Representatives of the Murmansk branch of the opposition movement Solidarity said that local police detained two activists when they attempted to transfer the report from a train to their vehicle. The two were sent to a local police station and told that the thousand copies were confiscated because Murmansk police suspected the report of constituting “extremist literature.” The report will now undergo expert analysis for the presence of extremist content, said the police.

As of Wednesday evening, the two activists had been released.

The incident marks the second time Russian police have confiscated copies of “Putin. Results. 10 Years” under allegations of extremism. Police in St. Petersburg confiscated 200 thousand copies of the report under this pretense this past June, but released them two weeks later after an analysis came up empty.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of Russia’s former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. Police in various Russian cities have confiscated copies of the report on at least four separate occasions. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.

Nemtsov analyses the survey results on his blog:

The Levada Center has published the results of a survey on whether or not Russian citizens know about our report: “Putin. Results. 10 Years.” A presentation of the report was held on June 14 and the report was published on the Internet, and 300 thousand copies were confiscated in St. Petersburg and in a print shop in Smolensk in result. After an analysis for extremism, which they didn’t find, they returned the report to us. And we began to hand it out.

At the current time, 50 thousand copies have been handed out in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladimir, and Yaroslav. More than 300 thousand Russian citizens have read the report on its website.

We can only be thrilled by the survey’s results. 10% of Russian citizens have heard about our report – that’s about 10 million out of the adult population. And 2% have read the report – that’s about 2 million.

Have you heard about the expert report by Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov “Putin. Results. 10 Years”?

Familiar with the content of the report: 2%
Heard something about it: 10%
Hearing about it for the first time now: 82%
Hard to say: 6%

As a matter of fact, it was already obvious at the beginning of distribution that millions of our compatriots had heard about the report or read it. And more than half of those familiar with the report support its basic theses.

Do you agree with the basic proposals of the report?

(taken from those who are familiar with the content of the report of heard about it)

Definitely yes: 10%
Most likely yes: 45%
Most likely no: 16%
Definitely no: 3%
Hard to say: 26%

The obvious informational success is connected with the clumsy and stupid actions by the authorities, which at first organized spam attacks against our website and then confiscated and analyzed [the report] for extremism. An information war by Putin and Lukashenko when fragments of the report were published in the Belarusian official newspaper Respublika also promoted the popularization of the report.

However, the most active work of all to distribute the report begins in the fall, when trips all across the country are planned with the goal of presenting the report in the regions. Our main task is to tell people about what’s happening in our country and what’s being hidden from them by television and the newspapers.

A truckload of 100,000 copies of the report, “Putin. Results. 10 Years,” were confiscated by St. Petersburg police on June 15, after the driver of the truck was reportedly found to lack the proper documents to bring a heavy cargo truck into the center of the city. Now, as of July 1, the activists working to distribute the self-published report have authorization to take the copies back, as no evidence of “extremism” had been found within their contents.

Meanwhile, a number of activists detained on June 18 for distributing the document on Vasilievsky Island, where the International Economic Forum was being held at the time, have been called in by police “for questioning,” said Kurnosova.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of the former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. However, aside from the 100,000 confiscated by St. Petersburg police and released yesterday, another 100,000 were taken by Federal Security Service agents on June 17. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.

“I can’t remember this kind of interest, if not excitement, in our report,” Nemtsov wrote on his blog late Friday. The former deputy prime minister and co-leader of the Solidarity opposition movement apparently plans to travel throughout Russia to distribute the controversial pamphlets, which condemn Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for the problems that have grown or first arose during his time in power. “We’re going to hand out ‘Putin. Results. 10 Years’ all over the country, regardless of the difficulties,” he said.

The scene below of people scrambling for copies of the report took place outside of St. Petersburg’s landmark Gostiny Dvor.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.