“Many participants of the forum, including myself, were confronted with the fact that mobile phone service entirely disappeared at the entrance to the camp in the Khimki Forest,” Belyakov said on the website of A Just Russia on Tuesday. “Certain police officers told me under condition of anonymity that ‘jammers’ are definitely being used. They even told me where one of them was.”

Belyakov added that he took photographs and video footage of the devices used to jam cell phone service.

“I’ve already sent Ministry of Internal Affairs Chief Rashid Gumarovich Nurgaliyev a deputy inquiry demanding an explanation of the goal of the operation to suppress the mobile phone signal in the Khimki Forest,” he said.

ITAR-TASS reported late on Tuesday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs is denying that any jamming devices were used at Anti-Seliger and accused Belyakov of speaking “rubbish.”

The forum, dubbed “Anti-Seliger,” was held in the Khimki Forest outside Moscow from June 17-20. According to organizers, the goal of the event was to give oppositionist, environmental, and other activists an opportunity to share their experiences and learn from one another. Approximately 3000 people took part.

Over the course of the forum, lectures were given by prominent journalists, political analysts, and human rights activists, including Leonid Parfyonov, Artemy Troitsky, Stanislav Belkovsky, Oleg Kashin, Aleksei Navalny, Yelena Panfilova, Valery Panyushkin, and Igor Chestin.

Anti-Seliger was organized as an alternative to Seliger, an annual forum held by Russia’s Federal Agency for Youth Issues (Rosmolodezh) and the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi. Seliger is notorious for its grotesque displays of anti-oppositionist propaganda; past targets of harassment have included United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov, leading human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Nashi leaders have admitted that the group – and, by extension, the forum – were created “to prevent an Orange Revolution” ahead of Russia’s 2008 presidential election. According to public records, Rosmolodezh head Vasily Yakemenko plans to spend no less than 178 million rubles ($6.37 million USD) on Seliger 2011.

As the Telegraph points out, the group has recently became much more officially deserving of that nefarious title: Nashi activists in Yaroslavl were found to have plagiarized the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to “inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights.”

The full report:

Activists from the ‘Nashi’ youth group drew up a list of eight commandments meant to inspire young Russians to greater patriotic heights, a Kremlin priority.

Anti-Kremlin activists however spotted that the text was a lightly edited version of an infamous list of commandments that Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, composed to steer National Socialists in the right ideological direction.

The Nashi activists, who were based at a branch of the youth group in the town of Yaroslavl 150 miles east of Moscow, had removed Goebbels’ advice to beware Jews and punch anyone who insulted the motherland. But they otherwise seem to have substituted the word Russia for Germany.

“The enemies of Russia are your enemies,” they wrote mimicking Goebbels’ phrase “Germany’s enemies are your enemies; hate them with all your heart.”

Critics said they were not particularly shocked by the content of the new commandments but disturbed by what the act of plagiarism said about the activists.

“It is strange that they did not find any other way of expressing themselves other than copying fascists,” wrote Anton Orekh of the Ejednevny Jurnal news portal. “In order to copy it they had to find it. To find it, read it, and really get into it. And understand that to say it better than Goebbels is just not possible.”

Ruslan Maslov, the activist who penned the commandments, said he could not understand what was so bad about their content. Another activist, Artyom Kozlov, said the scandal was an attempt to blacken the group’s name. He said that not everything about Nazi Germany was bad.

“The roads in Nazi Germany were well built,” he told gazeta.ru. “But that does not mean they should be destroyed. The good things should be preserved.”

Nashi, which means ‘One of Us,’ enjoys support from the Kremlin. It has courted controversy in the past, however, by mounting an aggressive campaign of harassment against the former British ambassador to Russia and, more recently, by displaying the heads of its ‘enemies’ hewn from papier-mache on spikes donning Nazi caps.

“The Commandments of Honour”

1. Your fatherland is Russia. Love it above all others and in deed more than word.

2. The enemies of Russia are your enemies.

3. Every compatriot, even the lowliest, is part of Russia. Love him like you love yourself!

4. Demand only duties of yourself. Then Russia will regain justice.

5. Be proud of Russia! You must honour the fatherland for which millions gave their lives.

6. Remember, if someone takes away your rights, you have the right to say “NO!”

7. Uphold what you must without shame where Great Russia is concerned!

8. Believe in the future. Then you will become the victor!

Update 11/11/10: Fuller context added to Pleshcheyeva’s remarks.

Members of Russian law enforcement, mass media, government agencies, advocacy groups, and pro-Kremlin youth organizations spoke yesterday during a Public Chamber session dedicated to the ghastly beating of Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin. While most presentations denounced the attack and focused on the need to step up efforts to prosecute assailants of Russian journalists, one speaker accused the journalists of bringing these attacks on themselves.

According to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, passions ran high during the two-hour session, with journalists, lawyers, and activists decrying Russia’s chronic failure to solve cases of attacks on journalists. Editor-in-Chief Yevgeniya Albats of the New Times magazine spoke directly to representatives of law enforcement present in the auditorium, saying that the government has provided vast amounts of support to large organizations that have long been hounding Kashin and numerous other journalists.

The editor was referring to government-sponsored pro-Kremlin youth movements that routinely harass journalists whose views contradict their own, some of whose representatives were present at the session. Nashi Commissar Irina Pleshcheyeva turned out to be an actual member of the Public Chamber, and issued a sharp rebuke against those who she felt practice “political terrorism.” Noting that she did not consider Kashin to be a talented journalist, the commissar argued that the journalists themselves are responsible for such attacks:

When a journalist is attacked or murdered per order, when he’s dealing with some case, then journalists take it, come together, and continue the case. They don’t need to provide reasons to murder them. Not everyone is going to be killed. If a person – the people who commit crimes – they don’t think they’re going to be caught. None of the criminals think they’re going to be caught. But if their goal is to change the situation – so that a person doesn’t write, doesn’t investigate – he should know that, in the future, the journalists are going to take the case and continue it. The editorial staff will take it. All the journalists will take it. I don’t know. But that investigation will continue. Then there won’t be any necessity to explain to people that fists don’t solve anything.

Pleshcheyeva went on to say that she herself feared being attacked for what she wrote on blogs and other Internet media, and that this is a problem shared by Russian society on the whole. Moreover, she argued, lots of people get killed in Russia while fulfilling their professional duties – soldiers, businessmen, teachers, doctors – so journalists are no exception. While the commissar briefly touched upon the importance of investigating such attacks, she stressed that society has to focus on the fact that “they don’t let us speak,” and not “that somebody got crippled.”

The speech was disturbingly reminiscent of remarks by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in August that opposition protesters intentionally provoke the police into “bludgeoning them upside the head.”

Also present at the session was Andrei Tatarinov, a leading member of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Guard and member of the Public Chamber. He supported Pleshcheyeva and added that while his organization has not always been on great terms with Kashin, its website has posted condolences and denounced the attack. He did not explain, however, why this page was accompanied by what Nezavisimaya Gazeta described as “staged photographs mocking people expressing sympathy.”

A presentation by Moscow’s chief investigator, Vadim Yakovenko, provided an abrupt summary of Kashin’s case: the work is ongoing; 30 witnesses have been questioned; there is a wealth of information.

Vladimir Vasiliev, head of the State Duma Committee on Safety, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the auditorium was clearly unsatisfied with Yakovenko’s laconic speech. Therefore, Vasiliev spoke about the lack of sufficient budgetary funds for the needs of Russia’s law enforcement system, which results in complex cases being doled out to “boys” to solve. According to the newspaper, Vasiliev’s remarks were taken as evidence that we shouldn’t count on seeing any results from the investigation in the foreseeable future.

After undergoing two operations on his skull and a partial amputation of one of his pinky fingers, Oleg Kashin awoke from a coma Wednesday morning in a Moscow hospital. Doctors say his condition is critical but stable, and that he should be able to talk in the coming days. Colleagues and supporters continued calling for his perpetrators to be found and brought to justice for the fifth day in a row.

While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

A group of youth activists attending Seliger 2010, a summer-long camp that was founded as a training ground for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi but is now run directly by the federal government, erected a row of 13 plastic heads on sticks. Each head has a hats bearing Nazi symbols and a picture of a different Russian public figure, including former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, musician Yury Shevchuk, and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The installation was originally thought to be organized by Nashi itself, but was later found to be the work of a smaller pro-Kremlin youth group called Stal (”Steel”). According to the group’s LiveJournal page, Stal is a “patriotic movement created for the unification of thinkers and prepared for decisive action for the sake of its country, for the sake of Russia, of youth.” They also call themselves “the weaponry of Russia.”

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin is deeply enraged by the installation. He said that it would be hard to do more damage to Russia’s reputation and that the organizers should be severely punished.

Russian bloggers immediately pointed out that the installation violates a federal law banning the public demonstration of Nazi symbolism.

Members of the Public Chamber, a federal body meant to foster dialogue between civil society and the government, called for a full boycott of the camp.

“I am deeply outraged that our best human rights advocates and well-known public figures – Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Nikolai Svanidze – are compared to Nazis,” said Alla Gerber, Public Chamber member and president of the Interregional Holocaust Foundation. “The authors of this installation are irresponsible hooligans, absolutely insane people who don’t know what Nazis are.”

Nashi defended Seliger 2010 for allowing different youth movements to express different points of view, Stal’s being no exception. In a statement posted on its website on Wednesday, Nashi said that the camp’s administration “does not subject participants’ statements to censorship, does not participate in the preparation of installations, does not pay for art objects that delegations bring along.”

Lyudmila Alexeyeva told Ekho Moskvy that public figures would do best to ignore such incidents, and thus she does not plan to file suit for slander against the installation’s organizers.

“Things like this don’t offend me,” said Alexeyeva. “And really, if they originate with Nashi, then excuse me, who is there to be offended by – those who make do without any human qualities, decency, or intelligence? Let them amuse themselves in this ugly fashion. Put up a caricature of an old woman who already looks sufficiently morose. If my grandchildren did this, then I would explain to them that good children don’t do this. But here I’m not going to explain anything.”

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.

Nashi Celebrates Fifth Year With Kremlin Support
April 16, 2010
By Alexander Bratersky

Pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, best known for harassing ambassadors and opposition leaders, celebrated its five-year anniversary Thursday with a major show of support from the Kremlin, which said the activists remained a vital force in Russia.

Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov — who is widely believed to have organized the group while an adviser to then-President Vladimir Putin in 2005 — spoke to the raucous crowd of 2,000 delegates, as did Nashi’s founding father, Vasily Yakemenko.

Created to resist revolutions like those in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, Nashi has taken a back seat to other youth groups in recent years as the threat of widespread public unrest dwindled.

But Surkov told members Thursday that he “would always support” them.

“If we all go on vacation, the consequences won’t wait. We see what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan — that means we’re needed and have to be at our posts. … Those who chose for themselves the political fight will never be able to relax again,” Surkov told the crowd. “I’m calling on you to remain in that fight,” he said, before conveying greetings from Medvedev.

Putin said in a letter to the congress that the movement “unites people who love their motherland and are trying to make a serious contribution to the resolution of the current problems of the state and society.”

Yakemenko, now director of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, restated the group’s allegiance to Russia’s two leading politicians.

“The Nashi movement is the movement of those who feel outraged and mad by the things they see around them. Our movement knows no authority except the authority of the policies of Medvedev and Putin,” Yakemenko said.

The congress, held in an ornate Moscow business center, also elected a new ruling board, in which a previously low-profile activist, Marina Zademidkova, 25, collected three times more votes than her nearest competitor, Anton Smirnov.

The State Duma’s youngest member, Robert Shlegel of United Russia, known for his initiatives to restrict media freedoms, was also elected to the five-member board. Nashi will elect its new formal leader from the group on May 15.

Incumbent leader Nikita Borovikov, 29, did not run for a spot on the board.

Political expert Stanislav Belkovsky said the movement’s future would depend on financing from the Kremlin. “The movement doesn’t have a solid ideological base,” he said.

Ilya Yashin, a member of the Solidarity opposition movement who is a frequent target of Nashi attacks, said the group would still come in handy as the state tries to deflect the growing “protest mood.”

“It’s possible that the experience of movement’s managers would be needed when people hit the streets,” the former Yabloko youth leader told The Moscow Times.

While Nashi members in the regions have also been involved in less political activities, such as charity work, the group’s radical fight against the Kremlin opponents will continue to be its focus, members said Thursday.

“We thought that we have defended our sovereignty, but we shouldn’t forget that they are trying to occupy us,” Borovikov said, referring to Western powers and the “agents of the ideological influence.”

He said they were behind Russian opposition leaders and liberal-leaning media, which he accused of “promoting drugs and providing a tribune to terrorists.”

Before Borovikov’s speech, the group was shown a 15-minute film about Nashi, highlighting its opposition to the “organizers of color revolutions” and “liberals and fascists.”

To illustrate the message, the film showed former chess champion Garry Kasparov and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov — both members of the Solidarity movement.

Without naming names, the film also attacked “losers” in government and the media who are trying to block the country’s modernization, a key initiative by Medvedev to close Russia’s technological gap with the West.

“The task to create civil society has been completed. The new task is to defend modernization and sovereign democracy,” the film narrator said in a robotic voice.

But not all of the delegates said they supported the hard-hitting ideology, which has discredited the movement with some of the public.

“We often don’t have concrete ideas to express,” said Artyom, who asked that his last name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

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.

Nevertheless, police detained both protesters and independent observers for taking part in the unsanctioned event, reportedly employing extreme brutality against both detainees and journalists, including representatives from state-owned media sources.

“One of our activists, Grigory Torbeyev, was severely injured; his face is broken,” said opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov. “Nevertheless, he was dragged into an OMON police bus and is now being held there. He requires medical attention but the police are doing nothing.”

Both of the rally’s organizers, Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin and National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, were among those detained, as were a number of activists from the Solidarity opposition movement. Chairman Lev Ponomarev of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights, who came to the event as an observer, was also detained.

As they have done for each of the Strategy 31 rallies since their inception last May, organizers had filed the required application with Moscow city authorities to legally hold the rally on Triumfalnaya Square. And as has been the case each of those times, the city denied the request on the premise that the space was already reserved for another event. While such events have usually consisted of various cultural festivities, March 31 was reserved for Generation Day, an event organized by and for a conglomeration of pro-Kremlin youth groups, including the notoriously Komsomolesque organization Nashi.

Limonov argued that the city’s actions showed that it had “cardinally altered its tactics and strategy” by allowing such an event to take place at the traditional place and during the traditional time of the Strategy 31 anti-government protests. In a similar vein, Heidi Hautala of the European Parliament’s human rights committee earlier called attention to “the particularly concerning trend that is newly appearing in the period prior to the demonstration on March 31.”

“I understand that the Russian authorities, it’s possible, are searching for ways to deny sanction to these demonstrations, as has occurred in the past,” said Hautala. “It can even happen that they simultaneously allow rival pro-Kremlin groups to hold demonstrations at the same time and in the same place. This would bring about the risk of creating clashes and excessive violence between the groups.” As it is, each of the Strategy 31 rallies have ended by being violently broken up by police.

One mainstay of the Strategy 31 demonstrations was absent on Wednesday night: 82-year-old former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva chose instead to attend a memorial at the Park Kultury metro station, where one of Monday’s two bombings took place. Noting that the decision had been difficult, Alexeyeva said on Tuesday that “I tried to convince myself that since the official day of mourning was declared to be March 30, I could go to Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st with my ‘Article 31 of the Russian Constitution’ badge. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything when I imagined what the memorial rally that the pro-Kremlin youth are going to be holding at that time is going to turn out like.”

“I have no desire to be present at that orgy; I can bear neither to hear it nor see it,” she concluded.

That somber memorial at Park Kultury took a shocking turn when Alexeyeva was physically attacked by a young man identified as Konstantin Pereverzev. While the elderly activist addressed a crowd of reporters, Pereverzev approached her and asked “Are you still alive, b****?” before striking her across the head. He was immediately restrained by members the crowd. Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports that the police did not act to detain the man, but that members of the crowd instead took him to a police station. Police stated that the assailant was “in a state of extreme alcoholic intoxication.” Interfax reported that the man “frankly cannot put together a single word and is currently a state of unconsciousness,” although Alexeyeva herself and other eyewitnesses claim that Pereverzev was completely sober at the time of the attack.

“I’m an old woman. I behave in a law-abiding fashion. If a young man hits an old woman, it’s not normal,” said Alexeyeva. The elderly activist left for home immediately after the incident, having possibly suffered a slight concussion.

According to rally organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a prominent human rights advocate whose arrest at a New Year’s Eve demonstration in Moscow has drawn international scorn, the city authorities had no basis on which to prohibit the rally.

“We are categorically outraged at this refusal,” Alexeyeva said. She described a sanctioned rally held in January 2009 directly after the murders as having been “quiet and peaceful,” giving authorities no reason to suspect that this year’s rally would be any different.

“But our authorities very much love to prohibit everything; they need to, so that the citizens sit at home, and if they do go outside, then only these ‘Nashi’ will be there with their cries of ‘Hooray Putin!’” Alexeyeva said, referring to the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi.

The rights advocate added that the application for the January 19 rally had been filed on December 24, giving authorities plenty of notice.

Stanislav Markelov was shot in the head in central Moscow on January 19, 2009. He died at the scene. Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, who had been walking with Markelov, was also shot, and died the same day in the hospital.

Markelov was known for his work defending victims of human rights abuses in Chechnya and violence from ultranationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. Two suspects in the murder, alleged neo-Nazis Nikita Tikhonov and Yevgeniya Khasis, were arrested in November and have plead guilty to the crime.