According to the newspaper, a corresponding order has already been written up and posted online for public discussion and signed by Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and the head of the Federal Migration Service.

Sources in the Ministry (MVD) said that the formal reason for the measure is the departure of the migration service from the MVD. Unofficially, however, they said it was intended as a way to deal with undesirable foreigners, such as political activists and religious radicals.

As an example of what the MVD is apparently concerned about, Izvestia noted an incident this past March during the Russian presidential election when women from the Ukrainian organization Femen stripped naked at the polling station where Vladimir Putin had cast his vote. The group was subsequently banned from the country.

The MVD black list would also include powerful foreign criminals, such as mafia bosses.

The Izvestia report stated that the foreign minister would personally decide the fate of each “undesirable” foreigner.

Human rights advocates fear that the measure could become a repressive instrument for the MVD to use for political purposes.

In February 2011, British journalist Luke Harding was stopped at passport control and denied entry to Russia with no explanation.

The Guardian, where Harding worked, believes that the decision to keep the journalist out of the country was made at the highest level of government in connection with the Guardian’s publication of documents from WikiLeaks that characterize the Russian government as a mafia state and suggesting the possible involvement of President Vladimir Putin in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

The interview came in the wake of the March 31 iteration of the Strategy 31 rallies, a series of demonstrations held by the Other Russia opposition coalition in defense of the right to free assembly. The mayor’s office has routinely denied sanction to the rallies on the basis that the oppositionists’ traditional space of protest, the centrally-located Triumfalnaya Square, has always been reserved for other events. In a slap to the face for the oppositionists, last month’s event turned out to be a gigantic youth rally lead by the notoriously fanatical pro-Kremlin group Nashi.

Outraged oppositionists and human rights activists accused the mayor of deliberately creating conditions that could lead to a violent mob, citing the example of a tsarist-era tragedy on Moscow’s Khodynskoe Field where more than a thousand people were trampled to death when a panicked rush broke out.

Speaking to Izvestia in reference to Strategy 31, Mayor Luzhkov insisted that while the freedoms of speech and assembly “are among the main components of democracy,” they should not hinder other people’s right to normally live their lives. Therefore, when several thousand people announce that they’re planning to attend a rally on the relatively small Triumfalnaya Square, it poses a serious risk of impeding traffic, he said. How he reconciled this with the pro-Kremlin rally was unclear.

“The second issue is assuring safety for the demonstrators themselves,” Luzhkov went on. “So far, thank god, nothing at these demonstrations has happened where people’s health could suffer or where they could lose their lives.”

In reality, each Strategy 31 rally has ended with police beating and detaining scores of protesters, who are often denied medical attention after being stuffed into police buses. Ambulances routinely appear outside police stations later on to take away wounded activists.

In any case, Luzhkov admitted that outbreaks of violence were certainly possible. “There are such examples in the history of Moscow. Remember Khodynskoe Field,” he noted.

Activist Sergei Aksenov, a regular at the Strategy 31 rallies, took particular offense to Luzhkov’s appropriation of the Khodynka metaphor. “Luzhkov brought up Khodynka. But it seems that he’s intent on pounding [our] traditional place with various Nashisti and police,” he said. “The situation is becoming so dangerous that it calls, at the very least, for the attention of the Prosecutor General.”

The mayor went on to assert that the city has never actually banned the rallies, but simply required them to be held somewhere farther from Moscow’s center, “where people can feel more comfortable and safe.” Oppositionists maintain that not only is Triumfalnaya Square safe for a large number of people, but that the whole point of holding the rallies is to inform Russians about their constitutional rights, and holding them somewhere that’s not centrally located couldn’t achieve that goal.

Luzhkov disagreed. “Why do the ‘discontented’ insist on Triumfalnaya Square?” he asked. “So that arguments with the authorities become a point of conflict… ‘Look how they suppress us.’ They are not interested in the rally being sanctioned, but in it being banned. They want a scandal. But their freedom should not hinder the freedom of other people to calmly live and work, for traffic to move calmly, finally,” he concluded.

In the end, Strategy 31 organizers chose to hold their rally, unsanctioned as usual, together next to the pro-Kremlin youth rally. Most oppositionists, however, arrived with flowers to commemorate the victims of Moscow metro attacks days earlier on March 29. On the other side of Triumfalnaya Square, the three thousand young Russians danced to loud rap music and declared their faith that Russia would defeat terrorism. Regardless of the fact that Triumfalnaya Square was obviously capable of holding several thousand people and that the Strategy 31 activists, who that day numbered less than a thousand and carried no political insignia or banners, were holding what was largely a memorial for the dead, police detained between 40 and 50 of them. Many were beaten and severely injured.

While Russian law prohibits participation in unsanctioned rallies, rights organizations and governments worldwide, including the United States and the Council of Europe, have criticized Russia for failing to observe the right to free assembly and using excessive force against the Strategy 31 participants.

Writing in his blog on Monday, Sokolov posted the text of an article he had written along with a bare-bones preface: “Tomorrow I’m bringing my letter of resignation to Izvestia. Here’s tomorrow’s rejected article.” The column criticized a proposal by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to establish a Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley in an old Moscow auto factory, following last Friday’s proposal by President Dmitri Medvedev to put it in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo. Arguing that both proposals would continue a dangerous trend of geographically centralizing scientific research, Sokolov said that research in the outer areas of the country would end up underfunded, resulting in the detriment of Russia’s entire scientific community.

Luzhkov’s proposal in particular, which would put the facility even closer to the Kremlin than the president had proposed, was the painful result of “geographical super-ultra centralization,” wrote Sokolov.

“The distance between Skolkovo (30 kilometers from the Kremlin) and the auto factory (10 kilometers from the Kremlin) would be substantial if this was all happening in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg,” said the journalist. “There, those are completely different sized distances. For Russia, spanning 4,000 kilometers from north to south and 10,000 kilometers from east to west, they are exactly the same.” The centralization, he went on, is “super-ultra because what we are facing is not just the notion of ‘nothing in circumvention of Moscow,’ but the even stronger notion of ‘nothing except for directly inside of Moscow.’ Only within the limits of direct visibility from the Kremlin, when one can observe from a pair of binoculars.”

Sokolov had been a journalist at Izvestia since 1998. He will continue to be published in the influential business publication Expert.

Having been the primary newspaper of the Soviet government since 1917 and remaining closely connected to the government since the fall of the Soviet Union, Sokolov’s case is not the first time Izvestia has been associated with censorship. Former Editor-in-Chief Raf Shakirov was fired allegedly as a result of publishing scathing photographs of the 2004 Beslan massacre. A column critical of a film celebrating then-President Vladimir Putin’s 55th birthday in 2007 was banned, according to its author Irina Petrovskaya, directly by the order of then-Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Mamontov. According to the online newspaper Grani.ru, a memo from Mamontov was leaked to the press in January 2006 in which the editor declared that Izvestia was not an opposition newspaper and should be “all-national” and close to the people. Anyone unhappy with the “new editorial politics” would be fired, he added.

The full text of Sokolov’s blog post in Russian can be found by clicking here.

Izvestia, one of Russia’s oldest and most prominent newspapers, has been issued a warning against printing “extremist” material, Kommersant reported on Tuesday.

The warning from the Moscow city prosecutor came after Izvestia published an article entitled “the New Russia and the New Turkey in the New World” by controversial State Duma Deputy Sergei Markov of the leading United Russia party.

According to the prosecutor, content in the article “approves of the activities of the leader of the prohibited religious association ‘Nurdzhular,'” a russification for followers of Islamic scholar Said Nursi.

The article had been timed to coincide with the visit of Turkish President Abdullah Gül to Moscow last February. While Markov does mention “Nurdzhular” leader Fethullah Gülen, the text does not name the association itself.

“Moderate trends of Islam are becoming more popular in Turkey,” Markov wrote. “Fethullah Gülen and his colleagues, who in principle do not deal with questions of politics, are developing the ideological basis of moderate Islam. This experience is useful for Russia, which is also searching for ways to unite Western institutions and national identity.”

The newspaper is now required to respond to the warning with a letter to the prosecutor, or alternatively it may file a complaint in court.

“In accordance with the law ‘Concerning the Media,’ prohibited organizations may not be mentioned in texts without a note that they are banned by decision of the court. But absolutely nothing prevents a publication from writing about the person who leads it,” said Mikhail Fedotov, secretary of the Union of Journalists of Russia. “This would be equal to banning Hitler’s name, and therefore I see no violation of the law here.”

Russian human rights advocates have long called for existing legislation regulating extremism to be annulled, and for the Interior Ministry’s notorious Center for Extremism Prevention to be dissolved.

Opponents of the legislation allege that the extraordinarily vague formulation of the understanding of “extremism” in the Russian criminal code is appropriated by government authorities to persecute opposition activists and media.

In a recent example of such appropriation, law enforcement legal experts in the port city of Novorossiysk judged the slogan “They don’t give freedom, they take it” as extremist. On this basis, authorities attempted to close a regional branch of the human rights organization For Human Rights, which held a rally in April 2009 using the slogan.