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"Bush blew up the Twin Towers, Putin blew up [the towns of] Buinaksk and Volgodonsk. Obama blew up the marathon." The RuNet, just like the Internet at large, has always had a penchant for conspiracy theories.
As Navalny's show-trial for lumber embezzlement continues, such questions are perhaps more important than ever. Here are some data-points which could be used to make a rough approximation:
Science isn’t safe in Russia today. That, anyway, was Lev Gudkov’s message in a public statement today, announcing that prosecutors in Moscow contacted him five days ago, to issue an official warning that the Levada Center is operating in violation of a recently minted federal law requiring politically-active NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register with the government as foreign agents.
Fogle's alleged letter (written in awkward if grammatically correct Russian) looked like "Nigerian spam run through Google translate".
Are Russia's members of parliament, who have fostered a climate of homophobia over the past year, to blame for a man tortured to death by drunk hooligans in Volgograd?
When Vladislav Surkov left the government last week, it triggered an avalanche of speculation about what the loss of “the grey cardinal” means for Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev in particular and his “liberal” political clan in general. At the center of an ongoing related police probe is Duma Deputy and anti-Putin protest movement leader Ilya Ponomarev, who earned a surprising $750,000 for his work for the Skolkovo innovation center.
"Before there was trickery, now it has been replaced with criminal charges and prison sentences. Surkov, whatever you may think of him, is, first of all, a political aesthete, who won't break pots with a hammer"
The Russian opposition, it seems, can't catch a break. Sometimes, this is because the Kremlin's political technologists outmaneuver them. Other times, it is thanks to internal bickering. On May 6, however, the culprit was plain bad luck. For one man, that bad luck was fatal.
Every Russian opposition rally and march attracts wild online speculation about the numbers of the participants -- both by observers and the participants themselves.
"A Monstration is a parody of a traditional demonstration, with absurd demands and slogans, where every participant says what they want."
“Do you really have the feeling that the old system collapsed after the December 2011 protests? The system defeated the opposition. It’s a fact.” Vladislav Surkov delivered this line earlier today to a crowd of reporters and students in London. Russian netizens were not happy.
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Following Saturday's scoreless soccer game that catapulted Moscow's CSKA club to its fourth Russian Premier League title, the team's fans clashed with riot troops in downtown Moscow. Police detained 140 people [ru], later releasing all but two. Bloggers posted photos to LiveJournal here, here, and here [ru], alleging police brutality.
Police “detain” a soccer fan, Moscow, 18 May 2013, photo by Sergey Danilov, posted to his LJ.
At this very moment, Kirov police are searching [ru] Alexey Navalny's local headquarters, established to coordinate the blogger's public outreach in the city where he currently stands trial for embezzling roughly half a million dollars. The case has attracted international attention as the latest in a long series of politicized Russian judicial proceedings, including the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, three members of Pussy Riot, and others. More »
Dissidents have fled Russia for as long as there has been a Russia from which to flee. Earlier this week, April 7, 2013, activist Ilya Yashin startled many when he announced [ru] on Twitter that protest figure and former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov had abandoned his leadership position in the oppositionist group “Solidarity,” and likely decided to emigrate. More »
Russian Internet censors at Roskomnadzor have reversed a decision to ban Wikipedia's entry for “cannabis smoking,” following a reexamination of the article after a new round of edits by Wikipedian volunteers. In a statement [ru] on its website today, April 10, 2013, Roskomnadzor announced the unbanning, though at least nine [ru] other Wikipedia articles apparently remain on the RuNet blacklist.
As RuNet Echo previously reported [GV], Alexey Navalny has appealed to his readers to make up their own minds about his innocence or guilt in an upcoming embezzling trial by releasing for download the financial documents of the firms involved. Now, his opponents appear to have taken a page out of his book, creating a website which is a direct copy [ru] of Navalny's original [ru]. Unlike Navalny's “Why is Navalny Not Guilty?”, this one is titled “Why is Navalny Guilty?” and makes available for download allegedly relevant excerpts from Navalny's previously hacked email correspondence [GV]. Since the emails have been publicly available for quite some time, the page is likely created in the spirit of “trolling” rather than any real attempt at an exposé.
On April 1, 2013, the 20 year anniversary of Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper critical of the government and known for its investigative reporting, Head of the Chechen Republic (formerly President) Ramzan Kadyrov took to his Instagram [ru], as he often does these days, to publicly express respect for the publication and its journalists, even thought he “sometimes disagrees with them.” Some bloggers [ru] were flabbergasted [ru] – after all, it is a widely held belief on RuNet that Kadyrov (then Chechen Prime Minister) is at least partially responsible for the assassination of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.
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