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.

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.”

Last week, the Moscow City Duma approved a controversial fifteen-year construction plan that will reshape much of the city’s current infrastructure. The plan has provoked fear and outrage from Moscow’s residents, architectural preservationists, and opposition groups who fear that the “Genplan” will destroy many of Moscow’s historic areas, while simultaneously failing to address basic traffic and infrastructure problems.

A diverse array of activists staged a number of protests in Moscow in the weeks leading up to the approval of the Genplan. More than 20 protesters were arrested in a flash mob outside of the City Duma on the morning of the official vote. Also, Interfax reported today that even though the measure passed easily through the politically homogeneous Duma, 30 public organizations have formed a coalition to fight against the Genplan, including opposition groups, architectural watchdogs, religious organizations, art advocacy groups, and others.

The online newspaper Gazeta.ru has published an editorial arguing that not only does the Moscow Genplan spell out a death sentence for the country’s historic capital, but it also exemplifies the endemic corruption throughout the Russian government that allows civil servants to push through projects for their own personal gain, leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.

Genplan For It’s Own Sake
May 5, 2010
Gazeta.ru

The General Plan for the Development of Moscow is not meant to solve any of the actual problems of the megalopolis; it’s written by civil servants in the interests of civil servants, and will do nothing to hinder the city government’s commercial construction plans. It is a true encyclopedia of the rules and methods that govern Russia.

The Moscow City Duma approved the General Plan for the Development of Moscow [Genplan] in its third reading. It is the primary document for urban development of the city for the next fifteen years.

The need for this plan did not come as a whim from the Moscow mayor’s office; it was required by the Urban Development Codex. But in a sense, the Genplan fails to address any actual issues. Last summer (in August, at the height of vacation season), the city authorities held public hearings on the Genplan; however, the plan did not cease to evoke sharp disagreement within society. During hearings in the Public Chamber as recently as in April of this year, several members called the document “a death sentence” for the city. Nevertheless, the Genplan was approved, and as Moscow City Duma Speaker Vladimir Platonov noted, it defends the people and helps “to get rid of scandalous situations.” “Suspending the law would have been harmful to Muscovites, since the law defends their interests,” Platonov added.

The problem is that the only Muscovites in Moscow whose interests are defended are the Moscow civil servants.

The Moscow Genplan does not resolve the issues of how the city is going to deal with traffic jams or how it’s going to preserve its historic center. On the other hand, it does nothing to limit opportunities for the Moscow authorities (the city mayor will have to be replaced at some point during the fifteen years of the formal operations in this document, for purely physiological reasons) to hand out construction contracts on opaque grounds and continue to build the city up in a way that is profitable for the authorities themselves or for their developers. It does not put any barriers in the way of having another office skyscraper appear instead of another children’s playground.

Therefore, the quality of the Genplan is generally secondary to the fact that this document fails to provide a clear legal framework for the commercial interests of the city’s civil servants, who have become the primary driving force for construction in Moscow.

Overall, not a single large city in the world, especially with an ancient history, has been developed under an officially approved general plan, and ideas by city leadership for urban development at various points in time have evoked protest from city residents (one can read Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable book London: The Biography to become convinced of as much). But civilized development in large cities stems from the fact that the city’s executive government is accountable to the population, and, in practically all foreign megalopolises of the caliber of Moscow, is directly elected. And the experts on the mayor’s public councils on urban development have to opportunity to argue with the authorities, and sometimes even prove that they’re right. As an individual region (and not a municipality), Moscow does not have direct elections for mayor. So the population can’t argue with the mayor’s office, and the mayor’s office doesn’t want to ask the population how to better develop the city in the interest of its maximum number of residents.

It’s unlikely that even passionate supporters of [Moscow Mayor] Yury Luzhkov, of his family, and of his team of bureaucrats would deny that the Genplan for Moscow’s urban development can be summed up altogether in one phrase: “What I want is what I’ll get.” Moscow’s new Genplan doesn’t create the slightest obstacle for civil servants to continue this kind of urban development policy. So, it doesn’t change the situation at its core, and thus remains something that exists only for its own sake.

The Moscow government could easily do everything that the Genplan prescribes without the document itself: the few chances for lawsuits are vanishing, and in situations like what happened with the Rechnik settlement, the federal government intervened only after two dozen houses had already been demolished, and no earlier. Furthermore, given the importance of Moscow for the country’s political stability and for performing state functions, it’s unlikely that the Kremlin, under any president and any mayor, could manage a hands-on approach to urban development disputes.

That said, we need to be aware of the fact that the blatant disregard for residents’ opinions during the process to approve Moscow’s Genplan, and the lack of barriers for contracts to be distributed amongst their own, does not differ, in essence, from the government’s decision to give oil and gas fields to individual companies without competition, or from the actions by the St. Petersburg authorities to construct a tower for Gazprom – the notorious Okhta Center. In that case, as is well known, both the Urban Development Codex and building height regulations were directly violated – but the Petersburg authorities went on with it without batting an eyelid: here we have a political order, and we have the interests of the city’s primary taxpayer – the Gazprom corporation. And in today’s Russia, at any level of the government, the interests of civil servants and the companies close to them are higher than the law, common sense, or the interests of ordinary citizens.

Rally organizer and coalition co-founder Konstantin Doroshok said that a founding assembly was held on Wednesday, but leaders have yet to settle on a name for the new union.

The January 30 protest in Kaliningrad, in which between 7 and 12 thousand people participated, was notable both for its massive size and for the diversity of political forces represented. The new coalition features similar diversity, including the Kaliningrad branches of the parties Solidarity, Justice, A Just Russia, Patriots of Russia, Yabloko, and the Communist Party.

According to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, coalition leaders invited the local branch of the Right Cause party to join the union, but leader Mikhail Tsikel declined the proposal. The ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party is also not included in the coalition.

Doroshok said that the union’s main goal is “to break the political monopoly of United Russia,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, which has dominated the country’s elections at every level since its inception in 2001.

Ekho Moskvy reported that Kaliningrad residents have been threatened with losing their jobs or having their wages slashed if they take part in the coalition’s upcoming rally on March 20. Likewise, students have been promised that they will be expelled.

Meanwhile, the Kaliningrad Public Chamber was set to meet on Thursday with the Public Chamber of Russia to discuss the situation in the region, which has been a media spotlight since January’s massive rally. A relatively new institution, the Public Chamber is an oversight body intended to monitor government activities.

Protesters in the January 30 rally gathered in Kaliningrad to collectively demand that high vehicle tariffs be annulled and that Kaliningrad Governor Georgy Boos and Prime Minister Putin both resign. Boos immediately cancelled his vacation plans and promised to meet with opposition leaders, although he cancelled multiple times before finally meeting with Doroshok on February 26.

Another rally of more than a thousand Kaliningrad residents was held in the city of Yernyakhovsk on February 28, and a demonstration of comparable size to the one on January 30 is scheduled for March 20.

Pavel Astakhov, a celebrity attorney that leads the “For Putin!” movement, voiced support for the law. He added that the suggested measures seemed more lenient than laws in the West: “Here, only acts that lead to material loss, which must be proven, are punished, while in other countries, the accountability sets in for any attempt to inflict such an act.”

The Chair of the Information Policy Commission of the Federation Council, Lyudmila Narusova, also voiced support for stricter control of the internet.

“The lack of legal regulation of the Internet leads to terrorist propaganda and to the publication of recommended methods on how to assemble a ‘shahid’s belt’ [a belt of explosives that is worn by Muslim suicide bombers],” she said. “The Government is obligated to keep citizens out of harm’s way, and any talk of censorship is groundless.” Narusova believes that the draft law could help prevent a wide range of crimes, including child pornography and pedophilia.

Senator Vladimir Slutsker, a Federation Council delegate from Chuvashiya who introduced his own version of an internet regulation bill in February, said that a new law was needed since the relevance of the regular law on mass-media was questionable. “It is not clearly written into the law itself, and [cases] are now given up to the buy-out of the courts.”

Nearly all the speakers agreed that controls on the internet must be reinforced. One of the few dissenting voices came from Mikhail Fedotov, a Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, who co-authored Russia’s the original draft law on mass-media. Fedotov is certain that there is no need to institute any new restrictions regarding extremism and other specific crimes on the internet. “What if the salesman killed the customer,” he asked, “would we try him using the law ‘On the protection of the rights of the customer?’”

Fedotov asserted that a single amendment to the law on mass-media, which would allow for prosecuting slander on the web, would suffice.