children away from opposition activists is not an uncommon tactic used by the Russian authorities. Prominent environmental activist Yevgeniya Chirikova received such a threat earlier this month, as did fellow activist Alla Chernysheva. Yevgeny Ivanov, leader of a trade union of General Motors workers in Russia, has been threatened by child custody services with having his parental rights revoked. In the city of Dzerzhinsk, the local government attempted to take away the children of opposition activist Sergei Pchelintsev. Such tactics have even been used to threaten people who owe debts to the state.

St. Petersburg resident Vera Kamkina, who lost both her mother and husband last year, told the publication that “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’m not a drug addict. Of course, my family is extremely poor. I raised my children by myself and wasn’t able to work. But I had help from relatives and charity.”

The officials told the woman that her children would be returned after she repaid 140 thousand rubles (about $4,600) in debt to the housing authorities for rent on her apartment.

In an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, children’s rights representative Pavel Astakhov said that the authorities should take all aspects of a child’s family life into consideration in such cases, and not only material issues.

An unnamed municipal custody official denied to Novye Izvestia that children were taken from their families “because of poverty,” and that “the fairy tales about how their children were taken away are told by alcoholics who have enough money for the bottle but not for their their children.”

An amendment currently under consideration in the Russian State Duma would raise the standard for parental responsibilities to children. If adopted, parents would be required to provide children with “material support, including providing nutrition, clothing, shoes, and housing,” in addition to the appropriate care currently required by law.

Despite the clear importance for children to be properly provided for, Marina Ozhegova of the parental advocacy organization “Lots of Kids is Good!” fears that such an amendment will be harmful for both parents and children. “In Russia, 80 percent of families with multiple children live below the poverty line,” she said. “Many have their gas and electricity turned off because of debts to the housing authorities.”

Rosstat, Russia’s federal statistics agency, estimates that 5,877 children were taken into custody as a result of unfulfilled parental obligations in 2008, compared with 2,557 children in 2000.

“The problem of the seizure and closure of children’s educational institutions remains throughout Russia,” said Sergei Komkov, the president of the All-Russian Education Fund. Komkov, an academic in the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and a member of the Moscow Writer’s Union, was speaking at a press conference on the dramatic problems faced by day-care centers.

Participants of the conference described methods used to take over properties, from illegally re-zoning the land to literally destroying buildings to make them uninhabitable. Two so-called “raiding plans” are used. Under the first, buildings in prime locations are simply rented to an organization other than the daycare. The new group then demolishes the building and re-develops the land commercially. In the second case, buildings are transferred directly to companies and redesigned into banks and offices.

“When a day care is located in a convenient recreation area, where a large investment project can be built, raiders do everything to demolish it,” Komkov said. “There are very many instances of the direct destruction of day-cares in Moscow.”

Over the past 12 years, some 700 Moscow day-cares have transformed into offices that no longer serve any educational purposes. Meanwhile, the city has a deficit of education centers for children, with some 60 thousand youths who cannot be placed in the existing day-care system. Only 100 new day-cares have been set up to replace those destroyed, and only after a city directive to build new centers passed in 2007.

According to UNESCO, some 2 million 300 thousand school-age children are not receiving an education in Russia. Komkov blamed this in part on the destruction of schools and educational facilities in the country.

Elena Martysheva, the Director of the “Aspects of Education” Center, and an international children’s activist, spoke of the takeover of a children’s center associated with her group in July 2007. In that case, Globex Bank took possession of their building, and would not even let Martysheva in to gather things from her office. The new owners then destroyed the Center’s property. Appeals to the prefecture, the militsiya and the prosecutor general’s office proved fruitless. Law enforcement called the case a “dispute between business entities” and refused to act.

According to Martysheva, the new occupants also gained access to the school’s files and documents, which contained confidential information. By law, only the Center’s employees are allowed to handle such paperwork.

Anatoly Karpov, the Chairman of the Russian Peace Foundation and former world chess champion, commented on Martysheva’s case. He explained that during a change of ownership, a building’s new owners may only enter the premises with a court-order on hand and the militsiya present. Globex did not have either.

Karpov went on to explain what happened next as deliberate acts to make the building uninhabitable. Globex then used the new damage as a pretext to file paperwork saying it was impossible to keep the building for its intended educational use. The children’s center was subsequently demolished.