On May 12, Kasparov.ru correspondent Viktor Shamaev was covering a protest in Penza held under the Day of Wrath campaign. Organizers say these protests are meant to provide a day for Russians to voice their collective grievances against federal and local officials, and participants routinely include human rights activists, political oppositionists, environmental activists, and others. Local authorities often refuse to grant permission for Day of Wrath rallies, which are subsequently cracked down on by police. Yesterday’s Day of Wrath participants in Penza held solitary pickets, the only legal form of non-government-approved protest in Russia.

Immediately after Shamaev photographed local Left Front coordinator Yevgeny Makeyenko picketing outside the mayor’s office, a deputy chief from Penza Police Station #1 sent a lieutenant to ask the journalist to follow him to his car. When the officer smelled an empty can of beer, he took Shamaev to a detox center, and then to a police station where the journalist was held for three hours.

It is not clear what exactly Shamaev was charged with, but according to Kasparov.ru, he had to sign all papers presented to him by police, ostensibly admitting his guilt, since he needed to take his infant child home.

Additionally, the website reports that the lieutenant who detained Shamaev told him in a private discussion that he was “ordered to take Shamaev.”

Shamaev worked for the police before becoming a correspondent for Kasparov.ru in 2006. Law enforcement agents have repeatedly interrogated him in connection with various incidents and have attempted to arrest him several times. For example, Shamaev was questioned in November 2009 about the arson of the Penza United Russia office on the basis that he was among the first journalists to arrive at the scene. Human rights activists expressed concern at the treatment of oppositionists during the investigation.

Kashin said his colleagues have been telling him for weeks that the case of his attack has been solved.

Investigators supposedly believe that the motive for the beating was jealousy since Kashin had “stolen” the wife of one of the attackers. According to the journalist’s friends, the investigators are too “shy” to announce this because Russian President Dmitri Medvedev is personally following the case.

“I called the head of the investigative group and asked whether it’s true; he cursed in response and said it’s not true. And then two days pass and one of my acquaintances again tells me, in strict confidence, about the ‘domestic’ version, about Medvedev and even about how news reports that the case has been solved are being held ‘under embargo,'” Kashin wrote on his blog.

He added that he definitely didn’t steal anybody’s wife.

This is not the first time such rumors have reached the journalist.

“There were additional details even before January: that I left for Israel to avoid talking to investigators, that Medvedev was in the know about the ‘domestic’ version and doesn’t know how to wrangle his way out of this situation,” he wrote.

Oleg Kashin was attacked by two assailants on November 6, 2010. He suffered skull fractures, broken shins and his fingers were maimed; one had to be partially amputated. As Kommersant Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin said at the time: “It is totally obvious that this was a planned action, naturally, connected with Oleg’s professional work. They broke his fingers, legs; they wanted to cripple him.”

Investigators reported earlier that the primary version of the motive for the attack was Kashin’s journalistic activity. Analysts say his controversial articles about the Khimki Forest and various government officials could have provoked any number of possible attackers. President Medvedev reacted to the beating the very morning of attack and vowed to punish whoever was responsible for it, regardless of their status.

The editor, Hussein Shadiev, was shot in the shoulder while driving between his office at Serdalo newspaper and his home late on Monday.

Local police say they are still searching for the assailants. “We don’t have any details yet, but we can say that, at the moment when Shadiev was traveling in Nazran down one of the city streets in his automobile, he was shot from an unknown weapon. It’s possible that the shooting was done from a pistol with a suppressor, because nobody heard the shot,” a source from Ingush law enforcement told RIA Novosti.

The source added that the bullet had grazed the editor’s shoulder and he had been hospitalized, but that his life was not in any danger.

“Republic President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov knows about the incident, law enforcement agencies are taking all necessary measures to establish the circumstances of the incident and to carry out an investigation,” acting presidential press secretary Bers Yevloyev told Kommersant newspaper. In his words, it was too early to say anything detailed about the attack. “In my recollection this is probably the first case where local journalists have been attacked,” said Yevloyev.

Shadiev’s colleagues say the attack could have been a reaction to an anti-corruption article published in the newspaper. “Yes, we didn’t carry out our own journalistic investigation, we don’t have the strength for that, but we gave publicity to incidents of corruption that were uncovered by law enforcement agencies, and somebody may not have liked that,” said Serdalo editorial deputy Yakub Sultygov.

Just past midnight on Saturday, Oleg Kashin was beaten by unknown assailants on a street close to his rented apartment. The attackers left the journalist with two broken shins, fractures on the upper and lower jaws, skull lesions, and broken fingers. However, they did not take Kashin’s money, tablet computer, or cell phone.

According to a janitor who witnessed the incident, Kashin was beaten by two people “not with their fists, but with some kind of object.”

The journalist is currently in an artificial coma and hooked up to an artificial lung in a Moscow hospital, where doctors fear that he may develop pneumonia. An operation on the victim’s skull revealed that his brain was undamaged. As of Saturday night, doctors said his condition was “extremely critical.”

Editors at Kommersant say the attack was most definitely connected to the journalist’s professional work.

“It is totally obvious that this was a planned action, naturally, connected with Oleg’s professional work,” said Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin. “They broke his fingers, legs; they wanted to cripple him. This wasn’t some kind of hold-up.” Mikhailin said he plans to “put the maximum amount of pressure on the investigation in order for it to be solved.”

Kashin’s recent articles have focused on a number of controversial topics, including political youth movements, the Khimki Forest, and high-ranking government officials.

Moscow city police filed a criminal suit early on Saturday for attempted murder, after reviewing security camera footage and interviewing witnesses of the attack. Later that morning, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered that the investigation be transferred to the direct control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.

“There has also been an order to take all measures to solve this crime,” reads a Kremlin press release.

A statement posted late Saturday on Kommersant’s website decried the fact that the murders of so many journalists in Russia often go unsolved:

The attack on Oleg Kashin is outrageous, but far from the only manifestation of the growing violence in the civil and political life of the country. Unfortunately, we only see the victims: the attackers go uncaught, and the ones who ordered it – unknown. The impunity stimulates further violence.

If the investigation of Oleg Kashin’s monstrous beating, despite the demands of Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev and the personal control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, ends in nothing, as has already happened with murder and beating investigations of other journalists in past years, it will effectively legalize the use of force.

Activists working to prevent the destruction of the Khimki Forest say that the attack on Kashin could be connected with another beating that occurred just a day earlier, when unknown assailants attacked environmental activist Konstantin Fetisov with a baseball bat late on Thursday night.

“My personal opinion is that Kashin suffered because of his journalistic work,” Khimki Forest activist Yaroslav Nikitenko told Gazeta.ru. “In our country, attacks don’t just happen. If I’m not mistaken, Kashin was the first correspondent to write a large article about the Khimki Forest in the newspaper Kommersant.”

Russia is widely considered one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work in the world. The press watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranks Russia as 140th out of 178 countries on its 2010 Press Freedom Index, and has called Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a “predator of press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia as the 4th deadliest country for journalists in the world, with 52 killings with confirmed motives since 1992.

A young Russian journalist has been found dead in his Moscow apartment, Interfax reports.

Acquaintances of 26-year-old Dmitri Okkert said that they had not had any contact with the journalist over the course of three days. On Friday morning, investigators found Okkert’s slain body in his central Moscow apartment.

An investigation is currently underway at Okkert’s residence. Sources in Russian law enforcement said that more than thirty knife wounds were found on the victim’s body. There was no report on any possible motive for the killing.

Anatoly Bagmet, head of the investigative department of the Moscow Regional Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee, will reportedly be personally in charge of the investigation.

Dmitri Okkert had worked as a journalist and television host for a variety of major Russian media outlets. He became a correspondent for the Vesti news program on the state-run Rossiya television channel in 2005, and proceeded to work as a journalist with the independent REN-TV network and the state-controlled NTV network later on. He had been a news host on the business channel Expert-TV since December 2008.

Russia is notorious as one of the most deadly countries in the world for journalists. This past April, the American think tank Freedom House ranked Russia 175 out of 196 countries for global press freedom, calling the country’s media environment “repressive and dangerous.” The Paris-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on its recent list of “predators of press freedom.”

Vsevolod Bogdanov, head of the Russian Union of Journalists, estimates that more than 300 journalists have been murdered in Russia in the past 15 years, with the majority of cases remaining unsolved. Because of the lack of court convictions in cases involving murdered journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia in 8th place on its impunity index for the years 2000-2009.

Oleg Ptashkin, leader of an independent journalists trade union, said in a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday that the managers of numerous media outlets were using the global economic crisis as an excuse to hire journalists as independent contractors instead of normal employees. Ptashkin, who used to work for Russia’s state-controlled Channel One TV until he was illegally fired, said that these kinds of contracts violate the rights of media workers and that his union is working on an initiative to ban the practice.

Igor Trunov, a lawyer for the trade union, said that the Russian government has recently been using a wide variety of measures to put pressure on journalists and the media. Among such measures, he said, have been police raids on editorial offices, evictions, and libel and defamation suits. Last month, for example, the editorial offices of the New Times magazine were raided after an article was published accusing an elite subdivision of the OMON riot police of using migrant workers for slave labor. The raid was condemned by journalism watchdog groups worldwide, but the police justified their actions by accusing the publication of poor-quality journalism.

New legislation expected to be adopted soon by the Russian State Duma that allows the Federal Security Service (FSB) to issue preemptive warnings to anyone suspected of acting in a way that might lead to extremist behavior is one of the most serious blows to free speech and democracy facing the country right now, Trunov went on. The bill’s wording is so vague, he said, that it would allow police to issue a few such warnings and then arrest a publication’s editor-in-chief for a fifteen day term.

Shortcomings in current Russian law would make it virtually impossible to appeal such decisions, the lawyer added.

Ptashkin said that the union is appealing to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev with a request to veto the bill.

President Kadyrov’s debut as an official predator of press freedom comes as no surprise following last year’s surge in violence against journalists in the North Caucasus. The report cites 5 journalists killed in that region in 2009 alone, and 22 since 2000:

Often referred to as “Putin’s guard dog,” Ramzan Kadyrov shares the Russian prime minister’s taste for crude language and strong action. President and undisputed chief of this Russian republic in the North Caucasus since April 2007, he has restored a semblance of calm after the devastation of two wars. A high price has been paid for this superficial stability, the introduction of a lawless regime. Anyone questioning the policies of this “Hero of Russia” (an award he received from Putin in 2004) is exposed to deadly reprisals. Two fierce critics of the handling of the “Chechen issue,” reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down – Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Chechnya in July 2009. When human rights activists blamed him for their deaths, Kadyrov was dismissive: “That’s bullshit, that’s just gossip,” he said.

The report blames the Kremlin for buying Kadyrov’s loyalty and for using government-run media outlets to create the veneer of a legitimate press. The analysts were equally scathing of the prime minister himself:

“Control” is the key word for this former KGB officer: control of the state, control of the economic and political forces, control of geopolitical strategic interests and control of the media. The national TV stations now speak with a single voice. …The Nashi (Ours), a young patriotic guard created by the Kremlin in 2005 at the behest of Putin and others who lament Russia’s imperial decline, sues newspapers critical of the Soviet past or the current government when it is not staging actual manhunts. As well as manipulating groups and institutions, Putin has promoted a climate of pumped-up national pride that encourages the persecution of dissidents and freethinkers and fosters a level of impunity that is steadily undermining the rule of law.

Putin and Kadyrov found themselves among fifteen other presidents and prime ministers condemned as predators of press freedom, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. All over the world, says the organization, 9 journalists have been killed since the beginning of 2010, and another 300 are sitting behind bars. In Russia alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 19 journalists have been murdered as a direct result of their work since 2000. A murder conviction has only been handed down in one of those cases.

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.”

In the days following Monday’s deadly suicide attacks on the Moscow metro, Russian television has come under mounting criticism for largely ignoring the incidents during the first critical hours after they occurred. As opposed to radio and print media, which are overall less subject to censorship, state-controlled television remains the primary source of news for most Russians.

While Russian television has been routinely criticized for refusing to air prominent oppositionists, anti-government protests, reports containing scenes of graphic violence, and other events that could cast the government in an unfavorable light, the public response to its failure to cover Moscow’s worst terrorist attacks in six years has been uncharacteristically harsh.

In a column for the online newspaper Gazeta.ru, Natalia Gevorkyan argues that today’s Russian television has gone beyond the breaking point and become an alternative reality that only its producers seem to believe in.

A Crooked Broadcast
By Natalia Gevorkyan
March 31, 2010
Gazeta.ru

Russian television has definitely ceased to be a form of news media. Its design of a virtual form of reality has reached the peak of perfection. TV has its own reality – with little jokes, idiotic talk shows that take one week to write, and programming that is in no way affected by reality. But in this country there is grief, the dead, the wounded, and shattered metro cars in the center of the capital. The result: on the day of the terrorist attacks, it was only the published news media that lay out the real reality, and not all at once. The remaining programs left the impression of a broadcast from Mars. They did not concern this life, or these deaths. (I’m not talking here about Russia Today. The television broadcasts for foreigners turned out to be more adequately realistic. This channel is in a different competitive milieu, the western one – normal, sensible, professional. They have to correspond.)

I was abroad when the events in Beslan began. Except for the breaks for headline news, which also began with Beslan, CNN showed only Beslan. RTR-Planeta at the time was telling me about prostitution. Now I’m in Moscow. The explosions occurred a kilometer away from my home. Or the explosions in Kizlyar, where another twelve of my fellow citizens were killed. Today. I turn on the television. Literally right now, Wednesday mid-day. Movie, movie, movie, drama, drama, drama, talk show about photography, talk show about court, something about Pasternak, songs, laughter. And only in the news breaks do you understand that people still haven’t been buried, people are still carrying flowers, still lighting candles, people are still crying, the prime minister is reanimating ten-year-old jargon, the Federation Council is apparently planning to institute the death penalty.

When cell phones stopped working on Monday, when cars with sirens sped off down Komsomolsky Prospekt and crowds of people moved towards them – if my arm had reached for the television switch, it would only have been as a last resort. The computer. The internet works. Everything is there. That’s all understood.

Then the radio. A more democratically accessible form of media. A separate thank you to radio hosts for their work on this black Monday. They did what television should have done. Right on time, the radio broadcast experts, opinions, and conversations, which are always better than silence and uncertainty. Even if they’re just empty responses to the primary questions: who, how, why? But the analysts, comparisons with analogous terrorist attacks, broadcasting information as it became available, interviews with news people – all of this is absolutely normal journalistic work. The radio flexibly reworked itself during the tragic events. It worked in person, live, broadcasting directly. A few radio stations even cut out their commercials.

The television managers couldn’t decide to do a live broadcast even in a situation that, in my view, obliged them to do so. They have betrayed their profession. They betrayed it long ago, when they allowed Putin’s TV watchdogs to erase live television from our lives, from the lives of citizens. They then began to design a country that was pleasant for the leadership to look at. This country, ideally, either cracks up at moronic jokes, or empathizes with the heroes of dramas, or is terrified at dissected corpses, or gets divorced together with a wealthy couple, or shares a child together with a famous singer, or is moved by its leaders, who crop up in the news clips so periodically that Brezhnev would have been jealous, or in a united fit of emotion even votes for them. This television, which the new president has not abolished either, looks like a meaningless, imitation Chinese vase, decorating the empty corner of a room.

Everything that radio did should have been done by television. Live broadcast, open studios where they could have questioned specialists, intelligence officers, doctors, witnesses of the events. Live. Effective editors, conversations, attempts to come together to understand, to overcome, to grieve, to calm, to unite. And the live programming, the latest information, the reaction of the government, the reaction of the world, the reactions of people in Moscow and Vladivostok, in Grozny and Irkutsk, and so on, that this television was already capable of doing ten years ago.

Guys, you already can’t do it, you’ve lost your instincts, you’ve killed them off within political labyrinths. Now you ponder what to let on the air and whether to let it on the air at all, but people are already dead, and your viewers already hear the emergency sirens; they already know what happened, they’re already pulling out the wounded and tying tourniquets. One day later, with you, the Caucasus don’t blow up; the screen shows some kind of different, glamorous life – while it’s already blown up into a multitude of dangerous splinters that get to us everywhere, including in the capital. Television has erased real life from its programming. It has wiped society off of its screen – living, reflective, disagreeable society that is unable to afford the new housing and utilities tariffs, is unemployed and hard-working, has not become spoiled, and has not ceased to think. It has wiped out everyone from its programming who was capable of asserting our right to monitor the authorities and control over the intelligence agencies. You didn’t notice when the country stopped trusting the state, the cops, the intelligence agencies, the prosecutors, the investigators, the courts. And you. You didn’t notice because you already have come to believe that the country consists of what television shows, prepares, dresses in Prada, writes on the prompter and sends out onto the air.

How many more tragedies have to happen, and what kind, so that those who answer for and create today’s television to trembled and shook, so that the viewer became more important than the government, so that they would decide to say in a stern voice: “We’re going live.” And so that instead of Karpov, as previously scheduled, Pozner‘s guest today was a girl saved at Lubyanka Station.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

In a press released posted Tuesday on the agency’s official website, Lieutenant General Vladimir Gorshukov said that an article published Monday in the New Times magazine accusing an elite subdivision of the OMON of using slave labor was “a complete fabrication.”

“I would call it an intentional campaign against the OMON detachments of the Russian Internal Ministry, and against the Zubr detachment in particular,” said Gorshukov.

The lieutenant asserted that the article was based on “the private statements of a former member of the division who had disciplinary problems and did not follow demands from above that were given to members of the special subdivisions; in consequence of this, she was fired.”

Monday’s article by the New Times consisted largely of the transcript of an interview with former Zubr OMON officer Larisa Krepkova, who claims to have witnessed migrant workers brought to the OMON base and forced to work without pay. The article asserts that her reason for leaving the force was related to illness.

Major General Aleksandr Ivanin, who commands the Zubr unit of the OMON, said that while Krepkova was sufficiently qualified for her job as a canine handler, she had repeatedly come to work intoxicated and was seen consuming alcohol on the job. “We conducted a service check on the matter and have all the supporting documentation,” he added.

Ivanin claimed that Krepkova was given the opportunity to resign, but that the reason for her dismissal was changed to the condition of her health after a medical commission was completed. What exactly the commission concluded was unclear.

Internal Ministry spokesman Oleg Yelnikov accused the media of failing to fact check their articles. “Some journalists, clearly, have forgotten that in accordance with article 49 of the law regarding the media, a journalist is required to check the reliability of the information presented to him,” blaming the New Times for relying solely on Krepkova’s testimony.

The agency announced Monday morning that they plan to sue the magazine for libel.