While nearly half of the active American electorate voted for a Mormon for president earlier this week, the Church of Latter Day Saints has not enjoyed such a warm reception in Russia as of late. Activists from the ruling party’s youth group held a protest on November 1 accusing Mormons of pursuing “anti-Russian interests” and told them to fly back “home” to Washington. In this column for Gazeta.ru, religious historian Boris Falikov talks about how this sudden burst of ire has far more to do with the Russian Orthodox Church’s own political problems than any actual threat.

Surrounded by Mormons
By Boris Falikov
November 6, 2012
Gazeta.ru

Not long ago, Vladimir Putin dropped a few words about the need to perfect control over totalitarian sects. This happened at a meeting with representatives from the Samarskaya region. One of those present complained to the president that these sects have broken loose entirely and that something needed to be done about them. Putin agreed that it was a problem and promised to deal with it on the federal level – stipulating, incidentally, that it was a subtle matter, since it dealt with freedom of religion.

The Public Chamber took up the president’s remarks. A list had to be drawn up immediately of the ringleaders of these sects and turned over to the security services. At the same time, dubious religious organizations needed to be checked for signs of totalitarianism.

And Young Guard, which brings together all of United Russia’s young supporters, decided not to waste any time and went straight to work. And now in Moscow and other Russian cities we already have pickets against Mormons, telling them to go back to their historical homeland in the US. Especially since they’re not only a totalitarian sect, but also CIA agents. What is it that’s behind this surge in the war on the “sectarian threat?”

This war didn’t start yesterday. After the demise of the atheistic regime in Russia, missionaries and evangelicals of every imaginable persuasion poured in from all over the world. The Russian Orthodox Church, which has always insisted on its special position in the country, did not like this. Neither did this boundless pluralism suit the state, which wanted to bring order to the religious sphere in one fell swoop. As a result, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism were officially declared to be traditional religions, and the rest were asked to stand aside.

That might’ve been all, but the Russian Orthodox Church thought that was too little. To try and win over people’s souls by strictly religious means is a long, laborious process. It’s much easier just to declare your competitors to be enemies of society and call on the government for help. So now we have this concept of “totalitarian sects.” This has turned out to be quite a boon. For believers, a sect is a mob of heretics; for secularists, it’s a group of intolerable fanatics. It’s true that the word also has a scientific meaning used by religious sociologists. But this meaning is entirely destroyed with the added epithet of “totalitarian.” As a result, it has become a label that can be thrown at competitors to accuse them of antisocial behavior.

This label is used widely by the anti-sect battle squads formed in the depths of the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s easy to slap onto practically any religion or confession, since it was never scientifically specific.

As far as I can recall, the only things have been declared totalitarian sects are new religious movements and Protestant denominations that had success with their missionary efforts and formed competition for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Of all non-titular faiths, Catholics have managed to avoid this fate. But who knows – it if wasn’t for the warm relationship between the Russian patriarch and the Vatican, maybe the Pope would also turn out to be the leader of a totalitarian sect.

This state of affairs suits the security agencies quite well. They don’t need to break their skulls over who’s a threat to society and who’s not. They’ll always have the list of “usual suspects” drawn up by the Orthodox anti-sect fighters. Among all those distinguished is also the well-staffed expert council on the Judicial Ministry. But what good does all this do for society?

We all know well that religion is not always a blessing. Sometimes it’s a risky entity, and not only because religious radicalism is on the rise all over the world, Russia no exception. What are totalitarian sects most commonly accused of? That their charismatic leaders subjugate their disciples and twist them into knots. That is to say, they don’t so much help them find God as draw them into a blind faith in the leaders themselves. But there’s no reason to believe that misuse of spiritual authority and turning it into cruel authoritarianism is a problem that only comes from new religions. It’s a common misfortune that not even the most respectable religions can guarantee against.

But when eloquent preachers pontificate about the coming end of the world and frighten the public, then it’s not remotely important which religion is spreading the panic. The damage is the same.

Or take child-rearing. Sectarians, as a rule, are accused of crippling children, robbing them of joys of youth. But if we remember the orphanages of several certain Orthodox monasteries, such as Bogolyubsky, then it becomes clear that these foster children don’t exactly have it any better. The children of devout believers run into identical problems, and they have nothing to do with what exactly their parents believe in. Neither are there confessional boundaries when it comes to the abuse of property. Those victims can be from any religion. What needs to be determined is whether they gave their property to a religious organization voluntarily or were forced into it by dishonest tricksters.

Law enforcement agencies should address these problems by relying on our civil and criminal codes. Making lists of leaders of nontraditional religious organizations and checking them for secret signs of totalitarianism isn’t going to help. More likely, it’s going to be a hindrance, since it replaces a concrete war against violations of the law with a war on ideologies. Aside from the fact that they’d be undercutting the principle of citizen equality before the law, regardless of religious conviction. However, this is the path that the authorities prefer to take. Sure, there isn’t much benefit to society from any of this, but there is to the government, and it’s not insignificant.

The fact of the matter is that a timely witch hunt is a tried and true method of drawing public attention away from urgent political and economic problems that the Kremlin doesn’t have the strength to fix. A few words tossed around by the president at a meeting in Novo-Ogaryovo elicited an immediate response from the Public Chamber. And the loyal Young Guards are already striking against a totalitarian sect whose roots extend across the ocean. The fact that a Mormon has a decent chance of becoming president of the United States underlines the significance of the threat. The enemy is great and terrible – it’s obvious why nothing in this country works out.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

In this column for Gazeta.ru, independent political commentator Sergei Shelin warns against trends in military spending and economic policy that are heavily reminiscent of Soviet times.

Per Stalin’s Wishes
By Sergei Shelin
September 5, 2012
Gazeta.ru

Just like any collective that’s headed towards a dead end, the Kremlin team has been directing its thoughtful gaze back to a time when, as it sees it, everything was good, correct, and even ideal. For them, those times were the years of Stalinism.

Their instinctive draw to precisely those times and those experiences has already become simply impossible to camouflage. There’s too much at stake now to darken or mask their own archaism or to feign a sense of balance or even a contemporary outlook. There’s no longer any possibility for balance today.

The appeal to Joseph Stalin for a recipe that will save them has been sounding out across the entire problematic front.

And Putin’s prescription for the siloviki and military industrialists “to carry out as powerful a breakthrough in modernization of the military sector as we had in the ’30s” – this is only one of the latest examples of the leaders’ return to their roots and origins. But this example might also be the most characteristic one. For it’s precisely the Russian military complex that has been chosen to prove to the people – and, if it’s useful, to the entire world – that our old government not only knows how to spout off rhetoric, but also still understands something about these matters and is capable of implementing at least some sort of grand projects.

It was not for nothing that at this same session of the Security Council, Vladimir Putin once again guaranteed 23 trillion rubles in financing for our weapons program, regardless of its obvious impracticality, and as a compelling point remarked that, for “the past thirty years,” the Russian military-industrial complex has “missed several cycles of modernization” due to a lack of financing.

“The past thirty years” instead of the “past twenty years” that comes to mind – this is an innocent oratorical trick. Otherwise it would turn out that two-thirds of this era of decline occurred during Putin’s own rule. But the main thing in this speech was not that, but the plan it included to reset military industry, with all its concrete provisions.

Their structural, and in some cases textual, similarities to Stalin’s respective provisions bring about the same sensations as one gets from watching an old newsreel.

Stalin had “six conditions” for industrial development. Putin does as well. True, he only has four (three that are enumerated and another supplemental one about conditions for making analogs for us of foreign weapon designs). But in discussing, for example, the cadres, we can say that the two leaders quote one another.

“The slogan ‘the cadres decide everything’ demands that our leaders show the utmost concern for workers, for the ‘little ones’ and ‘big ones’…raise them, move them up and forward…” (Stalin)

“A word or two about cadres: it’s an extremely important question, and at all levels, at that – beginning with the rank-and-file worker and engineering cadres up through those of the company managers… We’ve done a lot to upgrade the working cadres, but if it hasn’t been enough, we’ll continue this work…” (Putin)

Incidentally, it’s possible that these aren’t quotes of each other, but just a similarity in their directions of thinking. With the difference that Stalin knew how to achieve the goals he set, while Putin, it seems, just doesn’t sense what it is in the 2010s that differs from the 1930s.

Nothing that Stalin’s modernization relied on still exists today.

During Stalin’s first five-year plans, from 1928 to 1940, the number of people employed in the industrial sector tripled, and in heavy industry even quintupled. The working ranks were filled up by peasants fleeing from collectivization, women (whose representation in industry rose from a fourth to nearly half), and people from the decimated urban private sector. In today’s Russia, there’s no way to help any large sector of our economy by force of numbers.

The price of modernization in the 1930s was radical, as was the catastrophic decline in the standard of living – particularly in the villages, but in the cities as well. In 2010, no demographic in Russia would agree to sacrifice itself for the sake of “modernization” in general, let alone for the “modernization” of the military-industrial complex.

The motivation of workers, from the “little ones” to the “big ones,” in the 1930s was a mixture of panicked fear and fiery enthusiasm. None of our workers today, “from the rank-and-file worker and engineering cadres up through those of the company managers,” naturally, share either of those sentiments.

One more detail that people don’t always remember. The most important driver of Stalin’s modernization was competition. For example, the competition between aircraft design bureaus, which proposed various fighter plane models. Or, conversely, the fight over resources between military factories that manufactured the same types of products. But Putin’s economy is a place where monopolization is not only imposed, but imposed with ferocity. In short, there are no points of convergence whatsoever.

We do not need to repeat Stalinist modernization. If we have to remember it at all, it should only be in order to do the opposite. To renew today’s Russian economy, we need not socialism, but capitalism; not growth in military spending, but its reduction; not cuts in educational spending, roads, health care and in general everything that would make the country more modernized, but an increase in this spending.

Perhaps Russian society is not quite mature enough for this kind of renewal. But still, Stalinist modernization would be categorically unsuitable. Just as other characteristic aspects of that way of life would be unsuitable.

The romantic nostalgia of Putin and his circle for those past times is, for them, perfectly natural. This is their spiritual foundation. But every successive attempt they make to build contemporary political policy on this foundation only reminds us of the deepening inadequacy of our government representatives to do what’s possible and desirable.

The activist was part of a crowd of between 30 and 100 people who arrived at the statue of Kazakh poet Abay Qunanbayuli to celebrate his birthday and attempt to renew the atmosphere of the protest movement.

As a message on the group’s Facebook page explained: “On August 10, in honor of the 167th birthday of Abay Qunanbayuli, the movement Occupy Moscow invites everyone to take part in an improvisational festival on Chistoprudny Boulevard. With your help, we would like to renew the atmosphere of the May camp of Occupy Abay, at least for a little while.”

A number of poets and Kazakh activists were slated to speak at the event, including Kirill Medvedev, Matvei Krylov, ArsPegas, and others. A musical performance and pop-up art exhibit were also planned.

Although the original Russian Occupy movement was overtly political, organizers said they saw no reason to request permission from local authorities to hold the celebration.

Aleksei Mayorov, head of the city’s regional safety department, said before the event that police would “consider the form and content of the event” while present. He promised not to interfere so long as public order was maintained and the gathering did not seem political in nature.

A number of police cars and four paddy wagons could be seen parked nearby the poet’s statue throughout the evening.

While there was no chanting of political slogans on the part of the celebration’s participants, one activist did unfurl a poster demanding the release of the three arrested members of the punk group Pussy Riot. As of Friday night, it was unclear what charges the arrestee might face.

Because of the Russian Occupy movement, Abay Qunanbayuli has become one of the main symbols of the country’s recently energized anti-governmental protest movement. In May, OMON riot police broke up a camp around the statue that had dubbed itself “Occupy Abay” only ten day after its inception. An attempt to renew the camp lasted less than one day when police charged organizers with lacking the proper documentation to distribute food and water.

From the editorial team at Gazeta.ru:

Abolishing Activity
July 23, 2012
Gazeta.ru

The Russian authorities are trying to make all forms of organized civil activity illegal. And they’re creating a surprise for themselves: when the first serious crisis hits, they’re going to find themselves up against entirely different forces – ones that come as if out of nowhere, unwilling to limit themselves to the bounds of the law, and indisposed to dialogue with the higher authorities.

Under pressure from the state, the opposition has now gone heavily on the defensive. The loud and confident calls heard not so long ago to renew civil society, to restructure the political order, and to find mutually acceptable forms of transition from the old system to the new one have since fallen silent.

By spewing out ultra-reactionary measures, the government has cut off political initiatives and forced its critics to focus on their own protection.

Protection, that is, from the upcoming show trials on the alleged mass riots on Bolotnaya Square and the inquisitional case against Pussy Riot; from the hysterical smear campaigns stylizing them as “enemies of the people;” from attempts to subject the internet to censorship and to label criticism of the authorities as “libel” and punish it as a criminal offense.

This reactionary wave has gathered momentum and become swamped with volunteers and seditionists alike – the outcasts of today’s government who hope that this troubled torrent will carry them into central positions. One Duma deputy proposed requalifying not only NGOs as “foreign agents,” but the media as well. Another one wants to introduce a criminal statute against “compromising morality,” so that nobody wants to arrange politically-tinted performances. Even the Public Chamber prepared a piece of legislation aimed at preventing the work of independent volunteers, the increase of whom has brought about the jealousy of the authorities.

If you combine all that’s already been done with what’s only just been planned, it comprises one insane project – the abolition of civil society in Russia. In reality, it’s impossible to do something like this right now, but it’s exactly what they’re dreaming about as an ideal.

The new law on rallies transforms marches that criticize the leadership either into something illegal and severely punishable or into an event completely under the control of that same leadership. The frightened NGOs are fighting over the state subsidies they’ve been promised and will become typical bureaucratic agencies. The internet will be stripped of everything that isn’t approved from on high. Critics will bite their lounges out of fear of “libeling” anybody. The “municipal filter” will exclude anyone from running for office except for those approved by the authorities ahead of time. A new, fatal law will be conjured for any sector of civil activity that still remains alive.

That’s exactly the trajectory. And even though it’s going to be only partially successful in the worst case scenario and won’t to drive people back into their kitchens, it’s easy to imagine some temporary freezes.

But here, two questions arise: who is going to suffer and what kind of social consequences are these reactionary freezes going to have, at least in the intermediate term.

The situation with the victims is clear. They are almost literally the same “angry townsfolk” who spent several months taunting the Kremlin with their protests. By some coincidence, the overwhelming majority of Russian civil activists belong to this crowd, including non-political ones – from city and environmental advocates to volunteers.

This petty but extremely punctual revenge on the part of the Kremlin is addressed, of course, first of all to those who “offended” it. But of course it works out so that the strike hits all types of civil activity and the entire civil collective.

This collective is almost entirely concentrated in large cities and most of all in Moscow. Its relatively small number of adherents gives the authorities the illusion that it is indeed possible to push it aside and forget about it.

In thinking that it should eliminate the tiresome and irritating opposition, the Kremlin is actually breaking with the part of society that is the most moderate, rational, law-abiding, and amenable to dialogue.

If the dream of the authorities comes true and the current civil collective is seriously compromised within the public realm, that realm is not going to remain empty. The newly-available space will be quickly taken up by different forces altogether, ones that appear instantaneously and spontaneously, who ignore any bans or government regulations, and who are not at all inclined to make compromises.

The public passivity of today’s ordinary Russian citizens is a fleeting and deceptive phenomenon, entirely unlike the trusting optimism of better times. Official surveys indicate that people have a very restrained or directly skeptical attitude towards the higher leadership. Any reckless social innovation could make this silence erupt into flashes of discontent, which will easily find spokesmen, and the fewer responsible ones there are, the more strongly disorganized and compromised the growing social stratus of political oppositionist activists will become.

The Russian people are waiting for the new old president to fulfill his campaign promises – a quick rise in the quality of life, or at least not its decline, which is what we actually face. Behind the nervousness with which the government shuffles and reshuffles its plans is a vague understanding that not one of these plans is going to work when considering the expectations of the masses.

The number of options left for the government is shrinking literally every month, and its current aggression against the country’s civil collective is worse than just the aggregate of reactionary and unlawful actions. It is a grave political mistake.

From Gazeta.ru:

A new piece of legislation is in the works in the Russian State Duma to return the statute against “libel” to the Federal Criminal Code. The bill was initiated by former Justice Minister Pavel Krasheninnikov, who is generally considered to be one of the more liberal members of the ruling United Russia party, and introduced to the Duma by his party colleague, journalist Aleksandr Khinshtein. According to Gazeta.ru, the bill is targeted towards “certain individuals,” guessed by some to include human rights advocate Oleg Orlov and blogger Aleksei Navalny. As far as the advocate is concerned, it’s time to start worrying about the return of Stalin’s notorious Article 58, under which many political prisoners were convicted during Soviet times.

Krasheninnikov, who heads the Duma committee on civil, criminal, arbitration and procedural legislation, called for deputies to examine one of the legislative regulations introduced as part of former President Dmitri Medvedev’s modernization initiatives. The deputy’s bill would return the article on libel into the Criminal Code, and the fines currently associated with the article on “insult,” which is only an administrative offense, will be stiffly increased.

“We believe that nothing good has come from the decriminalization of the article on libel and therefore we’re introducing a bill that will criminalize this element,” Interfax quoted Krasheninnikov as saying.

Khinshtein then wrote on his Twitter account that the project had been introduced into the Duma. “Together with a group of colleagues I’m introducing an amendment to establish cr(iminal) liability for libel: Ar. 129 CC RF. Believed and believe it’s annulment to have been a mistake,” he wrote. Khinshtein also told Gazeta.ru that aside from himself, Krasheninnikov, and United Russia deputy Irina Yarovaya, no other parliamentarians have signed onto the bill yet.

Gazeta.ru was not able to get in touch with Krasheninnikov on Friday, but he justified the bill to Interfax:

“The decriminalization of the article on libel that was carried out as part of the liberalization of criminal policy and instituted an administrative fine of up to three thousand rubles for various libelistic falsifications, or to put it differently, for spreading false information about a person, has led to a situation where certain citizens are accusing people with impunity of the most terrible of sins, calling them bandits, terrorists, and corruptioners.”

Krasheninnikov did not specify who he was concretely referring to, but Gazeta.ru speculates that his description implies at least two well-known figures: head of the Memorial human rights society Oleg Orlov, and oppositionist blogger Aleksei Navalny. In a highly publicized case, Orlov was charged with libeling Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who the former accused of bearing responsibility for the murder of human rights worker Natalya Estemirova. Orlov’s remarks came long before the libel article was removed from the Criminal Code, but after it was decriminalized, the case against Orlov was closed.

For his part, Navalny is credited with authoring a popular moniker for United Russia – “the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.” Political analysts have been unanimous in assigning this nickname with significant responsibility for the party’s marked fall during the December 2011 election. Party members were unsuccessful in their attempts to bring the blogger to court over the matter. Recently, Navalny revealed a document showing a parallel between rising housing and utilities costs in certain regions and United Russia’s election results. The document, which includes the party’s logo, shows a higher growth in those costs in the regions where United Russia had poorer results. Regional party members are currently working on filing complaints to law enforcement in response, according to United Russia’s Saratov regional press service. Indeed, Navalny has found himself the target of an all-out manhunt in recent times: earlier this week, Investigative Committee head Aleksander Bastrykin publicly castigated a subordinate for closing a case against the blogger involving the company Kirovles.

Before it was decriminalized, the libel article was seen as the “journalism” article – civil servants and party functionaries often used it to settle scores with the press. Indeed, in 2009 Russia took first place for the number of criminal suits against members of the media. At the time, the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations recorded 60 cases per year (for libel as well as other criminal statutes often used against journalists) and the number was growing. In 95% of cases against journalists, the plaintiffs were civil servants or parliamentary deputies.

Judging by Krasheninnikov’s statement, the new libel statute will be tougher than the first. Those found guilty will face up to five years in jail, as opposed to three years under the old one.

Moreover, the bill covers a gradation of types of libel based on their level of “public danger.” The harshest sentence will be given to those convicted of making false accusations that someone has committed particularly gruesome crimes, particularly ones sexual in nature.

Fines for the administrative statute on insults will also be significantly increased, but the statute itself will not be moved into the criminal code, Krasheninnikov added. Whereas the crime was previously punishable by a fine of 1-3 thousand rubles, the new bill would put it at 30-50 thousand rubles.

The libel and insult articles were both decriminalized in December 2011, and went into effect on January 1, 2012. The legislative project involved the liberalization of a whole range of criminal offenses, at the behest of then-President Medvedev and with the help of Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov.

Krasheninnikov – one of Konovalov’s predecessors in the post of justice minister – at the time welcomed the liberalization effort, calling it “without a doubt, timely and relevant to today’s demands.”

Khinshtein, who before his election to the State Duma was a scandalously notorious journalist, told Gazeta.ru that he always saw the decriminalizations as a mistake. “There is criminal liability for libel in the laws of every country in the world,” he explained. “There is a distinction between libel and insult. Libel involves intent, which is to say that the person knows that what he’s saying is a lie. The past six months have shown that court practice is not improving.” When asked about the court statistics on the number of people convicted of libel within the Administrative Code over the past six months, Khinshtein unexpectedly responded: “But we don’t have an administrative statute for libel.”

That is not the case: Article 5.60 of the Administrative Code is for “libel,” punishable by a fine of up to 100 thousand rubles.

Human rights advocate Pavel Chikov of the Agora association took a more ironic stance on the bill. “I’d like to remind Krasheninnikov that nothing good came from decriminalizing the article on anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Down with libel, let’s have Article 58! [almost four million people were convicted under this article during the Stalin era throughout the Soviet Union – Gazeta.ru] It would be nice to have time to get it back during the spring session,” he quipped.

According to the advocate, Krasheninnikov’s argument that “nothing good has come” from having the libel article in the Administrative Code for the past six months is wholly untenable. “It would be interesting to know about the practice of bringing charges for libel under the frame of the Administrative Code. But I’m guessing that there isn’t any practice,” Chikov said.

The decriminalization of the libel article is not the only Medvedev initiative that has come under reexamination following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidential chair. In particular, before he was even elected, Putin himself publicly promised to re-institute daylight savings time, which Medvedev had gotten rid of [and which some joked was Medvedev’s only real achievement – theotherrussia.org], and on Friday the State Duma passed the first reading of a bill that would label NGOs that accept international funding as “foreign agents” – under Medvedev, on the other hand, this legislation was in the process of being liberalized.

Khinshtein, however, denies that “Medvedev’s legacy” is being reexamined.

“There is absolutely no need to speak of any revision. We’re talking about concrete, specific things. What kind of revision can we talk about if the legislation is being introduced by leading United Russia deputies?” the deputy insisted.

“The effect is that we’re looking at the practice: admitting that here we were hasty, there we rushed,” he concluded.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

The upper chamber of Russia’s parliament has voted 132-1 to approve a bill that raises fines 150-fold for people taking part in unsanctioned rallies. The much-debated legislation now needs only the president’s signature to become law.

The Federation Council voted after a short debate, in contrast to the lower house, where MPs discussed it for 11 hours before the pro-Kremlin United Russia rammed it through at midnight.

The opposition factions in the Duma put forward several hundred amendments in an unprecedented attempt to stymie the bill’s passage, reflecting a new willingness to stand up to the Kremlin.

The bill raises fines from the current 2,000 rubles (£40) to 300,000 rubles (£5,970). The legislation has been seen as a response to a series of anti-government protests and aimed at discouraging further street protests challenging Vladimir Putin.

Gazeta.ru has created a helpful infographic for understanding the voting process; we’ve translated it here:

The opposition gained approval from Moscow city authorities to hold the protest outside at 11 am, but police began making detentions before the event even began. Members of the Yabloko and Other Russia opposition parties were among the detainees.

“Eighteen people have been detained, including myself… We didn’t violate any laws. We had one sign and flyers. We advertised that citizens could come to a rally agreed to by the authorities that was starting at 11 am,” Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin told Interfax. Also detained was Yabloko member Galina Mikhaleva, who had held a solitary protest outside the Duma.

Mitrokhin said he was held in a police station for five hours and charged with violating the order of holding a mass event. Mikhaleva stands accused of holding three posters at once during her solitary picket, and also for handing out flyers and “calling out slogans.” Mitrokhin wrote on his Twitter account that “it was written in the protocols that Galina Mikhaleva has four hands.”

One activist from Other Russia was arrested after trying to fasten a bicycle lock around the Duma’s entrance.

Sergei Davidis from the Solidarity movement was also detained. “Those impudent cows detained me in a solitary picket outside the State Duma. I stood there with a poster saying ‘the amendments on rallies are a crime!'” he wrote on Twitter.

According to Left Front activist Anastasia Udaltsova, at least 23 oppositionists were arrested. The arrest monitoring site OVDinfo.org puts the number closer to 70.

Opposition protests continued elsewhere on Tuesday. Later in the day, activists began a “peaceful stroll” while wearing the white ribbons that have come to symbolize the protest movement. Also, 30 protesters formed a human chain across the street from the State Duma. Two police vans pulled up after twenty minutes, and according to Interfax police detained “several suspicious citizens” who were all wearing symbols of the “white movement.”

While three of the four parties in the State Duma – A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia – all oppose the new law, the majority faction and party of power, United Russia, supports it in full and it is therefore expected to pass.

A meeting by the Duma’s upper chamber – the Federation Council – is already planned for Wednesday, where the law is also expected to be passed. If it is then immediately signed by President Vladimir Putin, it would go into effect in time for a massive opposition march planned for June 12. However, because of Tuesday’s “filibustering” by the non-United Russia factions, the process may be somewhat delayed.

In light of the recent slow-down in anti-government protests in Russia, the editors at Gazeta.ru spoke to various opposition leaders to see what the next steps for the movement might be.

Opposition Strategies: In Search of the People
By Ekaterina Vinokurova; edited by Semyon Kvasha
March 24, 2012
Gazeta.ru

While the protests have ended for now, protest sentiment is still here. Gazeta.ru talked to the leaders of mass protest rallies and asked them what the opposition should do next. Without a leader and or structure, the opposition is ready to do everything simultaneously: to continue the protest rallies, to register parties, to campaign and to take part in elections of all levels.

The state Duma is editing the law on party registration, facilitating the process of doing everything simultaneously.

This law, as well as several others, were offered by President Medvedev as part of a political reform declared as a response to the mass protest rallies last December. Ex-finance minister Alexei Kudrin announced that the fund he was creating was ready to cooperate with billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s party. Revolutionary poet Eduard Limonov is going to attend a monthly prohibited rally at Triumphalnaya square on March 31, part of “Strategy 31”, a campaign of protest for the constitutionally given right for citizens to gather peacefully, without arms (article 31 of Russian Constitution). Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov calls for all the opposition members to come to Moscow for the March of Millions on the day before Putin’s inauguration. Gazeta.ru tried to find out if these different acts have any common tactics or strategy, and what the protest movement’s perspective is.

Has the street ended?

The latest street actions gathered much fewer people than the rallies in Bolotnaya square and Sakharov avenue. The drop in rally attendance was as fast as its growth. This is natural, says Levada-centre deputy director Alexei Grazhdankin, whose company polled the protesters at rallies. He thinks the high season of protest ended with election campaining; but what’s more important, the rallies became a breeding ground for new activists. To continue the protests, the opposition needs its own demands and ideology, sociologists say.

Protest activists do not overdramatize the loss of attendance.

“The protest hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that the street activity is a wave process, we will see new rises and new drops in street protester numbers,” said Alexei Navalny, anticorruption project RosPil founder, to Gazeta.ru.

“Certain events can provoke a hundred thousand people go out in the street suddenly, but one shouldn’t expect a hundred thousand people in the street every weekend,” he said. Protest activity in the street is not the only means of political struggle, “Although you have to understand, that the gang of crooks and thieves is the most afraid of the people in the street,” he added.

“The unwillingness of the leaders of the Bolotnaya and Sakharov protests to come up with constructive suggestions disoriented the people, who were ready to stand up for their rights,” said Xenia Sobchak, TV anchorwoman and a socialite, to Gazeta.ru. She thinks that President’s administration played well off of the democrats’ main problem: their inability to come to agreement, to come up with a common platform, to gather behind one candidate because the leaders were to afraid to lose their supporters.

“People need an agenda, you cannot always go out into the street, stomp your legs and shout that the election is fraudulent, especially if the election is over. If people hear this new agenda, they’ll come back in the streets,” Xenia Sobchak told gazeta.ru.

She also said that the themes that could unite the people and bring them back to political activities could be the demands for independent court, the fight against corruption, and the demand for state officials to leave business.

Should the rallies be continued?

Different leaders of the opposition see its future in different ways. Sergei Udaltsov, a very experienced street protester, insists in expanding the street protests. It was his idea to call for the March of the Millions at the last rally on Novy Arbat street, where 15,000 to 25,000 gathered.
“We need to point out the question of really elections, to ultramobilize and deliver an ultimatum to the government: you either meet our demands or we won’t go home. It’s important that people from the regions come to Moscow and break the stereotype that there are only protesters from Moscow dressed in mink coats, and the other Russia that supports Putin,” he told Gazeta.ru.

“We can influence the government only by gathering large masses of people in the street,” agrees Ilya Yashin, member of political council of Solidarnost movement. The form of any successful event can be primitive, because no matter how creative a rally is, if small number of people come, it will be futile.

The march of the millions was conducted by the Egyptian opposition in Cairo, but whether it’s possible for Russian protesters to create their own Tahrir is a big question. “I can’t say there is hard work going on in the organizing committee creating new slogans and formats. We’ve taken a pause to understand how exactly we need to reformat the street protests and what new slogans will replace ‘For honest elections’,” Just Russia Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov told Gazeta.ru.

“The best opposition creative work is happening for Navalny now, he offers to put the protests on mass scale, but only legal gatherings. On the other hand, we must not get rid of the street protests, rallies and marches,” Gudkov said.

The head of the Foundation for Effective Politics, Gleb Pavlovsky, advises the opposition not to lower its energy but to get rid of its illusions. The March of the Millions, if attended by tens of thousands of people, will be disappointing.

They need to continue rallying but stop announcing their numbers and stop expecting each gathering to be larger than the one before.

“The main achievement of the last months is that the street activities have stopped being marginal, not only ‘professional’ protesters attend the rallies now, but the common people, too. The chasm between street and legal politics has disappeared: street protests have became a real influence on the government, those who attend rallies can later discuss their agenda in government offices,” Pavlovsky said.

The opposition is ready to expand its arsenal, but it needs to define what they are rallying about.

The success of the street action will depend on its demands it makes from the government, thinks one of the chairmen of the unregistered PARNAS party, Boris Nemtsov. “Yes, we need to fight for early parliamentary and presidential elections, but we need to support this fight with other demands: for political reform, freedom to political prisoners, abolishing the censorship in media, early elections in the Moscow city duma, new election of the Moscow mayor,” Boris Nemtsov told Gazeta.ru

The protest needs to adopt new forms, including the street protests: from street “festivals of freedom”, and street carnivals to flash-mobs and marches, Nemtsov said, “There can be other activities other than street rallies: conferences, festivals, participation in elections, printed report publishing,”- he added. Right now opposition has invented a new form of a street meeting – a conversation with an elected deputy, which doesn’t require permission from the city government, but this format is not overly popular, maybe because the police do not always recognize its legitimacy.
“Picket lines, letters of protest, state company account analyses, as Navalny does and many other things,” Dmitry Bykov, writer, poet and one of the Electors’ League founders, lists the possibilities for alternative opposition activities.

From political parties to “the machine of well intentioned propaganda”

For the three months of the protest season, the Russian opposition didn’t come up with a leader and didn’t form an organization. The natural internet based protests remain the same, and not all the participants want to form a bureaucratic structure, although some protest leaders call for people to be the part of a civic struggle and take part in local elections. It’s time for the opposition organizations and movements to strengthen their presence in the regions and to develop horizontal connections between each other, without trying to form an hierarchy, says the leader of ‘the movement for the preservation of Khimki forest,’ Yevgenia Chirikova.

“Our weakness is that we are scattered,” she said. She thinks that the opposition needs to unite on a network basis.

The protesters need to be elected in local self-government institutions to influence the government directly. “We need to create a country that Putin cannot rule without control, and this is possible only with a strong local initiative, strong local self-government,” Chirikova said. This is a process we can see in Moscow, where in some districts the opposition could press United Russia. Chirikova is ready to go even further and to organize a small ‘green’ party.

The other offer is to organize the constantly active structure to coordinate protest actions. “a ‘Protest rally organizing committee’ could become a coordinating structure, but it needs to gain legitimacy. It was formed generally and without registration, now it’s time to for it to go legit. We can conduct the election through this organizing committee on the Internet, as we did when we elected speakers for the rallies, says Sergei Udaltsov. But the opposition doesn’t need to create a united opposition party, because of an ideology disagreement, any structure would be artificial. Boris Nemtsov agrees that the organizing committee is to be preserved so that not to divide the opposition supporters with regard to their ideologies. At the same time, the opposition needs to consolidate into several parties in different political fronts.

New party legislation can lead to the majority of organization that protested on Bolotnaya and Sakharov avenue to become parties, but even without Kremlin spoilers there would be too many structures like this. Democrats in addition to Yabloko will get PARNAS, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is actively creating his party, Vladimir Milo is registering his “Democratic Choice” as a political party. Nationalists told journalists they are going to create at leats two parties, one created by Vladimir Tor (from the Movement against illegal immigration) and the other by Konstantin Krylov (from the Russian public movement). A few days ago, Dmitry Dyomushkin, leader of ‘Russian Movement,’ declared that he wishes to create his own nationalist party.
It’s unclear if Sergei Udaltsov is going to register his Left Front, he recently was offered membership in Sergei Mironov’s Just Russia. Just Russia deputies Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev, who took active part in the protests, are creating a super-party structure on the left flank.

“We can keep all the structures, but to take part in the election we need to create a democratic mega-party on the principle of collective management and financing. The left could do something like that, too.”

Meanwhile, in the current legislation, electoral blocks and super-party structures are prohibited and the Duma deputies refused to allow them in the new version of the law.

Alexei Navalny offers a non-party alternative. He says he is going to concentrate on his anti-corruption activities, he doesn’t want to create his party or become a member of any, and that’s why he refused to be a member of the observation council in any nationalist party.

He called on the readers of his blog to enlighten people in the large cities of Russia, to create the opposition’s “machine of well intentioned propaganda” as an alternative to the state media. “The machine” doesn’t need a structure, the activists just need to spend an hour a day explaining the situation with current government to their colleagues, family and friends. “If 100,000 men all over the country spent an hour a day or an hour a month to be part of “the machine”, it would work. For example, you write me from Bryansk: I want to be a part of GMP, what should I do? I reply with a list of options, from leaflets to solitary pickets. You answer you are ready to put up leaflets and so I send them to you. Activists receive the information and advice on how they can act, the rest is their own initiative. Make a list of people you can call once a month and tell the bitter truth about what’s happening, with examples, so that people won’t consider you nuts or a political freak,” Navalny explained in his blog.

Polish scenario

Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin, who tool an active part in the Electors’ league work, thinks the protest activity in Russia has only just begun. He thinks the government, at the very beginning, wrongly interpreted the civic protest as an attempt at revolution. “First, the authorities were frightened by an ‘orange’ protest and tried to find opposition leaders and to start a parley. But later, they found out there were no leaders, and this was its main threat: natural protest doesn’t bring anyone into government, it just shows the people’s attitude towards goverment, and it’s impossible to parley with such protests. People probably won’t come out into the streets by the tens of thousands, though the attitude towards the government hasn’t changed,” Oreshkin told Gazeta.ru. “What happened this winter is a typical ‘innovation wave’: a new trend to reject the authorities that will spread all over the country. When the first mobile phone or the first computer appeared in the capital, everybody was talking about it, a year later they were in million-plus cities, after two years all over the country.

For the government and for the opposition, it already doesn’t matter if the street protests have ended or not – the trend is now set, it will take root and become more popular,” Oreshkin told Gazeta.ru.

The situation in Russia is reminiscent of the situation in Poland in the end of 1970’s, he noticed.

Oreshkin thinks that an ever growing number of citizens are disgusted by the authorities, people have stopped obeying the leadership, the government concedes a bit in response, though later it may institute martial law for a short period of time or eventually give up power peacefully, since martial law always destroys the system.

There will be no radical change in the next few years, continues Oreshkin. But in the long view, the government is in a dead end, disappointment will grow, and if the economic situation worsens, inflation speeds up, prices rise, the social unrest will turn into a political process. “The current system will have no chance to survive in the new conditions of total disappointment,”- Oreshkin concluded.

Update 06/01/11: Number of detainees in Moscow updated; note of Toronoto rally added.

Russian opposition activists held rallies in defense of free assembly in dozens of cities across the country on Tuesday in the latest iteration of the Strategy 31 campaign. As usual, dozens of demonstrators were arrested in cities where local authorities refused to grant permission for the rallies.

In Moscow, an estimated 60 people were detained at an unsanctioned rally on Triumfalnaya Square, including, as has become customary, Other Russia party leader and rally co-organizer Eduard Limonov, Solidarity co-leader Ilya Yashin, and Left Front leaders Sergei Udaltsov and Konstantin Kosyakin. According to photojournalist Ilya Varlamov, it was very difficult to estimate the number of attendants, but it was likely no more than 300.

In a break from recent tradition, Limonov’s Strategy 31 rally was the only one held in Moscow on Tuesday. Leading Russian human rights advocate and former Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who for the past several months has successfully received official approval to hold her own Strategy 31 rallies, has chosen to organize different demonstrations on different days of the month.

The first to arrive on Triumfalnaya Square were Yashin, Udaltsov and Kosyakin, for whom Strategy 31 rallies usually with their detentions by police. This time was no different, as the three were arrested before they even had a chance to speak to clamoring television reporters – OMON riot police forced their way through a group of journalists to reach the opposition leaders. Similarly, Limonov was arrested as soon as he climbed out of his car.

Another traditional participant of the Strategy 31 rallies, Boris Nemtsov, was this time in Nizhny Novgorod, where activists held their own rally in defense of free assembly. Nemtsov, who came to the rally accompanied by his mother, signed several copies of his report “Putin. Results” for those present. Local police made no attempts to detain him.

“Recently, everyone has argued so much that it’s unclear how many people were coming and what they were going to do,” a rallier on Triumfalnaya Square told Gazeta.ru. Protesters did seem less prepared than usual – no flags or posters were seen in the crowd, and only a handful of people had badges with the number 31 pinned to their shirts. At the same time, organizers say that a demand for free and fair elections has officially been added to the Strategy 31 campaign.

Because Triumfalnaya Square itself continues to be blocked off for construction, ralliers were forced to gather along the bordering sidewalks – until police set upon them from both sides. Many were brutally pushed around; one woman cried out into the crowd, “they have no wives, that’s why they grope us!”

Cries of “freedom!” and “shame!” also sounded from the crowd, but police had almost entirely cleared the square of oppositionists half an hour after the rally had begun.

On the other side of the square, a small group of environmental activists calling for the defense of the Khimki Forest and representatives of a group called the Free Radicals tried to hold a small march, but were literally thrown to the ground by police after only 10 meters. Police then began to carry off the demonstrators; Sergei Konstantinov, head of the Free Radicals, howled at the top of his lungs until police brought him out of the view of journalists.

Police figures cite 26 detainees altogether on Triumfalnaya Square Tuesday night, while rally organizers put the number at 60. As usual, rally leaders are being charged with organizing an unsanctioned demonstration. They face up to 15 days of administrative arrest.

Strategy 31 rallies were also held in dozens of other Russian cities, some with arrests. In St. Petersburg, approximately 100 demonstrators were detained, including at least one minor, at two unsanctioned demonstrations. A heavy police and separate “monitoring” presence was noted at a rally in Omsk, and protesters were forced to hold solitary pickets in Blagoveshchensk after local authorities refused to sanction a larger demonstration – on the basis that 500 visiting Chinese children were scheduled to play in the square.

Rallies in solidarity were also held in New York City, Toronto, London and Rome.

Article compiled from reports by Gazeta.ru and Kasparov.ru.

Alexander Kuchma has long been known as the man who slashed Khodorkovsky’s face with a cobbler’s knife, claiming that “I wanted to cut his eye out, but my hand slipped.” At the time, the incident gave rise to speculation that Soviet-era tactics of recruiting mentally unstable prisoners to attack others were being employed against the jailed oligarch.

Indeed, on May 16, 2011, just months after finishing a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, Kuchma told Gazeta.ru that he had been forced to carry out the attack. He did not, however, name names. Shortly afterwards, an unnamed federal television channel paid Kuchma “a certain sum of money” and shot a ten-minute interview where he recounts the story of how he was made to carry out the attack – this time, complete with specific names and dates.

Kuchma was then told by an employee of the channel that the interview would not be aired because it had “caused alarm and was being reviewed by the general director.” A representative of the channel told Gazeta.ru that it may still be aired at a later time.

Fearing for his life, Kuchma again phoned Gazeta.ru and retold his story, complete with the details he’d given in the filmed interview. “After they taped the broadcast, I decided to tell you everything sooner than they could come crashing down on me,” Kuchma told editors. “What do they need me for if I’ve already told everything?”

In the interview with Gazeta.ru, published on Thursday, Kuchma explains how two law enforcement officers organized the 2006 attack on Khodorkovsky. The website stipulates that, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty, they have changed the names and certain positions published in the article – but are prepared to release them in the case of an investigation. They also note that fact-checking has found that the people named by Kuchma indeed either worked or still work for the Federal Penitentiary System.

The incident began in March 2006, when Khodorkovsky and Kuchma were placed in disciplinary confinement as punishment for drinking tea. Shortly afterwards, two officers met Kuchma in a separate room and began beating him almost immediately. “They started saying I should take revenge on Khodorkovsky for supposedly getting me put in the disciplinary cell. They said that I should take a knife and stab him in the eye, like to stab it out. The plan was such that I needed to attack him in his sleep,” said the former prisoner. “I told them: ‘What are you getting at, guys? He’ll die.'”

“The first time I didn’t agree, they called me back, beat me again,” Kuchma went on. “They said that I already knew everything and if I didn’t agree they’d hang me in the disciplinary cell and say that I hung myself. The second time they convinced me that they’d kill me if I didn’t agree. I pretended to agree.”

Kuchma said the men, whose names he didn’t know, gave him a knife and that while they didn’t say directly to kill Khodorkovsky, “I understood that that’s what they meant. They said that they won’t add onto my sentence for it, that I’d live peacefully. That these were serious people from Moscow, that the government will defend me, very big people, that’s the sort of stuff they said.”

The ex-prisoner explained that he decided not to kill his cell mate, but just to slash him in the nose. “It was clear that there was more and more noise, that the bosses, lawyers, journalists had come running. I had hoped that those guys would leave me alone because of all this clamor,” he explained.

After attacking Khodorkovsky, Kuchma was put back in a disciplinary cell and the same plainclothes officers came back. “They beat me again and said: ‘what, you sleazeball, you didn’t do what we asked?!’ I apologized and said that I missed because I couldn’t see anything at night. They beat me some more.”

According to Gazeta.ru, representatives from the Federal Penitentiary Service refused to comment on Kuchma’s remarks. In addition, the editors have issued an open call for a criminal investigation.

Kuchma’s accusations come at a turbulent time in the Khodorkovsky case. The former oligarch’s extended prison term was upheld by a Moscow appeals court on Tuesday and he is now officially considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Next week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is set to rule on Khodorkovsky’s complaint against the Russian government about the legality of his arrest and conditions of his confinement.

Gazeta.ru’s full interview with Kuchma can be read in Russian here.