(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 15, 2013) A relative majority of Russians thinks that the national economic situation is deteriorating, and a third claims an economic crisis has already started, the Public Opinion Foundation said. Some 40% of the respondents polled in October alleged economic deterioration; the indicator stood at 28% two years ago. Discontent was expressed primarily by the respondents […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 16, 2013) The Kremlin’s moves against the principles of the Russian Constitution and basic human rights are currently coming at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to keep up with its assault on what remains of democracy in that country. This week alone featured three initiatives that are particularly […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 16, 2013) The “against all” vote, a popular mechanism of protest until it was stricken from the Russian ballot in 2006, may soon reappear on the initiative of the very people who removed it the ruling United Russia party. Valentina Matviyenko, who is the Federation Council’s Speaker and a United Russia member, said […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Julia Reed in Moscow) Moscow police rounded up and arrested more than 1,000 migrant workers at a vegetable warehouse on October 14, the day after rioters staged the most violent nationalist unrest in the Russian capital in three years, with more than 3,000 going on the rampage, smashing up a market, overturning and burning […]
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(Howard Amos, RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 16, 2013) Public prayers to mark the beginning of the Islamic feast of Eid al-Adha were not as crowded as usual this year in Moscow. A violent nationalist rampage over the weekend has left the city’s migrant laborers, many of them from mainly Muslim former Soviet nations, feeling uneasy. Speaking outside the Cathedral […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – October 16, 2013) Police on Tuesday detained the suspect in a killing that provoked a wave of ethnically charged riots in Moscow’s Western Biryulyovo district on Sunday. The alleged murderer, Orkhan Zeinalov, 30, who came to Moscow more than 10 years ago from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, was detained 100 […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Lyudmila Nazdracheva, Special to RBTH – October 16, 2013) Russia has the highest divorce rate in the world, but the causes and consequence of broken marriages aren’t surprising. When Valery Lepekhin’s boss got on his nerves one too many times, he punched him in the eye. Lepekhin was fired, but he felt like […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 15, 2013) Russia’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday approved the third and final reading of a bill toughening the country’s anti-smoking legislation by introducing fines for smoking in public and encouraging minors to smoke. The bill is part of broader anti-smoking legislation that came into force in June. It sets fines of up to […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Darya Lyublinskaya, special to RBTH – October 16, 2013) According to data from surveys, almost two thirds of Russians are indifferent to the political situation in the country. In their explanation of these results experts claim in the first instance that the population are more focused on everyday problems and do not trust […]
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(Interfax – October 16, 2013) Prominent opposition activist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, whom the Kirov Regional Court gave a five-year suspended prison sentence on Wednesday for embezzlement of assets belonging to the state-run timber company Kirovles, may be subject to the amnesty that the State Duma is expected to announce soon, Russian Presidential Human Rights Council head Mikhail Fedotov […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 15, 2013) President Vladimir Putin has submitted to the State Duma a bill that would restore the right of investigators to open tax fraud cases without a request from the tax authorities a move that critics fear could lead to a renewed persecution of business executives, a news report said Tuesday. If approved, […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 15, 2013) Moscow has no plans to dissuade Kiev from signing a free-trade deal with the European Union, a Russian government spokesman said ahead of Tuesday’s meeting between Russian and Ukrainian premiers. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Mykola Azarov in Kaluga, a city some 150 kilometers (93 miles) […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov chaired a meeting last week where it was decided that Russia would set up a Federal Copyright Service, Izvestia newspaper reported Monday. “The new structure will offer government services to register and protect intellectual property, legal regulation, supervision and coordination of authorities in this area,” the paper […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Using reserve funds to support major investment projects and small and medium businesses can accelerate economic growth slightly for a few months, but an innovative model of growth needs to be implemented in the long-term, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said at a briefing for the upcoming Open Innovations international forum in Moscow. The […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 15, 2013) State Duma deputies are calling for changes to the proposal prison amnesty that could benefit prominent convicts like former oil tycoon Khodorkovsky. State Duma deputies want to make changes to the broad amnesty proposal drafted by the Kremlin’s human rights council for the 20th anniversary of the Constitution, and are working on […]
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(RIA Novosti – October 14, 2013) Russia’s immigration laws do not need to be tightened, the country’s top migration official said on 14 October, in the wake of protests and rioting sparked off by the killing in Moscow of an ethnic Russian, allegedly by an immigrant from the Caucasus. Despite the unrest, Konstantin Romodanovskiy, head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 15, 2013) Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has said he does not expect the Kirov Regional Court to acquit him as it hears an appeal contesting Navalny’s embezzlement conviction on October 16. “I will be given a real or a suspended prison sentence, but I will not be acquitted,” he told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. However, […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 15, 2013) Nationalism is now at the center of Russian political discourse, that country’s leading specialist on ethnic conflicts says, and as a result, the core of Moscow’s political debate has shifted from one between liberals and derzhavniki to a very different one between left nationalists and right-of-center ones. Emil Pain, […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Tom Balmforth – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Moscow’s migrant workers have seen this story before and they believe they have reason to be afraid. When an unidentified man — believed to be from the Caucasus — stabbed and killed a young ethnic Russian on October 10, triggering the capital’s worst ethnic riots in three years, police […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said the police officers ‘ actions during riots in the Moscow district Western Biryulyovo were right. “In this case, what has occurred should be classified as hooliganism. It truly was hooliganism, and the law enforcement agencies should punish the perpetrators,” Alekseyeva told Interfax on Monday. […]
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(RIA Novosti – Natalia Antonova, Acting Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow News – October 15, 2013) There is a kind of sad poetry to Moscow’s working class neighborhoods. The box-like Khrushchev-era buildings that seem like gigantic children’s toys rather than real housing, the hilariously poor grammar on thousands of tacked up advertisements, the cracked pavement, the whispering trees, and the stars […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Some 57 percent of Russians feel that life is hard but bearable, according to a new survey, five percentage points higher than in 2011. According to new poll results released by the independent Levada Center on Monday, 25 percent of respondents said that the phrase “things aren’t that bad, it’s livable” best […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – October 15, 2013) Surrounded by railroads, industrial estates and giant cooling towers from a local thermal plant, the Western Biryulyovo district where riots broke out Sunday oozes its own sense of disunion from the rest of Moscow and residents say it has become a hostage to its own growing marginalization. “If […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Oleg Sukhov – October 15, 2013) In response to a violent race riot in southern Moscow over the weekend, federal and city authorities announced new measures to fight illegal immigration and detained about 1,200 migrants at a vegetable storage facility that had been attacked by rioters Sunday. With these actions, the government took a first […]
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[check back for updates, including more links; links also posted to facebook and twitter] Johnson’s Russia List :: 2013-#184 ::15 October 2013 E-Mail: davidjohnson@starpower.net A project of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs: www.ieres.org JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Natalia Antonova, Acting Editor-in-Chief – October 11, 2013) The issue of income inequality in Russia is nothing new. We are used to noting it – then filing it away somewhere as we get on with the rest of our lives. Rich people exist everywhere after all and it’s not as if the United States, to […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 13, 2013) Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered a cull of federal officials in the regions ahead of an upcoming three-year state budget crunch. Medvedev did not give any estimates for the number of officials facing the sack in 2014-2015 in his order, published on the government’s website on Sunday. The cull, to […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 11, 2013) Russia’s Internet economy will continue to grow at a rate of 3-6% annually even if there is a global crisis, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), Sergei Plugotarenko told reporters. “In preparing the study Runet Economy 2012-2013, we prepared four scenarios for the Internet economy’s development: innovation, stabilization, negative and […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 12, 2013) The Russian government will not revise its policy of investing almost half of the country’s foreign exchange reserves in US Treasury securities despite growing fears of a looming US debt default, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said. “I don’t see the need for changing our reserve investment strategy at present,” Siluanov told […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Helena Bedwell – October 14, 2013) Georgia regained access to Russian markets for its fruit, vegetable and nut exports, seven years after its northern neighbor banned the produce, according to the Black Sea country’s National Food Agency in Tbilisi. Russian inspectors have carried out sanitation checks in Georgia, Giga Kurdovanidze, a spokesman for the agency, said […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Olga Tanas & Scott Rose – October 14, 2013) Russia’s central bank left its main lending rate unchanged for a 13th month and removed a signal that it will keep monetary policy on pause as inflation dropped into its target range for the first time since August 2012. Bank Rossii left the one-week auction rate, its […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Jeremy Hodges – October 14, 2013) Hermitage Capital Management founder William Browder won the dismissal of a U.K. libel case filed by a former Russian policeman accused of playing a part in the 2009 death of legal and tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky. Judge Peregrine Simon ruled that the U.K. wasn’t the right jurisdiction for the ex-policeman, […]
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(Interfax – October 11, 2013) Some one million Russian Muslims are radicals, Roman Silantyev, deputy head of the expert council for the state theological review under the Justice Ministry, has said, as reported by privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax on 11 October. “On the whole, the number of Islamists in Russia may be approximately estimated at one million people, i.e. […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Almost one-quarter of government spending in Russia is to become classified within the next three years, according to findings by a Moscow research institute that will raise concerns of decreasing economic transparency in a country already plagued by corruption. Vedomosti business daily said in a report Monday, citing a study by the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 12, 2013) Employees at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow may soon join an estimated 800,000 U.S. government workers furloughed in the midst of a partial government shutdown following U.S. Congress’ failure to approve a spending bill for the new fiscal year. Should the embassy run out of funding, only key diplomats and the consular […]
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[check back for updates, including more links; links also posted to facebook and twitter] Johnson’s Russia List :: 2013-#183 ::14 October 2013 E-Mail: davidjohnson@starpower.net A project of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs: www.ieres.org JRL homepage: russialist.org JRL on Facebook: facebook.com/russialist JRL on Twitter: twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi Support JRL: […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, October 14, 2013) The ethnic violence in Moscow’s Biryulevo district over the weekend is only the latest pogrom to have occurred in the Russian capital since Vladimir Putin became president, something that all those who are following this rapidly developing story need to keep in mind to comprehend what this latest clash. […]
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[Video here http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131014/184131781/380-Held-Overnight-After-Anti-Migrant-Riot-in-Moscow-Suburb.html] (RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 14, 2013) Russian police said Monday that 1,200 people had been detained at a vegetable warehouse in a Moscow suburb that was one of the main targets of anti-migrant rioters during a night of violent clashes in the area. Helicopters and over a thousand police officers were dispatched to Biryulyovo in […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Lena Smirnova – October 11, 2013) It takes Ilya Bachurin mere seconds to choose his favorite movie. But when asked to choose his favorite Russian movie, to say that it takes him a long time would be an understatement. The general director of Russia’s youngest and most technologically savvy film studio, Glavkino, approaches the matter […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 11, 2013) The amnesty campaign meant to mark the 20th anniversary of Russia’s constitution should apply to the suspects in the Bolotnaya Square clashes case, the Greenpeace activists detained onboard the vessel Arctic Sunrise and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the For Human Rights organization said in an address published on its website on Thursday. “A […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – imrussia.org – Donald N. Jensen – October 10, 2013) In September, Vladimir Putin appointed Colonel General Viktor Zolotov, who used to head the Russian president’s security service, as deputy commander of the Interior Ministry troops, a large paramilitary force of about 170,000 soldiers. This appointment may be a step toward the creation of a new […]
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(RFE/RL – Brian Whitmore – October 10, 2013) The fact that a Moscow court found Mikhail Kosenko guilty of assaulting a police officer despite video evidence to the contrary didn’t exactly come as a surprise. In recent years, Russian courts have convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky of stealing oil from himself and Aleksei Navalny of embezzling money without making a profit, just […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – imrussia.org – Maria Snegovaya – October 10, 2013) The question of “Who is Mr. Putin” continues to interest Western Russia watchers. Political analyst Maria Snegovaya contrasts two recent books about the Russian leader, “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, and “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – October 11, 2013) The Constitutional Court ruled Thursday to allow people previously convicted of “serious and very serious crimes” to run for public office, in a move that may pave the way for opposition leader Alexei Navalny and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to get into politics. The ruling concerns a law […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Marina Obrazkova, RBTH – October 11, 2013 Experts advise the ruling party of Putin and Medvedev to resolve practical problems. Last week’s United Russia congress demonstrated that the ruling party remains the nation’s leading political force and has no viable rivals. Nevertheless, experts believe United Russia will need to change fast or risk […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Andrei Kolesnikov – October 10, 2013) Moscow based journalist, editor of the op-ed section of Novaya Gazyeta, columnist of the Vedomosti daily and www.gazeta.ru web magazine. Author of three books, including biography of controversial politician Anatoly Chubais Like a crippled Dreamliner, the Russian economy is slowing to a standstill; the bureaucrats are ignoring instructions; even the scientists are […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Ilya Arkhipov & Henry Meyer – October 11, 2013) President Vladimir Putin’s human rights adviser urged prosecutors to drop piracy charges against Greenpeace activists for an Arctic protest, saying it’s as stupid as accusing them of raping the oil platform they scaled. “These charges are laughable because there isn’t the slightest justification for accusing the crew […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – October 11, 2013) At first, Sochi’s Fisht Olympic Stadium was meant to resemble a giant snowflake, a symbol of cold weather to balance out the city’s palm trees and beaches for the Winter Games. Then, the design morphed into two parallel mounds of snow, opened down the middle to present views of […]
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(RIA Novosti – Fyodor Lukyanov, October 3, 2013) Fyodor Lukyanov is Editor-in-Chief of the Russia in Global Affairs journal, authoritative source of expertise on Russian foreign policy and global developments. The world is growing accustomed to the new America a country that will always surprise you. The United States’ political system used to be proud of its ability to […]
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(Interfax – October 10, 2013) Russians’ attitude to the USA is gradually getting worse, privately-owned news agency Interfax reported on 10 October, quoting a recent poll conducted by the independent pollster Levada Centre. The full results of the survey was published on the pollster’s website on the same day (http://www.levada.ru/10-10-2013/rossiyane-o-ssha). The poll was conducted on 20-24 September 2013 among 1,601 […]
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