Nearly half of Russians welcome amnesty – poll

(Interfax – December 27, 2013) Almost half of Russians (46 per cent) welcome a recent amnesty and about a third (31 per cent) think it is unnecessary, Russian Interfax news agency reported on 27 December, quoting an opinion poll carried out in December.

On 18 December the Russian State Duma announced an amnesty in connection with the 20th anniversary of the constitution, which will affect about 25,000 people.

According to the opinion poll carried out by Levada Center on 20-24 December, Greenpeace activists and the Arctic Sunrise ship’s crew and former head of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovskiy deserve to be amnestied most (48 per cent and 43 per cent respectively). Twenty-four per cent are against amnesty for the ecologists and 26 p are against amnesty for Khodorkovskiy.

At the same time a majority of Russians (68 per cent) don’t want amnesty for former Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov and former Defense Ministry employee Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, who are involved in a Defense Ministry corruption case; and 14 per cent think otherwise.

The Russians are divided on amnesty for the Pussy Riot punk band: 41 per cent welcome it and 40 per cent don’t.

Most of the respondents (39 per cent) could not say whether the legal prosecution of Left Front coordinator Sergey Udaltsov and opposition politician Aleksey Navalnyy should stop (33 per cent were for amnesty and 28 per cent against it).

Thirty-nine per cent of the respondents would welcome amnesty for the people investigated for their involvement in the protest on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on 6 May 2012, just as many (37 per cent) could not say, and 25 per cent of the respondents were against the amnesty.