Khamroev, a member of the Russian civil rights society Memorial, was attacked in Moscow on December 7.

According to Interfax, the rights advocate was visiting an acquaintance – a Russian citizen who emigrated from Kyrgyzstan – who had called Khamroev and complained that armed men had broken into his apartment.

“Bakhrom came out to the place. They didn’t let him in the apartment, they forced him to leave the entrance,” said Oleg Orlov, head of Memorial. “Then a man came out of a microbus parked nearby – we know the number – and asked Bakhrom several questions and suddenly hit him several times on the head. Bakhrom lost consciousness and was hospitalized.”

The leadership of Memorial believes that Khamroev was beaten by law enforcement officers.

Khamroev had previously been attacked in January 2007. The human rights activist was beaten by three men and suffered from a concussion.

According to the news site Fontanka.ru, the bus in question belongs to a private company that lacks a contract with the city and is basically bankrupt. A group of activists paid for advertising space on the side of the bus and put up a collage featuring Stalin’s face instead of an ad.

Viktor Loginov, who headed the movement to place the collage, says that his group only “fulfills the wishes of veterans.” He specified that the adorned bus will run for two weeks in honor of Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations commemorating the end of World War II.

Memorial Director Irina Filge said that “the public demonstration of Stalin’s image – with the obvious goal of glorifying this historical figure – is leading to a schism in society.” Far from fulfilling anybody’s wishes, the picture not only inflicts moral trauma onto victims of the dictator’s repressions, but is offensive to veterans of the war and survivors of the Leningrad Blockade, the director added.

The bus did not last long before unknown persons vandalized it on Wednesday, painting over Stalin’s face but leaving the rest of the bus untouched. The bus, however, was quickly cleaned off and put back into service on Thursday.

At the same time, RFE/RL is reporting that city authorities are refusing to display anti-Stalin posters reading “For a motherland without Stalin.”

Yevgeny Vyshenkov, the deputy director of the Journalistic Investigations Agency that helped prepare the anti-Stalin poster, told RFE/RL that the company responsible for placing posters in St. Petersburg said the issue should be discussed by the city’s Media Committee.

Committee officials have said that the anti-Stalin poster cannot be placed in public places due to some “discrepancies” in the poster’s colors.

Also on Thursday, Ekho Moskvy radio reported that members of the liberal opposition party Yabloko are asking Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to officially denounce Stalin in a public address. The president has spoken out against the Soviet leader’s crimes before, but his most noticeable statements were in the form of a video blog. Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin said that such an address would only have value if done officially and directly to the nation, not through the internet or in an interview.

Both controversies come on the heels of the public release of documents directly implicating Stalin in the 1940 Katyn massacre in World War II, in which the Soviet secret police executed close to 22 thousand unarmed Polish army reservists. As the Telegraph puts it: “The sight of Stalin’s signature on what amounts to a collective death warrant quells decades of debate on the massacre and gives the lie to claims by die-hard Stalinists that their idol did not personally sanction the killings.”

Stalin’s legacy has been a divisive topic in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, but particularly so in recent months as the country has prepared to celebrate the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II. Veterans groups, human rights organizations, and oppositionists alike have criticized a number of initiatives to use Stalin’s picture as part of national celebrations. The most notable debacle was in Moscow, where a city design committee issued plans to erect informational posters complete with the dictator’s portrait in chosen parts of the capital. The plans were eventually dropped after criticism from both rights organizations and the Kremlin itself, but not before Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov promised to make Stalin’s image a fixture of future city celebrations.

Russian human rights advocates worry that any continued glorification of Stalin could lead people to forget that the dictator was responsible for the estimated 30 million lives lost as a result of repressions and widespread famine in the 1930s and 40s. “Stalin was a criminal, and his regime, which killed millions of people, is utterly disgraceful to publicize,” former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva said last March in reference to the Moscow poster plans. “It’s the same as glorifying Hitler in Germany.”

The mayor made the announcement yesterday at a session of city government officials, following plans released last month for informational posters featuring Stalin’s role in winning World War II to be placed throughout the city in the run-up to May 9 Victory Day celebrations.

“I am not an admirer of Stalin,” said the mayor. “I am an admirer of objective history.”

Luzhkov then accused the Russian media of misrepresenting the city’s plans for the Victory Day posters and giving a false impression that big portraits of the dictator would be literally hung around the city.

“We’re going to do it in appropriate proportions,” he said.

Human rights organizations have already expressed their outrage at the plans, which the city’s design and advertising committee said was introduced at the request of veteran and pensioner organizations.

“Stalin was a criminal, and his regime, which killed millions of people, is utterly disgraceful to publicize,” said former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva in response to last month’s announcement. “It’s the same as glorifying Hitler in Germany.” She added that rights groups intend to hold protests if the plans are implemented.

The Memorial human rights organization also said on Wednesday that they would be launching their own campaign in response, hanging posters that detail crimes committed by the Stalinist regime.

Estimates of up to 30 million people died in the Soviet Union as a result of the Stalinist repressions and widespread famine in the 1930s and 40s, not counting the tens of millions who died as a result of World War II.

See also:
• Veterans Outraged at Stalin Soft Drink
• Fewer Russians Want Stalin-Like Leader

In a statement on Thursday to the Russian news agencies Interfax and RIA Novosti, law enforcement sources said that the murder had been solved and a killer had been identified. The killer has not, however, been detained, and a search is currently underway. Investigators, the sources said, are also still working to establish the identity of the person who ordered the murder.

Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights center, where Estemirova had worked, has already refuted the announcement. Speaking to Gazeta.ru, Orlov said that his colleagues at Memorial have spoken with representatives of the groups investigating Estemirova’s murder, and that these representatives denied that the announcement was true. “They said that they haven’t established the name of the murderer,” said Orlov.

While Gazeta.ru was able to obtain an unofficial confirmation from sources in the Chechen Investigative Committee that the culprit has been identified, all official sources proved to be unreachable on Thursday. The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia refrained from commenting, and the official representative of the Chechen Investigative Committee was out of the office and did not answer her cell phone throughout the course of the day. The newspaper was also unable to reach the press secretary of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who had promised to monitor the course of the murder investigation.

The 50-year-old Estemirova had been the lead member of Memorial’s office in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and had worked to investigate kidnappings and murders of people in Chechnya. She was kidnapped herself not far from her home in the capital on June 15 of last year, and was later found shot dead in the Nazranovsky district of Ingushetia.

Memorial, which soon after announced that it was shutting down operations in Chechnya, blamed Estemirova’s murder on President Kadyrov, claiming that the volatile situation in the republic was the president’s responsibility. Kadyrov successfully sued Orlov for slander, and a Moscow city court fined Orlov 70 thousand rubles (about $2300). In the beginning of February, after experiencing pressure from public officials and a particularly public dressing-down from his mother for failing to respect his elders, Kadyrov dropped all further suits against other human rights activists, including the prominent 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva.

The news of Estemirova’s murder had a powerful resonation throughout the world. In particular, United States President Barack Obama issued a statement calling on the Russian authorities to investigate the murder and punish those responsible. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that he did not believe that Kadyrov had participated in the tragedy, and considered the murder to be an act of provocation against the government.

Kadyrov, however, gave several interviews after the murder in which he spoke out harshly against the slain activist. Defending himself on Radio Liberty and saying that he took no part in the killing, the Chechen president said that he “had no reason to kill a woman who nobody needed.” Referring to her place on a public council under the Grozny city administration, he added that “she has never had any honor, dignity, or a conscience, and all the same I named her as a council representative.” He also did admit that he had later dissolved the council.

When asked if he thought the murder would ever be solved, Orlov stated that the politics tied up in the Estemirova’s case made it hard to say. “In naming this or that person as having participated in the murder, or in naming the person who possibly ordered the murder, the investigators and prosecutors are invariably stepping into a type of political realm,” he told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper.

Memorial member Aleksandr Cherkasov noted the 2002 murder investigation of an outspoken Chechen village leader, Malika Umazheva, as a cautionary tale. An official investigation blamed the killing on militants who it turned out had long been dead, and also on people who had only issued confessions under torture. Memorial’s own investigation established that Umazheva had been murdered by federal security forces, likely in retaliation for the leader’s fervent criticism of the ongoing Russian federal raids in her village.

The Rally of Dissent on Triumfalnaya Square, part of the ongoing Strategy-31 initiative by the Other Russia coalition, saw an increased number of participants compared to recent events. Opposition groups put estimates at between 700 and 1000 protesters.

Among those detained were former deputy prime minister and leader of the Solidarity opposition movement Boris Nemtsov, Solidarity leader Ilya Yashin, prominent political activists Roman Dobrokhotov and Nikolai Lyaskin, Memorial human rights organization chairman Oleg Orlov, and Lev Ponomarev of the organization For Human Rights.

Also detained was National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, who organized the rally together with former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva and activist Konstantin Kosyakin. Limonov was detained several minutes after appearing at the rally, but was able to answer several questions from journalists.

“We, the citizens, have the right to be here on this square,” Limonov declared. “Whether the police have this right is a big question.”

Law enforcement officials, which included internal military forces and the notoriously brutal OMON police forces, were reportedly harsher than usual in their treatment of detainees. Eyewitnesses noted that a girl, bloody after being beaten by police, was among those in an OMON bus on its way to a police station.

Protesters attempted to block the road when the buses began to depart from the square, but were dispersed by police.

Journalists, photographers and cameramen had been cordoned off early in the evening into a small space near the exit of a nearby metro station.

The large number of participants, however, was somewhat overwhelming for the police.

“Usually they manage to detain all the activists in 30 minutes,” said photographer Ilya Varlamov, “but this time it took two hours.”

Many protesters clipped tags to their coats with the phrase “Article 31 of the Russian Constitution,” providing for freedom of assembly, which they hoped would inform the police of “what they were detaining.”

Sunday marked Nemtsov’s first time participating in the series of rallies, dubbed Strategy 31 by its organizers. “I haven’t participated up until now in the rallies on the 31st,” the former deputy prime minister said on his blog. “It seemed to me that with Limonov in charge, it wasn’t worth our ideological differences. On December 31, my attitude toward the rallies changed. It became shameful, upon seeing that while we drank champagne and snacked on olivye, OMON officers were driving the distinguished Lyudmila Alexeyeva onto a police bus.”

The rally on December 31 ended in the detention of approximately 60 of 400 activists present, including the 82-year old Alexeyeva. Her arrest in particular drew immediate scorn from domestic rights groups as well as the United States and various European governments.

Like all previous Rallies of Dissent, Sunday’s demonstration was held without official sanction from the Moscow city authorities. While organizers submitted a proper application, the mayor’s office stated that “winter festivities” had been planned for Triumfalnaya Square on Sunday evening and advised them to pick another location. Organizers of the rally maintain that federal authorities are simply continuing to do whatever they can to block citizens’ rights to exercise freedom of assembly.

Analagous rallies were also held on Sunday in St. Petersburg, Astrakhan, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Murmansk and other cities througout Russia.

Valmarov’s photographs of the rally can be seen by clicking here.

On her Ekho Moskvy radio program, commentator Yulia Latynina spoke at length about the murder of rights activist Natalya Estemirova in Chechnya.  Latynina, who worked together with Estemirova on reporting rights abuses in the North Caucasus republic, was incredulous that an official investigation would find her killers.

Estemirova’s death is already having drastic consequences for the human rights community in the Northern Caucasus, as the Memorial rights group announced it would likely be closing its office in Chechnya.

Read more about the tragic murder from The Sunday Times (UK), and the New York Times.

Translated text follows.

—
Yulia Latynina – Access Code radio program
Ekho Moskvy Radio
July 18, 2009

“The most dreadful event of not only the last week but probably the last few years is Natalya Estemirova’s murder in the Caucasus. I think it is no exaggeration to say that Natalya Estemirova was the Memorial human rights centre in Chechnya. She is a person through whose hands passed the entire information about the horrors taking place in Chechnya. Anna Politkovskaya always stayed at her house. I think Anna would have been only glad to quote Estemirova in her publications, but it was too dangerous. And now, post factum, when Natalya is dead, we can say that a great deal of what Anna wrote was what Estemirova had told her.

“After Anna’s death, Estemirova published in Novaya Gazeta under an assumed name. By the way, on Monday (20 July) we (Novaya Gazeta) will publish a collection of Estemirova’s articles under an assumed name. But all we know about abductions, about burnt down houses of militants’ families, all this was reported by Estemirova. After Estemirova’s death, there will be no sources of information about what is happening in Chechnya that would be an alternative to the official point of view.

“Estemirova’s death completely changes the entire situation in the Caucasus, because it is one thing when militants’ houses are burnt down, but is another thing when a human rights activist who talks about it is killed. The former may be explained by political necessity, the latter can never be explained by anything.

“At the funeral of (murdered human rights lawyer) Stanislav Markelov, whom Estemirova knew well, both Memorial head Oleg Orlov and Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief Dmitriy Muratov pleaded with her to leave Grozny. She refused. I’m saying this because now the Prosecutor-General’s Office cannot find evidence that there were threats against her. Well, apparently Muratov and Orlov were mad at that moment.

“Natalya Estemirova was abducted at 0830 in the morning of 15 July. She was snatched by people in a white Zhiguli car, who apparently did not know her because, according to eyewitnesses, she was being followed by a woman who reportedly pointed to Natalya.

“There is a bruise on her body – she was grabbed by the shoulder, and a bruise on her face – she was hit in the face. Her wrists were cuffed. She was taken though several checkpoints, including the main checkpoint Kavkaz. It looks like the people who were transporting her produced some service ID cards, thanks to which they were allowed to pass the checkpoint easily. They not only took her through the checkpoint easily but also moved her to another car. Because she was abducted in the white Zhiguli car, while the road in the area where she was killed, near the village of Gazi-Yurt, is so muddy that it must have been a jeep, something like Niva. She was killed where she was dumped, not far from the road, by two lethal shots in the chest and an insurance shot in the head.

“I’m saying this because investigators from the Investigations Committee under the prosecutor’s office are now telling us that they have already established that Estemirova was being kidnapped, but when the kidnappers saw police beacon lights on the Kavkaz highway, as someone else was shot there, they panicked. Well, the killers were not afraid of the checkpoints, but once they saw beacon lights – that’s a rare thing, a police beacon light on the Kavkaz highway – they panicked right away. This alone is enough to say that the investigation is telling obvious lies. It seems that soon we will be presented with some dead militant who had killed Estemirova, or a warrior from the (disbanded) Vostok battalion, or a saboteur sent by (Georgian President) Saakashvili. But I don’t think anyone will believe that.

“By the way, about theories: Deputy (Interior) Minister Arkadiy Yedelev, who told us a week ago that Georgian militants were fighting in the (North) Caucasus, has already voiced several theories of Natalya Estemirova’s murder. One of the theories was stunningly brilliant – she was robbed. You see, she had a lot of money from Western grants, she was scavenging around Western embassies like a jackal, and she was robbed. However, even her mobile phone was not touched by those strange robbers who abducted her at 0830 and already killed her by around 1000, quite far from where she was abducted, after taking her through checkpoints. This is one theory Yedelev has. According to another of his theories, militants did it. Right, I can easily imagine militants, who are currently cornered in Ingushetia’s forests, whose situation is really difficult, under permanent bombardment, sneaking out of there, obtaining some federal ID cards, going to Grozny and killing the only person in Chechnya who had been protecting their relatives whose houses are burnt down. It is strange that Yedelev, when talking about his theories, forgot about the Georgian militants he had mentioned earlier. Maybe it was they who killed Estemirova, Mr Yedelev?  How could you forget?”

translation by BBC Monitoring.

Representatives of Memorial and the New-York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) visited the conflict zone to investigate what actually happened there. According to the rights workers, they found that the official casualty numbers put forward by Tskhinvali to be grossly exaggerated. While officials have maintained that around 1600 people were killed, no documentation confirming this figure was ever presented.

“People are individuals, and only the most detailed and full list can present an accurate picture of the death toll,” said Alexander Cherkasov, a Memorial board member. He added that most of those killed on the South Ossetian side were armed resistors, and not peaceful residents. Still, Cherkasov underscored that even a small number of casualties was a grave loss for South Ossetia, whose population numbers approximately 70,000.

The rights workers made clear that looting was still rampant in the buffer zone around South Ossetia, and said local residents were responsible. Russian soldiers stationed in the area, meanwhile, have taken to drinking, and are looking the other way. “Having entered a wine-producing region, they have started to let themselves go, and may become dangerous,” the authors write.

The report counters rumors that Georgian soldiers had tortured Ossetian prisoners. “As result of our trip,” said HRW investigator Tatyana Lokshina, “we did not find any evidence of prisoners being tortured by Georgian special forces. There are many rumors going around about this, but no specifics.”

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For more on the human rights situation in South Ossetia see:

Human Rights Expert Tatyana Lokshina explains the conflict in South Ossetia – (Part One and Two)