Politics, Government, Protests, Elections
(RFE/RL – rferl.org – April 1, 2013) In her 2006 book “How Russia Really Works” and its sequel “Can Russia Modernize?” political scientist Alena Ledeneva of University College London looks at the informal governing system that characterizes Vladimir Putin’s Russia. RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson spoke with Ledeneva about how this method of governance works and what it means for Russia’s […]
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(RIA Novosti, MOSCOW, April 2, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin has attended the inauguration of a building that will host the Club of the Cheerful and Sharp-Witted, or the KVN, humor show in Moscow. The ceremony took place on Monday night at the former Havana cinema building, which has been remodeled with Putin’s backing to accommodate Russia’s most popular […]
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YAKUTSK, April 2 (RIA Novosti) Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned his ruling United Russia party on Tuesday not to repeat the mistakes made by the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. “We do not aspire to be the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, particularly as it did not turn out very well,” Medvedev said at a meeting in Russia’s Sakha […]
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MOSCOW. April 2 (Interfax) – The funeral of businessman Boris Berezovsky, who died in London recently, will take place in the British capital, TV Rain (Dozhd) reported citing a source close to Berezovsky’s family. “The decision to hold the funeral of the embattled oligarch in the UK has already been made by his children, firstly his older daughters – Yelizaveta […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – April 2, 2013 -Yevgeny Gontmakher, special to RBTH) Analyst Yevgeny Gontmakher commemorates Berezovsky, who was not a hero but a face and a symbol of 90s. Yevgeny Gontmakher is deputy director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Boris Berezovsky, who died last month, was a shrewd self-promoter, but he was […]
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(Kremlin.ru – March 29, 2013) Rostov-on-Don Vladimir Putin took part in the first conference of the All-Russia People’s Front held under the theme Building Social Justice. The conference participants included heads of federal ministries and agencies, Mr Putin’s election campaign supporters, heads of the Front’s regional offices, and members of the expert community and public organisations. * * * PRESIDENT […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 1, 2013 – Natalya Krainova) ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region This town of 100,000 people, 25 kilometers southeast of the capital, elected its mayor on Sunday in an election marred by numerous reports of falsifications and vote-buying in favor of the government-sponsored candidate. The election was seen as a litmus test of people’s trust in […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Jonathan Earle – April 1, 2013) President Vladimir Putin described the Soviet Union as a land of opportunity and called for two Soviet relics, mandatory school uniforms and the “Hero of Labor” award, to be dusted off in the name of social justice, during an informal meeting with supporters in Rostov-on-Don on Friday. The Soviet […]
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MOSCOW. March 31 (Interfax) – President Vladimir Putin and the other Kremlin officials declared their incomes before April 1, as required, and their income declarations will be published in mid-April, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has announced. “All income declarations for 2012 have been submitted and they will be processed and published within two weeks,” Peskov said. The Kremlin releases income […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – April 1, 2013) A group of President Vladimir Putin’s advisors are considering reintroducing the position of vice president a move that might create conditions for a smooth transition of power to Putin’s presumed successor. “There are a lot of downsides to it, since we don’t want to return to the situation with Rutskoi,” said […]
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Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 From: “Russian Analytical Digest (RAD)” <newslist@isn.ch> Subject: No.124: Domestic Politics RUSSIAN ANALYTICAL DIGEST Newsletter 18 March 2013/No. 124 Domestic Politics To download this issue please click here: http://www.css.ethz.ch/publications/DetailansichtPubDB_EN?rec_id=2462 Analyses Divisions within the Russian Political Elites, by David Lane, Cambridge Forward to the Past! The President’s Message to the Federal Assembly, by Hans-Henning Schröder, Berlin The […]
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ROSTOV-ON-DON, March 29 (RIA Novosti) President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia needs a unified, standard approach to teaching history. “I fully agree that there should be a canonical version of our history,” Putin said Friday while meeting with his campaigners from the All-Russia People’s Front. He acknowledged that there are different opinions concerning history textbooks in high schools, […]
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MOSCOW, March 28 (RIA Novosti) You may be able to “friend” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Facebook, but that’s no excuse to get familiar. That was the message coming out of Medvedev’s office on Thursday in response to some web-users’ impudently using a diminutive version of the premier’s name. “I don’t get people who write on Facebook, for […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Brian Whitmore – March 29, 2013) The oligarch is dead. Long live the oligarchy. Boris Berezovsky’s death in London last week has been called the end of an era, and in some ways it sort of was. The man who once controlled swaths of the Russian economy and was called everything from the Godfather of the […]
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(Window on Eurasia, Paul Goble, Staunton, March 28, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-russian-nationalists.html) Russian nationalist parties are likely to form in the near future and to gain enough support to put their representatives into the next Russian Duma, according to a Moscow specialist who has examined polling data, monitored the Russian media and talked to other members of the expert community in […]
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(Interfax – March 29, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Rostov-on-Don to participate in the first conference of the All-Russia People’s Front dedicated to building social justice. The event is the first in a series of the All-Russia People’s Front conferences dedicated to discussing fundamental issues of Russia’s development, which have been discussed in this or that way […]
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MOSCOW, March 29 (RIA Novosti) Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday his time in the KGB had taught him that it was “bad” to listen into other people’s conversations. “It’s bad to eavesdrop,” a smiling Putin told a meeting of his newly revived All-Russian People’s Front. “I learned this from my time in the KGB. [And] I gave […]
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MOSCOW. March 27 (Interfax) – The existing system of support for nongovernmental organizations in Russia lacks transparency in many respects which obstructs the strengthening of the role of civil society in Russian life. The conclusion can be drawn from the report “Third sector in Russia: the current state and possible development models” compiled by the Fund for Civil Society. “The […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Artemy Troitsky, Peter Pomerantsev, and Oliver Carroll – March 27, 2013) Oliver Carroll is editor of oD Russia. Oliver was a founder editor of Russian Esquire and has worked for a number of other print and online publications in Russia and the UK. Peter Pomerantsev is a British TV producer. For many years, he sold British programmes to […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Natalya Krainova – March 28, 2013) Prosecutors on Wednesday continued performing unannounced inspections of nongovernmental organizations, checking the Moscow offices of three prominent groups and summoning two human rights leaders for questioning. Officials have inspected about 2,000 NGOs nationwide in the past month, Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights group, said by telephone. […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 28, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-kremlin-opposition.html) Neither the Kremlin nor the opposition understands that widespread alienation among the Russian people is not equivalent to inertness but rather contains within itself “a latent civic activism” which under certain conditions could coalesce and threaten the existing regime, according to a leading Moscow sociologist. In the […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Tom Balmforth – March 27, 2013) MOSCOW — Mikhail Subbotin thought he was answering a call to public service. Two years ago, then-President Dmitry Medvedev’s Human Rights Commission recruited the legal expert to draft a report reviewing the most recent conviction of former oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Subbotin agreed to work without pay. But when the […]
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MOSCOW. March 28 (Interfax) – Former YUKOS head Mikhail Khodorkovsky said that he was “very bitter” amid the death of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky in London. “I was told that Berezovsky had died. We were never friends but have known each other for over 20 years. It is a long time. It is hard to hear that Borya is gone […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – www.imrussia.org – Tatiana Stanovaya – March 26, 2013) The evolution of Putin’s regime toward tougher authoritarianism, which began with the “national leader’s” return to the Kremlin, will soon affect its policies toward youth. Under Vladislav Surkov, the erstwhile “éminence grise,” pro-Kremlin movements were supposed to serve as the main “anti-Orange” force on the streets. The […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Alexander Winning – March 28, 2013) President Vladimir Putin is set to attend a forum organized by the All-Russia People’s Front on Friday in a show of support for the movement he created almost two years ago to garner votes for the increasingly unpopular United Russia party. Putin will take part in the second day […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – March 28, 2013) Fewer Russians approve of the work of the State Duma and many believe that lawmakers are dependent on the Kremlin, a survey released Thursday showed. Thirty-seven percent of respondents surveyed by the Levada Center said that lawmakers are completely dependent on the Kremlin and do whatever the executive branch requests, while 30 […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Claire Bigg – March 26, 2013) Amnesty International has joined a growing list of organizations raided by Russian officials in recent weeks amid what activists describe as a ruthless Kremlin crackdown on dissent. Prosecutors and tax police on March 25 searched the venerable rights watchdog’s Moscow headquarters, along with three other prominent advocacy groups — the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Jonathan Earle – March 27, 2013) Unprecedented numbers of independent poll workers will help ensure clean elections in Moscow and St. Petersburg through 2018, a group of leading vote monitors said Tuesday, but the ruling United Russia party and local governments will continue to control polling stations elsewhere, a lingering risk of electoral fraud. In […]
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(Russia Beyond the Headlines – rbth.ru – Stanislav Kuvaldin, special to RBTH – March 27, 2013) Law enforcement organs are conducting mass checks of Russian NGOs. According to information from human rights activists, more than 40 organizations in 16 regions of Russia have already been inspected. The Justice Ministry and the Public Prosecutor’s Office have announced their intention to check […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Brian Whitmore – March 26, 2013) You can learn a lot about a regime from the fights it picks. And lately, the Kremlin and its proxies have been picking a lot of fights — both with civil society and with each other. Take, for example, the peculiar public feud that erupted last week between Pavel Gusev, editor […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW. March 26, 2013) The Supreme Court has found Russia’s switch to year-round summer time, in compliance with the government resolution of August 31, 2011, lawful and it rejected public organizations’ demand for scrapping the year-round summer time pattern, an Interfax correspondent reported. An inquiry was filed with the Supreme Court by the leaders of the League for […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 27, 2103 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-last-year-23000.html) More than 23,000 citizens of the Russian Federation, a large percentage of them non-Russians from the North Caucasus, sought political asylum in Europe in 2012, a number that ranks Russia just behind Afghanistan and Syria and ahead of Iraq, Somalia and China, according to Eurostat, the European […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – John Freedman – March 25, 2013) “A lot of people these days are finding parallels between the present and the 1930s, but the real connection I see is between the present and 1968.” Playwright Mikhail Durnenkov made that comment to me as we chatted Friday prior to the beginning of an evening called “1968. Prague […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 25, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-russian-nationalism.html) In a review of the literature on the attitudes of young people toward members of other ethnic groups, Aleksandr Skorik, a professor at the South Russian State Technical University, says that research suggests that “Russian nationalism is far more terrible than non-Russian extremism” as a source of […]
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MOSCOW. March 25 (Interfax) – Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov believes the stunt carried out by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is an indication of a moral decline in society. “There has been a considerable moral decline. The dancing of the girls, who consider themselves art revolutionaries, on the ambon of a church […]
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MOSCOW. March 25 (Interfax) – Russians who would like Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the jailed members of the Pussy Riot punk rock band, to be released on parole make up roughly the same proportion as those who want her to serve out her two-year term, an opinion poll suggests. On March 20, the chairman of the Public Supervisory Commission of […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Jonathan Earle – March 26, 2013) “Is Boris Berezovsky the godfather of Russia’s godfathers? It sure looks that way,” Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov wrote in an article published in late 1996, the year a small group of Russian oligarchs, including Berezovsky, engineered President Boris Yeltsin’s re-election. Berezovsky, then a billionaire businessman, objected to the portrayal, […]
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MOSCOW, March 26 (RIA Novosti) – Resolving the fate of the Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky’s estate will depend on whether the United Kingdom or Russia is ruled to have been his official place of residence, an expert told the Rapsi news agency on Monday. Since 2000, the Russian businessman had resided in the United Kingdom, where he died on Saturday […]
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(Interfax – Moscow, March 25, 2013) The Justice Ministry has explained that mass checks at NGOs are being carried out to uncover the organizations that fall under the definition of “foreign agents”. “If breaches of the laws of the Russian Federation are uncovered, including the provisions of the Federal Law “On the introduction of changes to legislative acts as regards […]
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(Institute of Modern Russia – www.imrussia.org – Alexander Podrabinek – March 21, 2013) Despite their mutual aversion, the Russian government and the Russian opposition have one common traita tendency to oversimplify the image of their enemy for propagandistic purposes. Author and analyst Alexander Podrabinek argues that the opposition is making a grave mistake when it focuses all its efforts just […]
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(Window on Eurasia – Paul Goble – Staunton, March 26, 2013 – http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-corruption-is.html) For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, corruption is the communism of today, Stanislav Belkovsky argues, and the struggle against it is like the struggle against the CPSU a quarter of a century ago, a battle that will lead to “Perestroika Version Two” and a series of events resembling those […]
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MOSCOW. March 25 (Interfax) – Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, believes the liberal media have assumed the role of the right-wing opposition. “The right-wing opposition is now extremely weak. The liberal media have assumed its role. Their attacks on the State Duma and the Kremlin are not just episodes, but a tough fight for […]
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MOSCOW. March 25 (Interfax) – Russia is moving away from its totalitarian past but it is unclear what kind of political system it is heading for, the justice minister has argued. “It needs to be realized that we are getting through an inevitable period of transition from a totalitarian society to another form of society. At the moment, it’s hard […]
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MOSCOW. March 26 (Interfax) – Recent polls indicate that in the opinion of Russian citizens, lawmakers are the wealthiest of civil servants, and they proposed setting an income limit for those seeking civil service. Fifty-five percent of respondents said deputies of the State Duma and the Federation Council are the richest among civil servants, and 52% said government executives are, […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – March 25, 2013) The survey conducted by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) together with Fleishman-Hillard Vanguard shows that 44% of respondents noticed the improvement of the business environment (34% considers the improvement minor) versus 55% in 2011, RBC daily reported. The improvement in the quality of tax administration is accompanied by […]
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(RFE/RL – www.rferl.org – Robert Coalson – March 24, 2013) Boris Berezovsky who was found dead of as yet undetermined causes in his London home on March 23 was a key figure among those who brought Vladimir Putin to power in 1999. And although Berezovsky was driven into exile by the end of 2000, over the years he […]
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[Russian Prosecutor General’s Office to continue its legal actions to bring Berezovsky’s criminally acquired assets back to Russia – ITAR-TASS – March 25, 2013 – http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c32/686220.html] ITAR-TASS reports on Russian efforts to seize assets of exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, recently found dead under undetermined circumstances in Britain, where he had been granted political asylum. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office […]
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[Exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky died in Britain – ITAR-TASS – March 25, 2013 – http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c142/686021.html] ITAR-TASS covers the death of exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky in Britain: Boris Berezovsky, an exiled oligarch and one of the main figures on the Russian political scene of Boris Yeltsin’s epoch, was found dead at his mansion in the town Ascot in the English […]
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(Interfax – March 25, 2013) Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who has died in London, wanted to be buried near a Moscow region church where he was baptized, Former Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Ivan Rybkin, said. “He told me – there is a cemetery in the Moscow region’s Tarasovka near an ancient brick church, where he was baptized after the […]
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[No radiation at Berezovsky home, no sign of outside role in death – Reuters – Olivia Harris – March 25, 2013 – click here for full article] Reuters covers the death in Britain of exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The post-mortem still awaits completion, and Berezovsky had been the target of multiple assassination attempts. But there has been no announcement […]
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