While access to the internet itself remains largely unhindered in Russia, many bloggers have come under attack – both online and in person.

In the last two years there have been several cases of technical blocking and numerous cases of content removal. The authorities have also increasingly engaged in harassment of bloggers. At least 25 cases of blogger harassment, including 11 arrests, were registered between January 2009 and May 2010, compared with seven in 2006–08. In addition, dozens of blogs have reportedly been attacked in recent years by a hacker team called the Hell Brigade.

The report did point out areas where access to the internet remains a pressing issue:

The number of internet users jumped from 1.5 million in 1999 to 46.5 million in 2010, and grew by more than 13 million in the last two years, though this still leaves Russia’s penetration rate at 33 percent, lower than the rates in Central European countries. The level of infrastructure differs significantly from place to place, and gaps are evident between urban and rural areas as well as between different types of cities. The worst access conditions can be found in the North Caucasus and the industrial towns of Siberia and the Far East.

Corruption within the federal government also plays a part in what companies control internet access across the country:

Five access providers—Comstar, Vimpelcom, ER-Telecom, AKADO, and the state-owned SvyazInvest—controlled more than 67 percent of the broadband market as of February 2010. Regional branches of SvyazInvest account for 36 percent of subscribers, up from 27.8 percent in 2008. As at the federal level, regional dominance usually depends on political connections and the tacit approval of regional authorities. Although this situation is not the direct result of legal or economic obstacles, it nonetheless reflects an element of corruption that is widespread in the telecommunications sector and other parts of the Russian economy.

Greater concern, however, was focused on blocked online content, particularly opposition-oriented websites.

Although attempts to establish a comprehensive, centralized filtering system have been abandoned, several recent cases of blocking have been reported. In December 2009, a number of ISPs blocked access to the radical Islamist website Kavkaz Center. At almost the same time, the wireless provider Yota blocked several opposition sites. The practice of exerting pressure on service providers and content producers by telephone has become increasingly common. Police and representatives of the prosecutor’s office call the owners and shareholders of websites, and anyone else in a position to remove unwanted material and ensure that the problem does not come up again. Such pressure encourages self-censorship, and most providers do not wait for court orders to remove targeted materials.

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Content is often removed on the grounds that it violates Russia’s laws against “extremism.” Providers are punished for hosting materials that are proscribed in a list on the website of the Ministry of Justice. The list is updated on a monthly basis and included 748 items as of January 2011. The procedure for identifying extremist materials is nontransparent, leaving ample room for politically motivated content removal. There have been at least three cases of site closures, two of them temporary, on the grounds that the affected sites hosted extremist materials. In February 2010, the major opposition portal Grani.ru was checked for extremism, but the authorities apparently found nothing incriminating.

Among the most disturbing accounts in the report were cases of criminal suits and physical attacks against individual bloggers.

Since January 2009, police and the prosecutor’s office have launched at least 25 criminal cases against bloggers and forum commentators. While some cases were against individuals who posted clearly extremist content, others appear to be more politically motivated. The most severe and widely known sentence was that of Irek Murtazin, a Tatarstan blogger and journalist who received almost two years in prison in November 2009 for defamation.

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While traditional journalists and activists have faced a series of murders and severe beatings in recent years, physical attacks on Russian bloggers and online activists have so far been comparatively limited. However, one recent event drew significant attention. In November 2010, Oleg Kashin, a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant who was also well known as a blogger, was severely beaten near his home in Moscow. His coverage of protests and political youth movements had prompted vocal responses from pro-Kremlin groups in the past, but it was not known exactly who was responsible for the attack.

Read the report in its entirety by clicking here.

On Thursday, the institute released its Freedom in the World 2011 survey, which reports a serious decline in democracy worldwide.

“The world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes acted with increased brazenness in 2010,” says the survey. Among the most damaging acts of the year, Freedom House cited the trial and conviction of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and China’s open disdain for the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony.

As the report notes, the Russian government’s charges against Khodorkovsky were widely dismissed as fraudulent. However, this did not prevent Prime Minister Vladimir Putin from publicly declaring “that Khodorkovsky belonged in jail even as the court was nearing a verdict.”

The report lambasts the Russian president for failing his entire pro-democracy agenda: “President Dmitry Medvedev’s highly publicized pledges to combat corruption, arrest those responsible for a series of high-profile murders of journalists and activists, and strengthen the rule of law have not been fulfilled. Instead, bribery and embezzlement remain the norm, politically motivated violence goes unpunished, and the law is enforced at the caprice of the leadership.”

Analysts said it was refreshing to learn that, behind closed doors, US diplomats in Russia and other authoritarian countries were “realistic, astute, concerned about growing repression, and often sympathetic toward the political opposition,” despite more positive statements that US officials make in public.

At the same time, they warned that strong, outspoken resistance on a global level was necessary to prevent authoritarian regimes from silencing their domestic critics. “Indeed,” says the report, “if the world’s democracies fail to unite and speak out in defense of their own values, despots will continue to gain from divide-and-conquer strategies, as Russia’s leaders are now doing in their approach to Europe and the United States.”

Freedom House ranks the level of each country’s political rights and civil liberties on a scale from 1 to 7, with 7 being the least free. For a self-proclaimed democracy, Russia’s scores are abysmal: 6 for political rights and 5 for civil liberties, putting it on the same level as the occupied West Bank, Rwanda and Yemen.

Read the full report here.

The organization describes the annual report, entitled “Nations in Transit 2010,” as a study of democratic governance throughout Central Europe and Eurasia. It covers the events of 2009 and assigns countries individual ratings based on the state of democracy in each.

In a press release issued on Tuesday, Freedom House noted that ratings in 14 of the 29 countries had worsened since the year before. It goes on to single out Russia as having “experienced the single largest overall deterioration” of democracy over the period of the past ten years.

The authors of the report cite a marked rise in corruption, pressure on the opposition, and a shrinking space for dissent as reasons for the decline.

“The Nations in Transit findings suggest that there is a deep and ongoing governance crisis in the former Soviet Union,” said Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor. “The intimidation and violence used against lawyers, reporters, and civic activists in Russia and other countries in the region cast a pall over these societies and their ability to build rules-based systems,” Windsor added.

In addition to democratic decline in Russia, authors of the study noted similar trends in Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Uzbekistan and several other countries.

Russia has regularly received low marks on the state of its democratic governance from Freedom House. A report issued earlier this year gave the country a score of 6 out of 7 for political rights and 5 out of 7 for civil rights, with a higher score indicating a greater lack of freedom. The organization argues that Russia’s current regime is authoritarian in nature and has become more and more oppressive over time.

According to their website, Freedom House is “an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.”

The report in full can be read by clicking here.

The Freedom House report maintains that press freedom declined in 2009 all over the world, including in Western Europe. That said, “Russia remained among the world’s more repressive and most dangerous media environments,” and figures among countries where the political opposition, non-governmental organizations, and independent media outlets come under the greatest deal of censorship and pressure.

Experts at the organization label Russia as one of a number of governments with “an authoritative bent” that are expanding control over both traditional media and the relatively more free internet. “The space for independent media in Russia has been steadily reduced as legal protections are routinely ignored, the judicial system grows more subservient to the executive branch, reporters face severe repercussions for reporting on sensitive issues, most attacks on journalists go unpunished, and media ownership is brought firmly under the control of the state,” says the report. “Russian authorities are also moving to restrict internet freedom through manipulation of online content and legal actions against bloggers.”

More concretely, Russia was grouped together with Venezuela and China as countries in which “[s]ophisticated techniques are being used to censor and block access to particular types of information, to flood the internet with antidemocratic, nationalistic views, and to provide broad surveillance of citizen activity.”

The report also slammed Russia for one of its most notorious statistics: since 2000, nineteen journalists have been murdered in Russia in retaliation for their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Only one of those cases resulted in a murder conviction. Freedom House named Russia as one country where impunity for journalist murders “is encouraging new attacks, significantly hampering media freedom.” In addition to the direct effect on the murdered journalists, the report says that “these attacks have a chilling effect on the profession as a whole, adding to the existing problem of self-censorship.”

Except for in the Baltic states, analysis from the rest of the former Soviet Union was not much more encouraging. Only Ukraine and Georgia were deemed to be “partially free,” while the remaining countries were ranked as “not free.” Among those, the only countries that fared worse than Russia were Belarus (taking 189th place), Uzbekistan (tied for 189th), and Turkmenistan (194th). The report also calls Russia “a model and patron for a number of neighboring countries,” indirectly implying that its bad influence is partially to blame for the low rankings of fellow former Soviet states.

Summing up the state of press freedom in the country, Freedom House says that the media environment in Russia is “marked by the consistent inability of the pliant judiciary to protect journalists; increased self-censorship by journalists seeking to avoid harassment, closure of their media outlets, and even murder; and the frequent targeting of independent outlets by regulators.”

“Reporters suffer from a high level of personal insecurity, and impunity for past murders and other physical attacks is the norm,” the report goes on. “The state’s control or influence over almost all media outlets remains a serious concern, particularly as it affects the political landscape and Russians’ ability to make informed electoral choices.”

To reach its conclusions, the organization researched metrics for political rights and civil liberties around the world, then ranking countries on a 7 point scale for each category, 1 representing most free and 7 representing least free (read the Freedom House methodology for the 2008 report).

For 2009, Russia received 6 points for political rights and 5 for civil liberties, the same score it has held since 2005. Chechnya, which is classified as a disputed territory, received 7 for both categories.

Russia is one of 42 countries classified as “not free.” Only 23 countries, including Belarus, Cameroon, Eritrea, Iran, China, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan received scores indicating they were less free. Conversely, more than 150 countries ranked as more free than Russia, including Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia and Latvia.

Youth activist Roman Dobrokhotov, who gained international prominence in December for heckling Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, was unsatisfied with the report:

“Even thought the report came out in 2009, in essence it’s from last year,” he said. “It discusses the heinous Parliamentary elections and other events from 2007, but has no mention of presidential elections, the war in Georgia or changes to the Constitution.”

“This will probably be reflected in the next report, and Russia will have all the opportunity to receive a 7 and 6, respectively,” he added. “For now we are objectively more free than Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Libya.”

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Read the 2008 Freedom House country report for Russia.

According to the document, Russian “journalists faced dozens of criminal cases and hundreds of civil cases” in 2007. Two suspicious deaths, those of Ivan Saforonov and Vyacheslav Ifanov, were deemed “suicides” by authorities, and at least three journalists were behind bars at the end of 2007. The report goes on to describe an alarming incidence of reporters who sought asylum abroad after harassment by officials, as well as two journalists, Larisa Arap and Vladimir Chugunov, who were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals after writing articles criticizing local authorities.

Russian officials have previously called Freedom House biased against the country.

Russia was not the only former Soviet country to drop in the organization’s rankings. The group describes a wide downward trend in much of the Soviet Union, including Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Azerbaijan.

Still, among the countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia has seen some of the sharpest declines, and is now above only Uzbekistan, Belarus and Turkmenistan.

According to the publication, “Russia [in 2007] remained one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the media.” In addition, “Lively but cautious political debate was increasingly limited to glossy weekly magazines and news websites only available to urban, educated and affluent audiences.”

We wonder if that last point included the very latest plan to revise the infamous extremism law promulgated last summer. The current “enhancement” is to eliminate the need for a court hearing to decide whether or not the statements in question constitute extremism, letting the prosecutor initiate criminal charges directly.

The Freedom House report places Russia’s press freedom together with Azerbaijan, right below Venezuela and Togo and right above Brunei and Swaziland, all deep into the “not free” point designation. The draft report section on Russia includes the following comments:

Media freedom was further curtailed in 2006 as President Vladimir Putin’s government passed legislation restricting news reporting and journalists were subjected to physical violence and intimidation. Although the Russian constitution provides for freedom of speech and of the press, authorities are able to use the legislative and judicial systems to harass and prosecute independent journalists. . . .

Despite public objections, Russia’s parliament also passed amendments to the Law on Fighting Extremist Activity, which Putin then signed in July. The measure expanded the definition of extremism to include media criticism of public officials, and authorized up to three years’ imprisonment for journalists as well as the suspension or closure of their publications if they were convicted. . . .

Authorities continued to exert influence on media outlets and determine news content in 2006. The state owns or controls significant stakes in the country’s three main national television networks: Channel One, Rossiya, and NTV. . . . During 2006, journalists continued to face criminal libel charges for printing and broadcasting statements that were unfavorable to public officials. Criminal courts also sentenced several journalists on charges of “inciting racial hatred” for publicizing controversial events in Chechnya. . . .

With online media developing and 16 percent of the population now online, the government also harassed some of Russia’s leading news websites.

The draft report also detailed the many journalists who were murdered in Russia in 2006, “likely for reasons tied to their work, according to media watchdogs.” Names that should not be forgotten: Anna Politkovskaya, Ilya Zemin, Vagif Kochetkov, Yevgeny Gerasimenko, Anatoly Voronin.