While access to the internet itself remains largely unhindered in Russia, many bloggers have come under attack – both online and in person.

In the last two years there have been several cases of technical blocking and numerous cases of content removal. The authorities have also increasingly engaged in harassment of bloggers. At least 25 cases of blogger harassment, including 11 arrests, were registered between January 2009 and May 2010, compared with seven in 2006–08. In addition, dozens of blogs have reportedly been attacked in recent years by a hacker team called the Hell Brigade.

The report did point out areas where access to the internet remains a pressing issue:

The number of internet users jumped from 1.5 million in 1999 to 46.5 million in 2010, and grew by more than 13 million in the last two years, though this still leaves Russia’s penetration rate at 33 percent, lower than the rates in Central European countries. The level of infrastructure differs significantly from place to place, and gaps are evident between urban and rural areas as well as between different types of cities. The worst access conditions can be found in the North Caucasus and the industrial towns of Siberia and the Far East.

Corruption within the federal government also plays a part in what companies control internet access across the country:

Five access providers—Comstar, Vimpelcom, ER-Telecom, AKADO, and the state-owned SvyazInvest—controlled more than 67 percent of the broadband market as of February 2010. Regional branches of SvyazInvest account for 36 percent of subscribers, up from 27.8 percent in 2008. As at the federal level, regional dominance usually depends on political connections and the tacit approval of regional authorities. Although this situation is not the direct result of legal or economic obstacles, it nonetheless reflects an element of corruption that is widespread in the telecommunications sector and other parts of the Russian economy.

Greater concern, however, was focused on blocked online content, particularly opposition-oriented websites.

Although attempts to establish a comprehensive, centralized filtering system have been abandoned, several recent cases of blocking have been reported. In December 2009, a number of ISPs blocked access to the radical Islamist website Kavkaz Center. At almost the same time, the wireless provider Yota blocked several opposition sites. The practice of exerting pressure on service providers and content producers by telephone has become increasingly common. Police and representatives of the prosecutor’s office call the owners and shareholders of websites, and anyone else in a position to remove unwanted material and ensure that the problem does not come up again. Such pressure encourages self-censorship, and most providers do not wait for court orders to remove targeted materials.

…

Content is often removed on the grounds that it violates Russia’s laws against “extremism.” Providers are punished for hosting materials that are proscribed in a list on the website of the Ministry of Justice. The list is updated on a monthly basis and included 748 items as of January 2011. The procedure for identifying extremist materials is nontransparent, leaving ample room for politically motivated content removal. There have been at least three cases of site closures, two of them temporary, on the grounds that the affected sites hosted extremist materials. In February 2010, the major opposition portal Grani.ru was checked for extremism, but the authorities apparently found nothing incriminating.

Among the most disturbing accounts in the report were cases of criminal suits and physical attacks against individual bloggers.

Since January 2009, police and the prosecutor’s office have launched at least 25 criminal cases against bloggers and forum commentators. While some cases were against individuals who posted clearly extremist content, others appear to be more politically motivated. The most severe and widely known sentence was that of Irek Murtazin, a Tatarstan blogger and journalist who received almost two years in prison in November 2009 for defamation.

…

While traditional journalists and activists have faced a series of murders and severe beatings in recent years, physical attacks on Russian bloggers and online activists have so far been comparatively limited. However, one recent event drew significant attention. In November 2010, Oleg Kashin, a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant who was also well known as a blogger, was severely beaten near his home in Moscow. His coverage of protests and political youth movements had prompted vocal responses from pro-Kremlin groups in the past, but it was not known exactly who was responsible for the attack.

Read the report in its entirety by clicking here.

Kashin became famous after he was beaten nearly to death outside his home in Moscow last November by two men who still remain unknown. On March 23, the journalist said on his blog that Yakemenko, head of the Russian Federal Youth Affairs Agency (Rosmolodezh) and the radical youth group Nashi, was probably involved in the attack.

“As a matter of fact, I myself don’t doubt the ‘Yakemenko’ version, and I don’t have any different ones (even the story about the stolen wife clinks with all of this – actually, I heard that Yakemenko’s wife left him in November), and I don’t believe that my case is that hard to solve, and the silence of the Central Investigative Committee, in my opinion, is set on just that conclusion,” wrote the journalist.

On March 24, Rosmolodezh Press Secretary Kristina Potupchik called the remarks “filthy accusations against Rosmolodezh and Mr. Yakemenko.” The next day, Yakemenko announced he was suing Kashin for slander.

The high-profile investigation of Kashin’s beating has been notably quiet since the initial shock of the incident in November, only briefly punctuated by rumors in February that the attack had been perpetuated by an angry husband whose wife Kashin had “stolen.” Kashin denied this account and continues to insist he was beaten because of his work as a journalist.

On March 24, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was asked about the state of the investigation into Kashin’s attack by writer and publicist Sergei Shargunov.

“Today I spoke with the head of the Investigative Committee about this topic… There’s movement there, I don’t have the right to say particular things, but there’s movement,” Medvedev said in response.

In addition, the president said the results of the investigation “should be presented not only to the victim, but also to the public, due to the large resonance.”

Oleg Kashin was attacked 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.

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.

Russia: Freedom of Speech Online in 2010
By Marianna Tishchenko
February 10, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

With the Internet rising in influence as the single most important source of information (40% of Russian citizens use the Runet), the issue of online freedom of expression has become significantly more relevant. This year, the Internet became a platform for political and social mobilization in Russia. However, judging by the reaction of the Russian authorities, who strive to suppress activities in cyberspace, the government does not see online activism in a particularly positive light.

At the same time as ordinary Russians (who are, by the way, the most active users of social websites in the world) have begun to rely more heavily on the Internet, the government has also changed its priorities in regards to the global web.

Regional Blocking

Blocking websites is a practice used widely by government authorities, mainly on a regional level, to control Internet content. It must be noted that the particular nature of this method is that residents from one concrete region are blocked from seeing the same websites that everyone else can access as normal.

The most outrageous example of limits imposed on freedom of expression on the Internet was the decision of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Central Regional Court about blocking the website YouTube by Internet provider Rosnet. The ban (which was never put into effect) was a reaction to a neo-Nazi video clip that was put on a “list of extremist materials.” Regardless of the fact that the court’s decision was later forgotten, the case itself is an example of the burgeoning interference by regional authorities over Internet content.

YouTube has not been the only online resource to suffer. At the end of July, a court in the Republic of Ingushetia required a local Internet provider to block access to LiveJournal. In August, a provider in Tula temporarily blocked access to the independent portal Tulskie Pryaniki.

There was an analogous case with the environmental website Ecmo.ru. A provider in the city of Khimki blocked user access to Ecmo.ru because it was hosting a petition calling for Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko to resign.

Physical and Virtual Violence

In addition to website blocking, the freedom of self-expression on the Internet has been influenced by threats of actual violence against bloggers. Well-known Russian journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin was attacked after he published a series of articles about youth movements and protests against the construction of a highway through the Khimki Forest.

In August, a criminal suit was filed in the Kemerovo region against Aleksandr Sorokin for a post in which he compared regional governors to Latin American dictators.

In November, Ulyanovsk activist and blogger Sasha Bragin became a target of the Russian justice system when he was accused of running over a pedestrian. Bragin said the accident was staged and that a criminal suit had already been filed after he was repeatedly threatened for his investigative work.

A series of criminal suits have been filed against neo-Nazi websites. According to the Sova Center, Komi resident Vladimir Lyurov was sentenced to six months probation for inciting hatred with anti-Semitic comments posted on a local forum. Lyurov has not admitted his guilt.

LiveJournal, which is controlled by Kremlin-allied oligarch Alisher Usmanov, wound up in the center of public attention after suspending their users’ accounts. Rakhat Aliev, a Kazakh opposition politician and ex-son-in-law of President Nazarbayev, had his blog frozen. Incidentally, at one point before then, all of LiveJournal was blocked in Kazakhstan. Blogger pilgrim_67 also had his account blocked, forcing him to “transfer” to BlogSpot and lj.rossia.org.

These cases have proven the instability of LiveJournal as a platform for the Russian political blogosphere.

Blogger accounts were not only closed, but hacked. In the past five years, more than 40 Runet blogs have been attacked.

This week, a group of hackers called “the Brigade of Hell” attacked the blog of Valery Novodvorskaya. Hacker victims include political and commercial bloggers alike and the deletion and falsification of content on online journals still goes unpunished.

According to historian Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has closely investigated hacker attacks on bloggers, this group’s financing is controlled by Timofey Shevyakov, leading analyst of the Kremlin website Politonline.ru and former employee of the pro-Kremlin research institute Foundation for Effective Politics.

Control and Deletion of Content

The unrest on Manezhnaya Square on December 11, 2010 provoked a rise in attention paid to the Runet, particularly regarding any information of a nationalistic persuasion. Representatives of the website Vkontakte announced that their moderators were working in cooperation with the police and FSB to delete “dangerous” content. Until then, the site had admitted but not specified the level of cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and now the security services speak openly of monitoring social websites and tracing the IP addresses of people who, in their opinion, are inciting hostility.

Vkontakte was noted for deleting content from its pages more broadly. After the explosion in the Raspadskaya Mine, the website’s management deleted a group created in sympathy for the victims that numbered more than 6000 members when it was deleted. Last July, the group Antireligia (about 8000 members) was also deleted.

Among other measures used against online activists was the incident of Dmitri Gudkov’s car, which was smashed up after Gudkov posted a video titled “Our Gulf of Mexico” about an oil well explosion that the authorities did not react to in any way at all.

Regardless of the fact that the Russian government has staged a series of serious attacks to limit the activities of Internet users, the Runet continues to grow, unite and discuss the most varied topics all the same. It’s possible that the government will realize that controlling freedom of expression is extremely difficult – not only because of the public’s stubbornness, but also because limiting online freedom could not only hinder regional and national debates but also harm the reputation of Russia in the global arena.

In an interview with television personality Leonid Parfenov, Kashin said he has no idea who ordered his beating, that his assailants said nothing during the attack, and that a variety of the topics of his articles could have been motivating factors. But which one it was – the Khimki Forest, Kremlin-sponsored youth groups, or insulted Russian governors – Kashin couldn’t say. An investigation under the supervision of prosecutor general is still ongoing.

In his first article since the attack, Oleg Kashin reveals that, far from embodying the glorified image of a fearless crusader that developed while he lay unconscious, the Kommersant journalist wishes most of all to simply go on with his work as usual. That, and to get rid of the feeding tube stuck up his nose.

About Gagarin and About Myself
By Oleg Kashin
November 29, 2010
Kommersant/Vlast

An unfamiliar man in a white coat took an instinctive step to the side, and my hand, stretching towards his chest pocket, grasping only air, falls back again to the mattress.

“What does he want?” asks the man, feeling his pocket.

“The pen, probably,” posed a woman’s voice; and that woman, who I didn’t see, was right: the pen, of course, I needed the pen. The blue gel pen from the chest pocket of the white coat of that man.

“A writer,” the man with the pen said respectfully – but he did not give me the pen. Discussing the amusing incident, the entire delegation took off, leaving me alone with the artificial ventilation lung that went through a special hole made in my throat. The hole was made lower than the vocal chords; therefore, even after regaining consciousness, I couldn’t speak. Seeing the pen in the doctor’s pocket, I would have been thrilled to take the pen and, at least on my own bandaged hand, write: “It itches under the cast!!!!!!” – they would read it and help, scratch it with something. And instead of that – the backs recede in their white coats, and there’s no help at all. At that point I still didn’t know that one of the backs belonged to a paid agent of the LifeNews publication – the resident resuscitation expert (I exposed him a week later), and who, several hours later and under the heading “Braveheart,” told how I demanded a pen and paper in order to begin, even while still attached to an artificial breathing machine, to write the horrible truth about the people behind the attack on me.

In the resuscitation ward, wrapped in tubes and wires, I could sleep (and slept) as much as necessary in any form, whether artificially medicated or healthily and naturally. I could keep quiet, I could (from the ninth day onwards) speak and, even while I couldn’t talk, still resolved the communication problem: a childrens chalkboard, left behind by someone, was found, and by drawing a rectangle with my hands in the air – a conventional gesture that everyone immediately understood for some reason – I could write what I was concerned about and what I wanted on this board. Only, I didn’t need to write about the itchy cast; they removed it faster than the board turned up. Therefore, the main topics of my notes were complaints about the probe in my nose – they fed me through the nose with some kind of special food – and flirting with the nurses. My life in those days, any way you look at it, was interesting and fascinating.

But aside from me personally – yes and the doctors and nurses as well – who knew about this life? Nobody knew. My real life was happening, maybe, a half-hour drive from the hospital. Outside of the police office at Petrovka, switching places with one another, my friends and former enemies stood in solitary pickets with posters of my name, having suddenly become friends (I say this without irony; enemies may sometimes seriously become friends). A newspaper called “Kashin,” completely devoted to me, was printed. On Pushkin Square, and afterwards on Chistie Prudy, rallies were held in my defense. “Do you want the classic Kashin or the one with his signature?” girls politely asked a line of pensioners waiting for my portrait, which they could attach to their chests.

The term “Journalist Kashin” appeared in President Medvedev’s lexicon. When a group of students in the journalism department at Moscow State University, locked in a classroom with windows facing the Kremlin, hung a poster out the window reading “Who beat Kashin?” a joke started going around: Dmitri Medvedev barricaded himself in his office, with windows facing the journalism department, and hung a poster out the window: “It wasn’t me!” – the joke is from Twitter, but who could guarantee that it didn’t really happen? The events in the week after my beating proved it: anything is possible, anything in general. The universal childhood dream, not to die but to be at one’s own funeral and hear who says what and how, came true for me alone. “Oleg, you’re going to wake up and be stunned!” – a phrase from the book of honorable recordings from a routine Kashin rally. And it’s true, I woke up and was stunned.

Journalist Kashin – that is to say, I – quietly came to in the resuscitation ward. A half-hour drive away from me, somebody was going on a rampage, somebody who even people who knew me personally were ready to take for Journalist Kashin, brave and uncompromising, personally presenting a threat to the Kremlin, as well as hope for freedom and happiness. “Kashin, get up! Kashin, write!” cried the square. The square didn’t know that I was already up in bed and was writing on the board: “I want to go to the bathroom.” The tabloids quoted Journalist Kashin (but not me): “They will not silence me!” – unfortunately, without indicating what topic Journalist Kashin wanted to have his say on. There was only one thing that interested me at the end of the second week after the attack. There was once a handsome young pilot named Gagarin. He was somehow chosen to be astronaut number one, and at the age of 27, or something, he flew into space for a bit more than an hour. He came back – and that was it, there was no more life, just presidiums, banquets, presentations that stamped the impending doom onto his handsome young face. This went on for seven years before he died for good. I lay in the resuscitation ward, flipped through the “Kashin” newspaper, and thought about Gagarin and how we are alike.

But I have one important advantage over Gagarin. The New Year’s recess – a terrific, as I understand now, invention. December is now beginning, I’ll likely be ill the whole time, and then the country will start to drink. We’ll return to work together, the country after the holidays and myself after rehab. Nobody will remember. Nobody will notice. And it will be normal, like before, to work. After all, they will not silence me.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

Channel One, one of Russia’s state-run television channels, broadcast the award ceremony, but not Parfyonov’s speech, which was only posted online. Expert opinions differ as to whether the usually non-political host’s remarks were given the go-ahead by the authorities or if they were a complete surprise. The New Times magazine has published a series of photographs of significant media personalities below a video and transcript of the speech. An English translation of the speech is below:

I was given the chance to speak for seven minutes about the topic that seems most relevant to me today. I’m worried, and will not try to speak by memory; for the first time in the studio I’m going to read aloud.

This morning I visited Oleg Kashin in the hospital. He had undergone another routine operation, surgically restoring, in the literal and figurative sense of the term, the face of Russian journalism. The brutal beating of the Kommersant newspaper correspondent evoked a much greater resonance in society and the professional sphere than any other attempt on the life and health of a Russian journalist. The reaction of the federal television channels, it’s true, could be suspected of having been prepared ahead of time; indeed, the tone of the immediate response by the head of state to what happened was different than what was said by the person in charge after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

And another thing. Before his attack, Oleg Kashin did not exist, and could not have existed, for the federal airwaves. In recent times he has written about the radical opposition, protest movements, and street youth ringleaders, and these topics and characters are inconceivable for TV. It seems that the marginal sphere is beginning to change something in the public situation, forming a new trend; but among television journalists, Kashin simply has no colleagues. There was one, Andrei Loshak, and he left altogether. For the internet.

After the real and imaginary sins of the ’90s, there were two points in the 2000s – at the beginning, for the sake of the elimination of the media oligarchs, and then for the sake of the unity of the ranks in the counter-terrorism war – when federal telecommunications were nationalized. Journalistic topics, and with them all of life, was definitively divided into what was allowed on TV and what wasn’t allowed on TV. Each politically significant broadcast is used to guess the government’s goals and problems, its mood, attitude, its friends and enemies. Institutionally, this is not information at all, but government publicity or anti-publicity – what else was the broadcast artillery in the run-up to Luzhkov’s dismissal – and, of course, publicity of the government itself.

For a federal television channel correspondent, the highest official persons are not newsmakers, but the bosses of his boss. Institutionally, a correspondent is then not a journalist at all, but a civil servant, following the logic of service and submission. There’s no possibility, for example, to have an interview in its truest sense with the boss of the boss: it’d be an attempt to expose someone who wouldn’t want to be exposed. Andrei Kolesnikov’s conversation with Vladimir Putin in a yellow Lada Kalina allows one to feel the confidence of the prime minister, his attitude towards 2012, and his ignorance about unpleasant topics. But can we imagine in the mouth of a national television journalist, and then on a national television channel, the question posed by Kolesnikov to Putin: “Why did you corner Mikhail Khodorkovsky?” This is again an example from Kommersant. At times, one gets the impression that the country’s leading social/political newspaper (which is in no way programmed as oppositionist) and the federal television channels talk about different Russias. And the leading business magazine, Vedomosti, was actually likened by [State Duma] Speaker [Boris – ed.] Gryzlov to terrorist supporters, including by their contextualization of the Russian mass media, television most of all.

The rating of the acting president and prime minister is at about 75 percent. On federal television broadcasts, no critical, skeptical or ironic judgments are heard about them, hushing up a quarter of the spectrum of public opinion. The high government comes across as the dearly departed – only good things or nothing is spoken about it. On that point, the audience has clearly demanded other opinions. What a furor was caused by almost the only exception – when the dialogue between Yury Shevchuk and Vladimir Putin was shown on television.

The longstanding techniques are familiar to anyone who caught USSR Central Television, when reporting was substituted with protocol recordings of meetings in the Kremlin; the text has intonational support when there are canons of these displays: the person in charge meets with the minister or head of a region, goes to the people, holds a summit with foreign colleagues. This isn’t news, it’s old; a repetition of what’s customary to broadcast in such situations. The possible shows lack an informational basis altogether – in a thinned-out broadcasting vegetable patch, any vegetable is going to look like a big deal just by having regularly appeared on the screen.

Having worked only in Ostankino and for Ostankino for twenty four years, I speak about it with bitterness. I don’t have the right to blame any of my colleagues, I myself am no fighter and don’t expect any heroics from others. But things at least need to be called what they are.

Television journalism is doubly shamed given the obvious achievements of large-scale television shows and domestically-created serials. Our television thrills, captivates, entertains and makes you laugh with all the more sophistication, but you would unlikely call it a civic socio-political institution. I am convinced: it is one of the main reasons for the dramatic decline in television viewing among the most active part of the population, when people from our circle say: “Why turn the box on, they don’t make it for me.”

What’s more frightening is that a large part of the population already feels no need for journalism. When they’re perplexed: “So they beat someone – do you think there so few among us who are beaten, and what’s this fuss over some reporter?” Millions of people don’t understand that a journalist takes a professional risk for the sake of his audience. A journalist isn’t beaten because of something he wrote, said or filmed, but because this thing was read, heard, or seen. Thank you.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

Nine days after the brutal assault, doctors were able to take Kashin off of an artificial lung. Earlier, when he came out of an artificial coma late last week, the journalist had immediately requested pen and paper to ask when he would be able to breathe on his own.

Then, on Monday, Kashin said of his attackers: “The one that hit me in the jaw looked like a football fanatic.”

Wife Yevgeniya Milova told the media that her husband is able to speak with difficulty, but his right hand works and he is able to write normally.

According to RIA Novosti, doctors plan to keep Kashin in intensive care for the time being.

Investigators plan to question the journalist as soon as his condition permits.

For more on Oleg Kashin’s attack:

• Russian Journalist in Critical Condition after Attack
• Yulia Latynina: Who Ordered Kashin’s Attack?
• Nashi Tells Journalists to Stop Asking to be Murdered

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.

Attacks on journalists are far from rare in Russia, and so is impunity. While suspects often abound, 94% of murder cases have never been resolved. Writing for Yezhednevny Zhurnal, noted journalist Yulia Latynina lays out the most likely perpetrators of Kashin’s brutal attack.

Kashin – Who Ordered the Attack?
By Yulia Latynina
November 8, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

The attack on Kommersant journalist Oleg Kashin is notable for the fact that, like in an Agatha Christie novel, its circle of suspects is finite and small.

The first suspect is Khimki Mayor and Afghan war veteran Strelchenko. The same thing happens to all of Strelchenko’s opponents – their skulls get broken. Exactly two years ago, they broke the skull of Mikhail Beketov; on the anniversary of Beketov’s beating, they broke the skull of Khimki Right Cause leader Fetisov, and a day later – Oleg Kashin.

What do we have here in Khimki, Chechnya? Who is Mayor Strelchenko – Ramzan Kadyrov?

The second suspect is the manager of the Federal Agency for Youth Matters, a close associate of Surkov, the spiritual leader of the Putinjugend – Vasily Yakemenko.

In August 2010, Kashin uncovered and expanded upon an unappetizing story about Yakemenko.

A young girl attending Seliger, Anastasia Korchevskaya, decided to promote herself by bragging about her proximity to the top command, and posted a photo of herself with Yakemenko online with the caption: “Seliger 2008. Yakemenko still thinks I’m madly in love with him.” Yakemenko commented in response: “Korchevskaya, if you came to me two times at night in my tent, it doesn’t mean I think you’re in love with me.”

The page was then deleted, but Kashin managed to make a screenshot and generally did everything possible to expand upon the story. It turned out that Yakemenko not only uses his authority to sleep with schoolchildren, but he also brags on LiveJournal that he screws them in tents. Kashin is not a simple person; he has cooperated with the Kremlin on multiple occasions (it is only worth nothing how he insisted that Private Sychev’s legs fell off on their own accord), and his position could be seen not just as the position of an enemy, but worse – the position of a traitor.

To declare Kashin to be an enemy of the people as a result of this issue was awkward. In the pedofuhrer’s place, it was worth it to wait and latch onto some other one of Kashin’s writings. And, for sure, when Kashin did an interview for Kommersant with the head of the antifascists who were rampaging against the Khimki administration, the Young Guard website, which is under Yakemenko’s jurisdiction, came out with an article entitled “Journalist-traitors (my emphasis – Y.L.) must be punished!”

In the interview with Anonymous (an unprecedented step that Kommersant went ahead with the publication of an anonymous interview, but that’s just it – Anonymous’s name is well known), Khimki is called “absolute evil,” and Strelchenko – “a bandit from the 90s.” But the most important thing is that Anonymous marked the beginning of “a new level of social evolution in our country.” The very existence of these kinds of youth movements, capable of instantaneous organization, self-sacrifice, and going to prison, and the enthusiasm with which the anarchists were greeted by Khimki residents who happened along their path, was a threat to the status and the money that people who love to screwing schoolchildren in Seliger are accustomed to.

And this came through very clearly in the Young Guard article. The article ended like this: “We cannot be under the thumb of information extremists. They are enemies, and that means they will be punished.”

Punished – how? Here is just a shortened list of beatings whose authors have never been found. The epidemic of beatings of Polish diplomats, the beating of Marina Litvinovich (“You need to be more careful, Marina!” she was told by one of the men who was standing nearby when she woke up), the beating of Lev Ponomarev. The murder of antifascists; the investigation of their connections with the Kremlin needs to look at the organizations Russian Verdict and Russian Image, which were joined by Nikita Tikhomirov and Yevgeniya Khasis – the presumed murderers of Markelov and Baburova.

Finally, we mustn’t fail to mention the third candidate. Oleg Kashin is extremely well known as the creator of the expression “sh!tty Turchak,” referring to the governor of Pskovskaya Oblast, former coordinator of youth policy for United Russia, Seliger guest and son of Putin’s friend – Andrei Turchak.

The writing on Kashin’s blog, however, was not about Turchak, but about Kaliningrad Governor Boos: “Compare him with any governor, not even with Ramzan and not with Tuleyev, with any sh!tty Turchak – is this Boos uncompromising?” – wrote Kashin.

If you think about the tone used on the Internet, the remark can be seen almost as innocent: but the son of Putin’s friend suddenly personally demanded that Kashin “apologize within 24 hours,” and then even took the time to call a press conference, where he called Kashin’s retort “informational trash.” “Now I know what kind of person this is, he is not a journalist as I understand it.”

I mention Andrei Turchak, by the way, for the completeness of the list: since, although the epithet “sh!tty Turchak” is now stuck with the former coordinator of youth policy for United Russia, this whole story looks more like a routine dirty internet fight than anything else. As opposed to the stories of Strelchenko and Yakemenko.

And so, like in an Agatha Christie novel, the list of suspects has been defined, and there is no chance that the crime was committed by the yardkeeper on the side. Interrogations on this case need to be carried out on Khimki Mayor Strelchenko, youth movement leader Vasily Yakemenko, and Governor Andrei Turchak. In the best case scenario, there will be talk about a semi-independent initiative by some kind of fascist organizations who were upset about the interview with Anonymous. But it’s most likely that one of these two, and not three – either Strelchenko or Yakemenko – decided that he would get away with everything. And let’s note: all of this is connected to Khimki in one way or another.

And another thing. Yes, I understand that there is more than one suspect. But, in my view, it is stupid to walk around with signs saying “find the criminals” and “take measures,” refraining from naming the suspects. If you guys are going to ask them to “find the criminals,” then they’re going to respond “we’re looking.” Gelman deserves honor and praise for writing that he thinks Yakemenko is behind the attack.

Translation by theotherrussia.org

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.