Denouncing the party he head for all of three months as “a Kremlin puppet,” Prokhorov complained that Surkov was the “puppeteer” who “long ago privatized the political system, who has been misinforming the country’s leadership for a long time, who is putting pressure on the mass media and trying to manipulate the citizens.” In this vein, he insisted, the Kremlin had orchestrated a plot to get the oligarch kicked out of the party.

Created in 2008 as a Kremlin-backed merger between the Union of Right Forces and two other parties, Right Cause has long been dismissed as a “marionette” that, despite its general loyalty to the center, garners almost no votes during elections. The introduction of Prokhorov as party leader gave rise to speculation that the billionaire’s unlimited financial resources could raise the party’s profile and give it a tint of legitimacy as an opposition movement. Unlike the vast majority of actual opposition parties, Right Cause has already been granted official registration by the Russian Justice Ministry, thus allowing it to field candidates for elections.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Kremlin may have been motivated to shut Prokhorov out of Right Cause out of fear that he was truly stepping out of line. As the Moscow Times reports:

The real reason that the Kremlin sacrificed the Right Cause party was because its former billionaire leader Mikhail Prokhorov had wanted to organize Orange Revolution-style tent camps in a faux opposition drive to win seats in the State Duma elections, a senior party official said Tuesday.

Right Cause, a pro-business party whose popularity hovers around 2 percent, needed a massive injection of support to clear the 7 percent threshold in the December vote, so Prokhorov planned for followers to camp out in the streets in tents, like during the 2004 Ukrainian protests that eventually toppled the regime of President Leonid Kuchma, the official told The Moscow Times.

Another party official confirmed his remarks. They both spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal from the Kremlin.

But the idea could not have appealed to the Kremlin, which ardently opposed the Orange Revolution and spent years ensuring that no such public protests took place in Russia.

The Right Cause official said Surkov was pleased that Prokhorov left the party last Thursday, citing him as saying during a private conversation: “It was good that we got rid of him before he was elected to the Duma.”

Surkov’s office had no immediate comment about the claim Tuesday.

RT management insists that it provides a much-needed alternative viewpoint to narrow-minded Western journalism, but critics dismiss the channel as an obvious Kremlin propaganda machine. Aside from pieces that broadcast blatant lies about the Russian opposition, particularly United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov, the station’s website includes such features as the “Russian Women Guide,” which disturbingly fetishizes the trend of American men searching out Russian wives on the internet. In a section entitled “Feminism, Russian-style,” an RT commentator writes: “Russian women somehow achieved, without the angst and anger of the western women’s man-eating philosophy, a sense of freedom, independence and, I dare say, happiness that their bra-burning sisters sacrificed a long time ago on the great battlefield of the sexes.” This twisted piece of analysis whitewashes the reality of sexism in Russia, where, as a recent feature by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty pointed out, there is “domestic violence that’s so pervasive many see it as a normal part of everyday life, in a country where an old saying advises, ‘If he beats you, he loves you,'” and where at least 14,000 women die every year from domestic abuse.

A piece out this week by the Independent reveals much about the inner workings of this questionable enterprise:

Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a well-respected US organisation that tracks hate groups and extremists in the United States, published a report about Russia Today. The group did not label the channel itself extremist, but said it gives undue airtime to conspiracy theorists and extremists. “Its slickly packaged stories suggest that a legitimate debate is under way in the United States about who perpetrated the 11 September terrorist attacks, for instance, and about President Obama’s eligibility for high office.”

The top brass at the channel, including editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, have denied this. “We don’t talk about 9/11 any more than US media discusses who was behind the 1999 explosions in Moscow,” she told the authors of the SPLC report, referring to the apartment block bombings that were a catalyst for the second Chechen war. “Moreover, our own journalists have never claimed or even as much as hinted that the US government may have been behind the tragedy of 9/11.”

This is not strictly true, as the report’s authors point out; not only do captions such as “New Yorkers Continue to Fight for 9/11 Truth” appear on screen during stories about the attacks, but on the last anniversary, the channel’s website published a four-part series entitled, “911 Reasons why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job”. A video of a recent interview with a “9/11 Truther” on Youtube is entitled, “Two planes didn’t take twin towers down”.

…

One employee of the channel told The Independent, on condition of anonymity: “I have mixed feelings about whether the channel is actually trying to provoke dissent among Americans. That seems the only logical reason to have some of these guests on and to spend so much time talking about these topics.

And if it’s not for provocation, it’s simply for the money – not that those two things are mutually exclusive:

On the other hand, Denis Trunov [the head of RT America] has said multiple times that his only goal is to get YouTube hits and he will have anyone on who will get Youtube hits. He has even suggested having porn stars on to talk about topics like Afghanistan, in the hope of getting hits.”

The strategy is apparently working.

“We now have more than 150 million views on YouTube, which is much higher than that of Fox News, CNN, Sky News or Reuters YouTube channels,” says Ms Simonyan. “Just a couple of days ago, RT made it into YouTube’s All-Time Top 100 Most Viewed Partners list, replacing President Obama’s channel.”

The article goes on to detail the outright censorship and bias handed down to staff by RT management – a charge readers may particularly remember following the station’s coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia War.

Several journalists at the channel have told The Independent that while some coverage of problems in Russia and sensitive issues is allowed, any direct criticism or questioning of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev is strictly prohibited.

With the start of RT America, observers have started to question the coverage of topics other than Russia. Some of the more bizarre moments on RT can sometimes be put down to youthful inexperience (such as the newsreader who clearly skimread the autocue too fast and referred to “North Korean leader King John the Second”), but sometimes it seems something more sinister is at play. One anchor told The Independent that during an interview with a leading scientist working on Aids he was repeatedly pressured by producers to “ask difficult questions” about the “evidence” that HIV doesn’t cause Aids at all.

The article can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

“In the concluding days of this past week, a variety of media outlets, including all the federal television channels, actively dispersed negative information about the activities of the mayor and government of Moscow. Moreover, the television and radio stories and newspaper articles were notable for their lack of evidence,” said a press release from the mayor’s office.

As political scientist Georgy Bovt pointed out in a column for Gazeta.ru, many of the main ideas in the media reports came from “Luzhkov. Results,” an opposition report published a year ago by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Minister of Energy Vladimir Milov. At the time, the mayor and his wife both sued for defamation, but a Moscow court ruled that only one sentence in the 37-page report had to be reworded.

Nemtsov himself said on Monday that the weekend’s reports constitute “a cinematization of our report. Which is nice.” He added that while the television channels clearly appropriated his and Milov’s writing, “information about Luzhkov’s corrupt activities is far more important than referencing its original source.”

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev also chimed in about Luzhkov on Friday. As the Moscow Times writes:

Luzhkov sparred openly with the Kremlin last week when he backed a highway through the Khimki forest outside Moscow and criticized Medvedev’s decision to suspend construction work following environmentalists’ protests.

Medvedev retorted Friday at a conference in Yaroslavl that he disagreed with Luzhkov’s position and that “officials should either participate in building institutions or join the opposition.”

But the fact that Medvedev is taking such a roundabout way of targeting the Moscow mayor is a sign of political weakness, critics say.

“Medvedev is not behaving like a president,” said Nemtsov. “Instead of issuing an order to fire Luzhkov and investigate his activities within the frame of the president’s declared war against corruption, he’s throwing sand in a sandbox like an offended child.

“Medvedev’s moment of truth has come – either he fires Luzhkov and becomes president, or he’ll be the laughing stock of all of Russia,” says Nemtsov.

Here’s the initial 20-minute report by NTV – which, according to the newspaper Kommersant, was ordered, filmed, and edited in less than 24 hours. The opening narration, interspersed for ironic effect with Luzhkov talking about his honeybee collection, says:

Why does Moscow have the most expensive roads, and why are they constantly under repair? Why was Moscow choked by smoke, but its mayor rescued his bees? How the mayor’s wife become the richest woman in Russia, and how his deputy got a watch that costs more than a million dollars. How the tastiest corners of our capital are divided up, and how those “friends” make a living. Why Moscow civil servants live in such houses, and how bees became more expensive than people. What does it mean to “cover up for one another,” and what is the capital government keeping quiet about?

On top of everything, the newspaper Vedomosti cited a source “close to the Kremlin” on Monday as saying that the issue of Luzhkov’s possible resignation will be resolved by the end of this week.

For more on the scandal:

Medvedev and Putin at odds over Moscow mayor – The Telegraph
NTV and Medvedev Target Luzhkov – The Moscow Times

In an article published Thursday in the Kommersant newspaper, an anonymous source in the presidential administration said that the routine crackdowns in Moscow of the opposition’s Strategy 31 rallies in defense of freedom of assembly have nothing to do with President Dmitri Medvedev or any of his officials.

The statements were a response to the intentions of Aleksei Venediktov, a member of the Public Council on the Moscow City Police and Editor-in-Chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, to appeal to a presidential deputy “to put an end to the slaughter” that happens routinely at the hands of the police during the rallies.

According to Kommersant’s anonymous source, Venediktov is barking up the wrong tree.

“The degree of activity of the police is determined by the administrators of the Moscow police and the city of Moscow,” said the source. “To see the Kremlin’s hand in the crackdown of demonstrations and to see this as a manifestation of any kind of personal ambitions would be to drastically oversimplify the situation.”

Therefore, Venediktov’s appeals to the presidential administration are unlikely to garner any results, he explained.

The statements come as tensions between the Kremlin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, whose tenure has now stretched into its eighteenth year, have reached a height that analysts say may finally mark his demise.

In the past several months, the mayor has been lambasted by criticism from not only oppositionists, but the Kremlin, the leading United Russian party, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Most recently, the timing of his end-of-summer vacation – which he took in the midst of a heat wave and forest fires that wreaked havoc on the capital – and revelations about government money spent on his private beehives have made him an easier target than usual.

The Moscow mayor’s office is officially responsible for handling applications to hold rallies, protests, and other such events in the city. Luzhkov has routinely defended the decisions to deny sanction to Strategy 31 organizers on the basis of ensuring public safety, but has been caught in serious inconsistencies on multiple occasions.

Speaking to Gazeta.ru, former Deputy Prime Minister and co-leader of the Solidarity opposition movement Boris Nemtsov said that the offer came several days ago from Vladislav Surkov, a primary Kremlin ideologist and highly influential aid to both the president and prime minister. Nemtsov refrained from specifying precisely to whom the proposition was made, but reports cite that it was to the “moderate” wing of the Russian opposition. Nemtsov denied that Surkov made the proposal directly to him, as some sources were reporting.

Left Front opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov expressed certainty that the Kremlin met with representatives from Solidarity, “since the Kremlin considers them to be moderate figures.”

According to Limonov himself, the offer was made both to Nemtsov and noted human rights advocate Lev Ponomarev, who heads the organization For Human Rights and is also part of Solidarity’s leadership. “At first they confirmed it. Then, clearly, they began to shy away – because now they have connections in the Kremlin,” he said.

Limonov, whose National Bolshevik Party is officially banned by the Russian government, characterized the proposal by the presidential administration as “the arrogance of a government that doesn’t want to give into Limonov.” He added that he has no intention of giving up his post as Strategy 31 organizer: “You cannot make concessions to the government: today they’re asking to sacrifice Limonov, but tomorrow it’ll be Limonov’s children.”

Meanwhile, the Kremlin denied the existence of any contact with the opposition at all. One high-level presidential representative, speaking under condition of anonymity to Gazeta.ru, said that he had no knowledge of any such negotiations.

In any case, opposition leaders are categorically refusing to abandon Limonov.

“I think the proposal is obscene,” Nemtsov said, noting that Limonov and his supporters had participated in Strategy 31 since the very beginning in July 2009. “And although it’s now a shared event, nobody has the right to start colluding with the government in this regard,” he concluded.

Vsevolod Chernozub, co-chairman of the Moscow branch of Solidarity, commented that the Kremlin’s proposal “reflects the cop-like and Chekist style of thinking of the current government.”

Strategy 31’s organizational committee has routinely consisted of Limonov, former Soviet dissident and Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin. The three have applied to the Moscow mayor’s office for official sanction on seven separate occasions – on each month with a 31st date – and have been denied every time.

Alexeyeva also said that she had no plans to exclude Limonov for the upcoming rally on July 31. “I’m in favor of holding consultations with the Moscow government, as is required by law. Like always, three representatives of the event will hold these consultations,” she told Gazeta.ru.

Limonov added that, as a Strategy 31 organizer, he is currently participating in mediation procedures with Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin and Moscow Human Rights Ombudsman Aleksandr Muzykantsky. Their most recent session was held on June 1, one day after police violently broke up May’s Strategy 31 rally. During that meeting, said Limonov, a different proposition was made: “The July 31 event could be held on Pushkin Square, and then as a reward they would supposedly give us Triumfalnaya [the next month], and the next time again on Pushkin, and so on,” he explained. “But I said that this was unacceptable to us: we aren’t migrant workers who can be driven back and forth.”

The Kremlin offer comes two weeks after Limonov announced the creation of a political party based on the Other Russia opposition coalition and his intentions to lead the party in upcoming parliamentary elections. Reports about the Kremlin proposal itself come on the same day as the pro-Kremlin youth organization Young Guard announced that they have been denied sanction by the Moscow authorities to hold an event on Triumfalnaya Square on July 31 – the same date and place where the Strategy 31 rally is planned to be held. A representative from the Moscow regional government told Gazeta.ru that a three-day automobile festival has been planned for the last weekend in July on Triumfalnaya Square.

The leadership of Young Russia confirmed that they had been denied sanction for their event, and also expressed a great deal of disbelief. As has been the pattern until now, Strategy 31 opposition leaders are continually denied sanction for their own rallies, with one commonly-given excuse being that pro-Kremlin youth groups have already applied to use the same space at the same time.

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.

In an article published earlier this week by the Guardian, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov chastises European leaders for forming increasingly close relationships with Russia and thus enabling the Kremlin’s violent suppression of free speech and human rights. Given the numerous annual murders of Russian journalists and activists and the Kremlin’s unbridled attempts to broadcast its own propaganda abroad, Kasparov calls on Europe to check these relationships at the door and reconsider its stand on human rights.

Don’t cosy up to Russia, Europe
Stifling free media, arresting journalists, bullying its neighbours – Moscow is stamping on freedoms and the EU turns a blind eye

By GARRY KASPAROV
February 23, 2010
The Guardian

In the capitals of European democracies, leaders are hailing a new era of co-operation with Russia. Berlin claims a “special relationship” with Moscow and is moving forward on a series of major energy projects with Russian energy giant Gazprom, one of which is led by the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi traveled to St Petersburg late last year to join in the celebration of his “great friend” Vladimir Putin’s 59th birthday. And in Paris, negotiations are under way for a major arms sale that would allow Russia to acquire one of the most advanced ships in the French navy.

At the same time, democratic dissent inside Russia has been ruthlessly suppressed. On 31 January, the Russian government refused to allow the peaceful assembly of citizens who demonstrated in support of … the right to free assembly, enshrined in article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation: the right “to gather peacefully and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets”.

Likewise, Russian journalists have been increasingly harassed for expressing any criticism of the government. But prosecution is hardly the worst outcome for Russian journalists who fail to report the news in a “patriotic” manner. In 2009, more than dozen of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents were killed.

Having stifled internal criticism of its policies in the Caucasus, the Russian government is now turning its attention to those who criticize them from abroad – and it is being abetted in this project by European businesses and governments. The last victim of Moscow’s censors and their western friends is called Perviy Kavkazskiy (First-Caucasian). This young Russian-language television station was, until the end of January, freely available to people living in Russian-speaking areas. Now, Eutelsat – the leading European satellite provider based in Paris – has taken the channel off the air and refuses to implement the contract negotiated with the TV.

It seems the Russian company Intersputnik made Eutelsat an offer it couldn’t refuse on 15 January, holding out the possibility of millions of dollars in business with the media holdings of Russian gas giant Gazprom on the condition that Eutelsat stop doing business with First-Caucasian. Eutelsat capitulated and sent a disastrous message to the world: no Russian-language television that is not controlled by the Kremlin will be allowed to be aired in the Russian Federation. Even if it is based abroad. Even if it has a contract with a European satellite provider.

The English-language satellite channel, Russia Today, funded and controlled by the Russian government, did not face such problems with European satellites. This channel has recently launched an advertising blitz in the United States and the United Kingdom featuring billboards that show the face of US President Barack Obama morphing into that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nobody raised any concerns about Russia Today and western viewers will be allowed to receive the propaganda that is broadcasted in Russia. But the very idea of an alternative channel in Russian language seems too “provocative” to some Europeans.

Eutelsat’s collaboration with these policies is a clear violation of the spirit of the EU laws protecting freedom of the press, and French courts may well find that the firm violated more than just the spirit of the law as the case against Eutelstat unfolds in the coming weeks. Still, this is just the latest example of European complicity in the Kremlin’s consolidation of political power inside the country and its reconstitution of the military used to coerce those nations that lie just across the border.

This is the context in which came recent reports that the French government intends to go forward with the sale to Russia of one or more Mistral-class amphibious assault ships. The Russian military has not concealed its plan for these weapons. In September of last year, the Russian admiral Vladimir Vysotsky triumphantly declared that “a ship like this would have allowed the Black Sea fleet to accomplish its mission [invading Georgia] in 40 minutes and not 26 hours”.

Only a little more than a year ago, as Russian tanks occupied parts of Georgia, NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared that there could be “no business as usual with Russia under present circumstances”. Russian forces still occupy Georgian territory, in violation of the ceasefire brokered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and yet NATO, too, is back to business as usual with Putin’s regime.

As Moscow shuts down opposition newspapers, arrests journalists who fail to toe the government line and bullies its democratic neighbors into submission, some European leaders are not silent. Instead they are arguing for closer ties to Moscow, for energy cooperation, for military for arms deals.

European leaders must take a stand for freedom of speech and in defense of the free media that enables it. This starts by making clear to European companies that they are not supposed to be the obedient tools of the Kremlin’s censorship. The same leaders should also show that, at the beginning of the 21st century, one cannot occupy a foreign territory without consequence. It clearly does not imply selling weapons to occupation forces. At stake is not only the freedom of Russian citizens, but also the very meaning and the honor of Europe.

• The following people endorse this article: Elena Bonner-Sakharov; Konstantin Borovoï, chairman of the Party for Economic Freedom; Vladimir Boukovsky, former political prisoner; Natalia Gorbanevskaia, poet, former political prisoner; Andreï Illarionov, former adviser to Vladimir Putin; Garry Kasparov, leader of United Citizens Front; Serguei Kovaliev, former minister to Boris Yeltsin; Andreï Mironov, former political prisoner; Andreï Nekrasov, filmmaker; Valeria Novodvorskaya, leader of Democratic Unity of Russia; Oleg Panfilov, TV presenter; Grigory Pasko, journalist, ecology activist, former political prisoner; Leonid Pliouchtch, essayist, former political prisoner; Alexandre Podrabinek, journalist, former political prisoner; Zoïa Svetova, journalist; Maïrbek Vatchagaev, historian; Tatiana Yankelevitch, archivist, Harvard; Lydia Youssoupova, lawyer