Most Russians agree.  According to a survey by the VTSIOM pollster, 60 percent of Russians believe that denying the Soviet Victory in World War II is an act deserving of criminal proceedings.  Communist Party supporters and respondents over 60 were most likely to back the idea, while younger Russians and self-described democrats were more likely to hold the opposite view.  The poll was conducted during April in 42 regions.

In his video blog, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev spoke against the “distortion of history” and decried whitewashing the tragedy and significance of the war.

“We are all the more often encountering what are called historical falsehoods,” he said. “Also such attempts are becoming tougher, more malicious and aggressive.”

As the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reported earlier, legislators were planning to introduce draft legislation to counteract historical whitewashing, both in Russia and the former Soviet Republics.  Russian officials have been angered by attempts to remove Soviet-era monuments and honor anti-Soviet resistance movements in Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and other former Soviet states.

The bill is titled “On countering the rehabilitation of nazism, nazi criminals and their supporters on the territory of independent states– the former Republics of the USSR.”  Both Russians and foreigners could be charged under the draft law, and would face sentences of three to five years and fines up to 500 thousand rubles ($15,500 or €11,400).

The law would also give Russia the power to create a special tribunal to monitor the development of pro-nazi policies in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).  The tribunal would hand down evaluations on foreign politicians, parties and civic organizations suspected of revisionism.

A foreign national found by the tribunal to have taken part in rehabilitating nazism would be barred from entering Russia, and tried under Russian laws if they were discovered on Russian soil.  Russian organizations and media outlets would be issued a warning from the Prosecutor-General’s office.  After several warnings, the organization could be closed by a court order.

The bill proposes several means of responding to former Soviet Republics that allow themselves to question the outcomes of the Second World War.  Russia may expel ambassadors, launch a partial of full blockade of transport and information communication, sever diplomatic ties, and make recommendations to the Russian business community and public organization on cutting ties with the offending country.

Foreign organizations found guilty by the tribunal would be banned on Russian soil.

The idea for such a comprehensive law was first proposed by Sergey Shoigu, the head of Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, in February.  Shoigu’s suggestion has had a wide resonance with the public, and has been backed by Yury Chaika, the Russian Prosecutor General, and other public figures.

Two of Russia’s liberal democratic parties, Yabloko and Right Cause, have called for expanding the legislation to include rehabilitating Stalinism and whitewashing Stalin’s repressions as a criminal act.  The idea is ironically fitting as Russia’s government has itself been criticized for downplaying Stalin-era terrors, and reconstructing a public image of a “glorious Soviet past.”

The hubbub over net-speak—purposeful misspellings and emoticons combining into what Russians call “Olbanian” (a made-up language in itself a misspelling of Albanian)–comes as Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, is preparing draft legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet.  One part of the law intends to control the language used by Russians to communicate online, according to Yelena Zelinskaya, the deputy-chairwoman of the Public Chamber Commission on Preserving Cultural Heritage.

“There is very much good on the Internet, this is practically common sense,” she said.  “But there are things that have a destructive effect on the younger generation.  A child can’t distinguish between what is grammatically correct and incorrect.  What do we do?  Tear off the hands of those who use slang?  Or rip out tongues?  Of course not.  The problem can only be solved with education.  For instance, we are proposing a whole series of efforts to raise literacy.  First of all, we need to forbid anonymity on the Net: reduce the amount of sites where people act using nicknames [usernames] instead of their real names.  And when users will stop hiding behind masks, their treatment of the written word will improve, because everyone knows that making mistakes is improper.”

Lawmakers have proposed various methods of battling slang in the past.  Actor Nikolai Gubenko, the last Minister of Culture of the USSR and now a Moscow City representative, suggested in 2005 that people who “unreasonably use jargon and slang expressions” on the Internet be treated as hooligans.  Gubenko urged that violators be fined from 500-1000 rubles, or arrested for 15 days.  In the end, the former minister’s colleagues decided to respectfully disagree, and block the proposal.

Independent experts, meanwhile, downplayed the effect of web slang on the Russian language, and argued that common grammar mistakes were much more pernicious.

“First of all, this only encompasses a very small audience,” said Marina Koroleva, author of “Let’s Speak Russian,” and the host of a radio show of the same name.  “Secondly, this is a language game, where the players are more likely adults than teenagers.  If a child sees the word “krasavcheg” [a misspelling of “beaut” or “handsome one”] by accident, of course this will present some sort of threat to his literacy, but not a a comprehensive one.  A much greater danger is the complete misuse of grammar in the Internet, which no one controls.”

Koroleva adds that there is no way to have leverage over Internet-users.  “And this is frightening, because poor grammar enters the subconscious,” she said.  “Even, excuse me, I come into situations, where I start to doubt spelling simply because I spend too much time in blogs.”

According to the Russian Ministry of Education, youngsters are more and more frequently using misspelled “Olbanian” web-speak in their essays.

Emoticon smilies and acronyms like LOL are cropping up next to humorous misspellings of common words popularized online, like “hello,” (preved) “something,” (chenit) and “somehow” (kaknit).

Net-speak has also become embedded into the language of business.  The General Director of one oil company even made the order to fine employees for using “Olbanian,” after he noticed its use in an outgoing business letter.

In 2007, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had a different take on the web language.  The web-savvy Medvedev, who now runs both a text and video-blog, was a First Deputy Prime Minister at the time.  During a conference on the Internet, Medvedev commented that controlling the use of Olbanian in the country was impossible but said that it needed to be considered closely.  “You may like it, you may not like it,” Medvedev said, “someone could say that it’s a change in the norms and rules of the Russian language.  But this is a current language environment, which, by the way, is nonetheless based on the Russian language.”

Only recently, the Russian justice system was dealt a grave blow, which in many ways canceled the achievements of the legal reforms of the early 90s. A whole of seven articles of the criminal code (the so-called crimes against the state) were released from the right to a jury trial by the State Duma.

Yet the authorities did not rest with their achievement, and are hurriedly continuing to eliminate those democratic elements still present in the criminal code. The Government has proposed to radically expand the definition of treason (art. 275 of the RF CC [Russian Federation Criminal Code]). Having refused the highly significant and subjective “desire to damage the country’s defense”, [the new definition] regards government treason not as activities, but as a single act against Russia’s security, including her “Constitutional order, sovereignty, territoriality and national integrity.” The understanding of espionage (art. 276 of the RF CC) has also been seriously changed – [authorities] even want to add on advisory “and other” assistance to foreign organizations.

This is a very dangerous and consequential development. If we express its significance concisely, it returns the Russian justice system to the norms of the 1920-1950s. Then, any independent estimate of the situation in the country or its separate areas, not to say criticism of the regime and unsanctioned association with foreigners, was estimated as treason against the motherland.

The creation of modern democratic rights came, not after all else, but when a clear distinction was made between serving an armed enemy and speaking out against the government and the established order. It was not for nothing that revolutionaries from different countries named themselves “patriots” – and even their most zealous opponents did not doubt their patriotism.

Only old world and medieval rulers combined the concept of speaking out against authorities with switching to the enemy’s side.

The drive to legally change speech against the regime and exposing violations of rights and freedoms into helping the country’s enemies signifies the return to the darkest totalitarian methods of combating dissidence.

Several years ago, when authorities immensely expanded the definition of “extremism,” our country was immediately flooded with persecution of dissidence. All the while, the actual number of racist crimes has grown by leaps and bounds.

But now, not only opposition activity, but even just reporting on what happens in the country is equated with serving enemy powers. The proposed law does not define those activities which are classified as criminal: for instance, “activities against the Constitutional order and state integrity (as distinguished from “territoriality”). Furthermore, sanctions against “forcible seizure of power” and “rebellion” already exist (articles 278 and 279 of the RF CC).

82 years ago, the overzealous leaders of bolshevism already equated their party rivals with “enemies of the people,” pronouncing any dissidence to be a grave political crime. The Great Terror started with this, and took away the lives of millions of our fellow citizens, including nearly all the authors of the sadly well-known 58th article of the Criminal Code. Several years later, a comparable law was adopted in the Third Reich.

An now, half a century later, this horrible language is being returned – as an almost complete repeat of the old [wording], which was created to justify totalitarian “cleansing” and widespread massacres. The only difference: the bill’s authors didn’t have the heart to make [people] criminally responsible for their relatives, and membership in the Council of Europe interferes with restoring the death penalty.

We want to warn the current leaders of the country and the deputies, that by opening the door for political repressions in such an obscene haste, they themselves greatly risk falling under that punitive grindstone. Who knows, will their successors count activities like reviewing the Constitution to be treason; or keeping state reserves in foreign currencies; or passing [disputed] border islands to neighboring countries; or concealing the after-effects of ecological disasters; or belonging to a system rife with corruption?

Since the proposed law touches on the fate of the country, we insist that before voting takes place, parliamentary hearings involving the most respected members of the legal and human rights communities be held. The “voting machine” must not simply be turned on. We call on deputies who feel responsibility for Russia’s future to dismiss the given legislation. In any event, the President of the Russian Federation, as a guarantor of rights and freedoms, must not sign it.

We call on politicians and public figures, civil servants and people from the public, intellectuals – to step out together against the adoption of laws acting in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler.

We reserve the right to appeal directly to the people of the Russian Federation, with a call to stop a new “nineteen thirty seven.”

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group
Svetlana Gannushkina, Citizen’s Assistance Committee
Sergei Kovalev, Memorial
Lev Levinson, Institute for Human Rights
Lev Ponomarev, For Human Rights Movement
Yury Samodurov, Co-Chair of the All-Russian Citizen’s Congress
Yury Ryzhkov, Academic of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Public Committee for the Protection of Scientists.
Ernst Cherniy, executive secretary of the Public Committee for the Protection of Scientists
Andrei Buzin, Interregional Voters Union
Sergei Davidis, Union for Solidarity with Political Prisoners
Alexei Prigarin, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party- Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Dmitri Belomestnov, journalist
Yevgeny Ikhlov, journalist
Viktor Sheinis, member of the Political Committee of YABLOKO
Alla Nazimova, sociologist
Boris Vishnevsky, correspondent for the Novaya Gazeta, member of the Bureau of YABLOKO
Mikhail Shneider, executive secretary of the Solidarity political advisory committee
Antuan Arakelyan, Chair of the Saint-Petersburg Dialogue and Action Coalition
Vadim Prokhorov, attorney
The Human Rights Council of St. Petersburg
Natalya Yevdokimova, executive secretary of the Human Rights Council
Aleksandr Golts, journalists
Grigory Amnuel, International Dialogue open club.
David Gorelishvili, human rights activist
Anatoly Rekant, Chair of the Center Division of the For Civil Rights Committee
Nikolai Sorokin, historian, Kostorma
O.I. Orlov, Sergei Buryanov, Sergei Mozogovy, members of the executive committee of the All-Russian Civilian Congress
Mark Feygin
Yury Brovchenko, Glastnost Foundation

Signatures are being collected at zpch@mail.ru

translation by theotherrussia.org

A group of Russian lawmakers are jumping at anti-corruption measures proposed by President Dmitri Medvedev to hand greater authority to the country’s security agencies, particularly the Federal Security Service (FSB).  As the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reports, a new draft law circulating in Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, would hand new powers to the successor agency to the KGB.  The bill would simultaneously put some limits on the FSB’s employees.

The proposed legislation would increase the FSB’s ability to conduct criminal investigations with less oversight.  One of the more controversial of its provisions would grant the agency the ability to eavesdrop on telephone conversations without a court order.

The bill also would make it more difficult to become an FSB employee, and would mandate a more detailed examination into the records of future candidates.

“A Russian citizen who does not have citizenship (allegiance) to a foreign government can be an employee of the FSB,” the document reads.  With this change, Russian agents would have the same requirement as deputies in the Parliament, who are barred from holding dual citizenship.

One member of the State Duma Security Committee, Mikhail Starshinov (Just Russia Party), expressed astonishment that the FSB was being reformed under the anti-corruption project.  In his words, “we have plenty of structures where bribes are given constantly,” but the security agencies “have practically no connection” to them.

Another member of the Security Committee, Gennady Gudkov (People’s Party of Russia) agreed with Starshinov.  Gudkov, who worked in the KGB during Soviet times, said agents were too busy with work to be corrupt, and simply didn’t have the power to impact any change, even if they were bribed.

“There are millions of bureaucrats in the country, but just several tens of thousands who engage in intelligence work,” Gudkov said.  “Furthermore, they have no connection to corrupt practices: first of all, they are extremely busy with work, and secondly, they don’t have the powers to resolve anyone’s problems, having received the money.

“Maybe they would be more than happy to take a bribe, but who would give it to them!”

Beyond that, agencies leading an investigation will have the right to ask mobile telephony providers for information on their users, including their IMEI numbers, an identity feature built into every mobile device.

The bill was introduced to Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, and would need to clear three readings before heading to the Federation Council, the upper house, and ultimately the president’s desk.

A similar bill was put forth in the legislature of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. Authorities there said the draft law is “aimed at lowering the number of crimes connected with stolen instruments of cellular communication.”

At the present, mobile telephone providers have the option to refuse requests from the security services, and may decide whether to cooperate on a case by case basis. If the company denies a request, officials are forced to go through the judicial system and appeal before obtaining records or listening in on conversations.

Pavel Astakhov, a celebrity attorney that leads the “For Putin!” movement, voiced support for the law. He added that the suggested measures seemed more lenient than laws in the West: “Here, only acts that lead to material loss, which must be proven, are punished, while in other countries, the accountability sets in for any attempt to inflict such an act.”

The Chair of the Information Policy Commission of the Federation Council, Lyudmila Narusova, also voiced support for stricter control of the internet.

“The lack of legal regulation of the Internet leads to terrorist propaganda and to the publication of recommended methods on how to assemble a ‘shahid’s belt’ [a belt of explosives that is worn by Muslim suicide bombers],” she said. “The Government is obligated to keep citizens out of harm’s way, and any talk of censorship is groundless.” Narusova believes that the draft law could help prevent a wide range of crimes, including child pornography and pedophilia.

Senator Vladimir Slutsker, a Federation Council delegate from Chuvashiya who introduced his own version of an internet regulation bill in February, said that a new law was needed since the relevance of the regular law on mass-media was questionable. “It is not clearly written into the law itself, and [cases] are now given up to the buy-out of the courts.”

Nearly all the speakers agreed that controls on the internet must be reinforced. One of the few dissenting voices came from Mikhail Fedotov, a Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, who co-authored Russia’s the original draft law on mass-media. Fedotov is certain that there is no need to institute any new restrictions regarding extremism and other specific crimes on the internet. “What if the salesman killed the customer,” he asked, “would we try him using the law ‘On the protection of the rights of the customer?’”

Fedotov asserted that a single amendment to the law on mass-media, which would allow for prosecuting slander on the web, would suffice.

The greatest number of punitive measures are directed at the internet, and the Prosecutor General’s Office has prepared a number of draft amendments to the current law against extremism. According to the draft legislation, if any kind of material, or any site, is deemed extremist by a court, access to the material must quickly be blocked. Any website found guilty of repeatedly hosting extremist materials will be shut down. A list of extremist internet-materials and sites must be regularly published, and internet providers will be obligated to stop hosting these sites within one month.

A draft law for regulating the internet began circulating in the State Duma’s Security Committee on April 10th. The law sets norms for how to classify extremism on the internet:

“Materials located on Internet websites are recognized as extremist by a federal court upon discovery, or by finding the individual or organization who posted them [guilty], on authority a prosecutor’s notice or by a corresponding [court case].”

Critics believe that defining what constitutes “extremism” presents a slippery slope, and may give authorities a new lever for censoring politically unpopular information. In recent months, similar laws against “extremism” have been used to shut down and raid the offices of human rights groups and NGOs operating in Russia.

Some lawmakers were uncertain that curbing information on the internet was even technologically feasible. “We tighten the screws and the situation only gets worse,” said Gennady Gudkov, the deputy chairman of the State Duma Security Committee. Others critics believe that law enforcement agencies already have the means to shut down internet providers, and pointed at an April 4th incident, when St. Petersburg prosecutors ordered the closure of 10 internet providers for hosting extremist content.

Kommersant notes that Alexander Torshin, the vice-speaker of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house, has already issued strong complaints against the world-wide web. According to Torshin, the role of the internet “as a means of terror propaganda” has grown to such an extent, that it is “not without reason that it’s called the academy of terrorism.” Terrorists apparently “spread information freely,” “practically propagandize their ideas in the open, recruiting new adherents, buying up weapons and munitions, [and] communicating with one another.” The senator was adamant that lawmakers need “to work out unified identifying criteria for terrorist websites, formulate techniques to expose them and constantly monitor their activities, nationally and internationally, and also [work out] the means to close these sites.”

The draft law has raised an outcry from some foreign companies currently working in Russia, and may require some to reduce or sell holdings. It states that any foreign company vying for a controlling share of a Russian business in one of the strategic sectors must petition the government and go through a complicated authorization process. If the foreign company is part-owned by a government, it must do the same if it wishes to acquire more than 25% of a Russian business.

Critics are concerned that the latest additions to the list may signal a Kremlin step toward tighter control over the internet. Up until now, the internet has provided a relatively free space for all kinds of criticism and opinion. Unlike much of Russia’s mass-media, online sources have been vocally critical of President Vladimir Putin’s administration. Most recently, experts have noticed new attempts at legal regulation of online media, as well as financial interest from businessmen with ties to President Vladimir Putin (notably Alisher Usmanov’s purchase of gazeta.ru).

One new directive on “executing investigative work,” expands the powers of Russia’s security agencies, and covers 16 types of telecommunications services. According to the order, telephone companies and internet providers must install special equipment which is to be remotely controlled by Russia’s security services. The equipment allows a user, presumably an FSB agent, to see who is initiating and receiving emails, phone-calls and SMS text messages, and to pull the text and audio of the communications if necessary. It also lets agents determine the locations of users.

In theory, a court order is required to use these devices. But that hasn’t stopped the concerns of citizens who see an administration steadily encroaching into cyberspace.