Internal Affairs Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said on Friday that the new centers would track both text and audio-visual materials.

According to Nurgaliyev, the decision was made by an interagency commission and will be implemented throughout the country by regional presidential plenipotentiaries.

Nurgaliyev noted that similar centers already exist in the St. Petersburg State University system and the state-owned Center for Information Analysis Technology in Moscow. Plans for one to be set up in Southern Federal University are pending.

Elaborating on the number of anti-extremism cases that the agency has undertaken, the minister said: “Two hundred and nineteen cases of investigation and analysis were initiated in 2011. Investigative agencies filed 67 charges and issued 130 cautions, warnings and advisories. In 47 cases, access to particular internet resources was blocked and their activities were halted.”

While Russia’s hostile environment towards journalists is nothing new – it hovers down in 142nd place on Reporters Without Border’s free press index – online newspapers have generally enjoyed a relative amount of freedom. Meanwhile, police have used accusations of “extremism” to crack down on opposition figures, ecological activists, and other entities deemed undesirable to the ruling authorities. With the expansion of such investigative work into the online realm, news websites and bloggers who criticize state or local governments will likely be subjected to an increasing amount of pressure and censorship.

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.

In accordance with the document, films could be banned from theaters if they “contain scenes containing public calls to carry out terrorist activities or that publically justify terrorism or other extremist activity, or scenes that propagandize pornography or a cult of violence and cruelty.”

The ministry will also reserve the right to ban screenings of films found to include “information on ways or methods of developing, producing, or using narcotics, psychotropic substances, or their precursors, or about places where they can be purchased, as well as scenes propagandizing any sort of advantages of using particular narcotic substances, psychotropic substances, or their precursors.”

The draft is posted on the Culture Ministry’s website for public discussion from November 25 to December 8.

The vague wording of Russia’s law against extremism is often abused by government authorities to ban materials or persecute groups or individuals that it deems undesirable to the regime. Democratic oppositionists often find themselves victimized by the law, whereas ultranationalist groups that publically promote xenophobia are given sanction by the authorities to hold mass rallies.

Ekho Moskvy journalist Vladimir Varfolomeyev featured the bill on his blog, noting that it could prevent any movie with “incisive social or political content” from making its way into Russian theaters. “There won’t be any more films like Russia 88, Trainspotting, or even Kill Bill or Shattered,” he said.

Russia 88, a 2009 award-winning docudrama about neo-Nazis in St. Petersburg, has suffered both from lawsuits and self-censorship on the part of theaters that refuse to screen the film.

Commenting on the Culture Ministry bill, Russia 88 director Pavel Bardin said: “We already have effective mechanisms for film censorship. The federal law against extremism allows any movie to be banned (true, along with the effect of an unnecessary scandal). The theaters wait for telephone calls signaling if they can or cannot show a certain film and basically never show any incisive movies. This order is simply the final accord.”

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.

The agency has announced a contest for designs for software that would automatically monitor online media and locate signs of violations of federal legislation that prohibits extremism. The contest deadline is August 15, 2011, with a second deadline of December 15, 2011 for testing and bug fixes.

Officials estimated the cost of the system at 15 million rubles – about half a million USD.

Roskomnadzor hopes to use the system to monitor materials posted on internet media websites issuing public calls to commit acts of terrorism, justifying terrorism, demonstrating Nazi symbols or attributes, calling for the violent overthrow of constitutional order, violating the “unity of Russia,” or inciting social, racial, national, or religious strife.

The system would also monitor public accusations against civil servants of having committed crimes.

Officials also want the system to locate “pornography propaganda” and organizations that have been banned by Russian courts, as well as “hidden inserts and other technical means and ways of distributing information that would act on people’s subconscious or have a harmful influence on their health.”

The software will be comprised of a media database, dictionaries of words and expressions that could constitute extremism as defined by Russian law, and “a repository of controversial materials.”

Agency representative Mikhail Vorobyov said Roskomnadzor currently monitors internet media manually with search engines. He noted that the number of registered electronic media outlets is constantly on the rise, topping 5,300 resources today compared to 555 in 2008.

According to Vorobyov, the decision to create an automatic monitoring system was influenced by a June 2010 Supreme Court decision that only requires media outlets to delete or edit “unlawful reader comments” in response to an official request from Roskomnadzor.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state. Federal officials routinely harass protesters, conduct raids of homes and offices, hinder legal forms of protest, and in some cases block opposition websites. Amnesty International has accused federal Russian agencies of using extremism as an excuse to torture criminal suspects.

Update 11/5/10: Pivovarov has been released and his sentance annulled per court order, after a judge pointed out that his rights as a defendant had been violated. Among others, the activist was denied the right to choose an attorney and the police officers who had detained him were never identified.

Courts and law enforcement agencies are currently deciding the fates of three opposition activists who helped to organize a rally in defense of free assembly in St. Petersburg this past Sunday, Kasparov.ru reports.

Andrei Dmitriev and Andrei Pesotskov, both members of the Other Russia party, were detained at a rally at Gostiny Dvor as part of the Russian opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign. The two were charged with organizing an unsanctioned rally and disobeying a police officer, and were sentenced the next day to 5 and 14 days of administrative arrest, respectively. Following their sentencing, both Dmitriev and Pesotskov’s apartments were raided by police.

A St. Petersburg court acquitted both men on Wednesday morning, but authorities followed to file a criminal suit alleging that the two participated in “extremist” activity.

“The court reconsidered the punishments and released them,” said Other Russia representative Andrei Milyuk. “However, Pesotskov and Dmitriev were immediately taken to Center ‘E’ for interrogation on a criminal suit and it’s not clear whether or not they’re free to go,”

The Center for Extremism Prevention, commonly referred to as Center “E,” is a branch of federal Russian law enforcement that is charged with investigating what is deemed to be “extremist” activity. Human rights organizations around the world have criticized the center for torturing criminal suspects and other abuses of authority, particularly against opposition activists, and for its broad definition of what constitutes extremism.

A harsher sentence was handed down to Andrei Pivovarov, leader of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian People’s Democratic Union and another organizer of the October 31 rally. Pivovarov was arrested at Gostiny Dvor together with Dmitriev and Pesotskov. On Monday, he was sentenced to 27 days of administrative arrest for organizing Strategy 31 rallies in August and October and for disobeying a police officer.

Originally, this same judge had sentenced Pivovarov to 14 days of arrest for his organization of the August 31 rally, but the oppositionist was released after two days of protests in support of his release. An appellate court ordered the case to be reviewed, and, as it turns out, Monday’s verdict is partially the result of that review.

Opposition activists have spent the past two days staging protests calling for Pivovarov’s release. In Moscow, Solidarity leaders Ilya Yashin, Sergei Davidis, and Mikhail Shneyder held solitary pickets – the only type of protest that doesn’t require government sanction to be held legally – while Solidarity leader Boris Nemtsov joined in ongoing pickets in St. Petersburg. The group plans to continue protesting so long as Pivovarov remains under arrest.

Two separate Strategy 31 rallies were held in St. Petersburg on October 31. One at Gostiny Dvor was attended by approximately 1000 people, by organizers’ estimates. Police began arresting the demonstrators immediately after the rally began. According to St. Petersburg police, only about 120 people came out to the rally, 104 of whom were detained.

A second rally at Dvortsovaya Square was attended by about 300 people. Police began detaining activists after they unfurled a 30-meter Russian flag.

Other rallies in the Strategy 31 campaign were held on Sunday across the country, including in the cities of Moscow, Vladivostok, Kurgan, Penza, Murmansk, Tver, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Astrakhan, Sochi, Ryazan, Krasnodarsk, and others.

Following months of legal battles, a Russian court declared in September that a decision by Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media supervision agency) to issue an official warning against the newspaper for “propagandizing nationalistic views” was valid. Since a publication can be shut down after two such warnings, Novaya Gazeta editors say that the court’s decision spells the beginning of the possible end of the newspaper.

In a post on Novaya Gazeta’s blog on Sunday evening, Deputy Chief Editor Sergei Sokolov explained the court case:

It’s entirely possible that next year Novaya Gazeta won’t be found in either kiosks or your mailbox. We may be shut down…

What alarmed the federal officials? The article “Gang, agency, party. Who are the ‘legal nationalists'” – which is research dedicated to ultra-right organizations that openly preach nationalistic views. We quoted propagandistic texts from the web site of Russian Mind, we took photographs from a Nazi website in which people calling themselves legal politicians were covered in symbols that look fascist to the point of confusion. (Notarized copies of these materials were presented to the court.)

Why did we do this? Because Novaya Gazeta has taken a principally antifascist position for the course of many years: it demands that the authorities investigate the activities of nationalist-extremists, it explains to people what the activists from numerous “patriotic” movements that gallivant around the center of Moscow in Russian Marches actually are, it reports statistics on the victims of nationalists. (Several kilograms of these texts were presented to the court.)

In January 2009, fascists murdered our journalist Anastasia Baburova and a friend of our editorial office, lawyer Stanislav Markelov – they were shot in the back of the head in the center of Moscow. It was a public punishment for antifascists. (The court was aware of these circumstances.)

We carried out our own investigation and explained: the people now charged with murder associated with members of Russian Mind and had a certain attitude towards it. Meanwhile, Russian Mind advertises itself as a non-extremist and non-fascist organization. In order for readers and law enforcement agencies to get the proper impression of these citizens, we quoted THEIR program documents and showed THEIR photographs with Nazi symbols. (The court was aware of this.)

We expected that after this publication, Roskomnadzor would deal with the fact that the website of Russian Mind exists, and that prosecutors would begin looking into further criminal charges.

Roskomnadzor did deal with it – only not with the ultra-right, but with Novaya Gazeta.

The offending article can be read in Russian by clicking here.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

The band members were ordered to appear at the headquarters of the Moscow City Police on Monday for an “interrogation,” said group soloist Maria Lyubicheva.

The phone call from the police headquarters informed the band that the electro-punk song “Gotov” (“Ready”), which was performed at the rally on Moscow’s Pushkin Square, can be interpreted as extremist.

Lyubicheva told the BBC that the offending lyrics – “to set fire to cop cars at night” and “the law is garbage” – have been taken out of context.

The chorus of the song, which was read without instrumental accompaniment at the rally, reads: I’m ready!/ And are you ready?/ To set fire to cop cars at night?/ It’s like a principle of life, a sign of good taste/ For those to whom the law is garbage.

“The song needs to be listened to in its entirety, because if you take lines out of context, then you can intentionally misconstrue any piece of work and call it extremist,” said Lyubicheva, who wrote the song’s lyrics.

According to the artist, the chorus speaks about the sacrifices that two people are prepared to make for the sake of their love.

Songs containing derogatory remarks about the Russian police cost popular rapper Noize MC a ten-day jail sentence in August.

The rapper, famous for his indictment of the Moscow police in his song “Mercedes S-666,” labeled some law enforcement officers “animals with red insignia” after they tried to stop him from handing a hat to attendees of one of his concerts in Volgograd in order to collect donations – a routine part of the artist’s program.

After the concert, Noize MC was detained for 48 hours and convicted the next day of minor hooliganism.

The rally in defense of the Khimki Forest on August 22 was sanctioned by the Moscow city authorities, a move that surprised organizers used to being denied permission to hold opposition events. At the same time, police refused to allow sound equipment to be set up on the stage.

The authorities argued that the use of sound equipment would turn the rally into a concert, which they did not grant permission to hold. However, as oppositionists noted, sound equipment is always used at their various other rallies.

In the end, a variety of musical groups, including Barto and headlined by rock singer Yury Shevchuk, performed acoustically with only the aid of megaphones.

Representatives of the Murmansk branch of the opposition movement Solidarity said that local police detained two activists when they attempted to transfer the report from a train to their vehicle. The two were sent to a local police station and told that the thousand copies were confiscated because Murmansk police suspected the report of constituting “extremist literature.” The report will now undergo expert analysis for the presence of extremist content, said the police.

As of Wednesday evening, the two activists had been released.

The incident marks the second time Russian police have confiscated copies of “Putin. Results. 10 Years” under allegations of extremism. Police in St. Petersburg confiscated 200 thousand copies of the report under this pretense this past June, but released them two weeks later after an analysis came up empty.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of Russia’s former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. Police in various Russian cities have confiscated copies of the report on at least four separate occasions. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.

A truckload of 100,000 copies of the report, “Putin. Results. 10 Years,” were confiscated by St. Petersburg police on June 15, after the driver of the truck was reportedly found to lack the proper documents to bring a heavy cargo truck into the center of the city. Now, as of July 1, the activists working to distribute the self-published report have authorization to take the copies back, as no evidence of “extremism” had been found within their contents.

Meanwhile, a number of activists detained on June 18 for distributing the document on Vasilievsky Island, where the International Economic Forum was being held at the time, have been called in by police “for questioning,” said Kurnosova.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of the former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. However, aside from the 100,000 confiscated by St. Petersburg police and released yesterday, another 100,000 were taken by Federal Security Service agents on June 17. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.