This weekend marked yet another not particularly glorious episode in Russo-British relations, as one diplomat and two (well known) British gay rights activists were attacked in separate incidents.

First in line for a battering was Nigel Gould-Davies, first secretary at the British embassy in Moscow. He was attacked at 1am on Saturday morning, as he walked across the Theatre Square in Chita, the last stop in his Siberian lecture tour. According to news reports, he was treated in hospital for bruising to his face, but wasn’t seriously hurt. The BBC add that the motive for the attack is unclear, but police are leaning towards the ‘random attack’ explanation:

Russian police believe students celebrating their graduation could have been responsible for the assault.

Next up were British gay rights activists, Mark Tatchell (famous for attempting to place Robert Mugabe under citizen’s arrest) and Richard Fairbrass (an eighties (?) singer, famous mostly for singing “I’m too sexy”. They were beaten while protesting against the decision to ban a Gay Pride march in Moscow and, to add insult to injury were arrested for their troubles.

Tatchell writes:

We arrived at the city hall at 12 o’clock on Sunday. Our intention was to hand a letter to the Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, but the police allowed gangs of neo-Nazis to infiltrate our group. They started attacking people in an absolutely shocking way. The police stood and watched while people punched me, knocked me to the ground and then kicked me. Eventually the police arrested me and let my neo-Nazi assailants walk free. I was taken into a police van with others, including the German MP Volker Beck, and the Italian MEP Marco Cappato. When we sat in the bus the police taunted us. They said: “Are you members of the sexual minority?” We said yes. They said: “We are going to have some fun with you at the police station.”

I spent 45 minutes at the station trying unsuccessfully to register a complaint. When we left, neo-Nazis attacked us again and pelted us with eggs. A Russian orthodox priest ran across the road and attacked us too. There were hundreds of riot police who could have easily prevented the neo-Nazis from assaulting us.

As well as Tatchell and Fairbrass, 31 others were arrested, including an Italian MEP.

Video of both attacks can be found on the BBC website. Obviously, they’re short clips, but the attacks looked unprovoked to me.

For more detailed, hour by hour reporting on the events at Moscow Gay Pride, see UK Gay News.

The harrasment of Garry Kasparov continues - this week Kasparov was prevented from flying to Samara, venue for this weekend’s EU-Russia summit:

Yesterday Mr Kasparov apparently outdid himself when he was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport on suspicion of forging his own airline ticket.

It was an elaborate plot, with suspicion falling on all those travelling with Mr Kasparov, including journalists from The Daily Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal and other organisations.

[…] Unable to resort to their favoured method for dealing with peaceful political demonstrations - violence - the authorities were going to have to come up with some other means to stop it going ahead.

Even so, farcical tactics that the administration did employ to keep Mr Kazparov in Moscow were astonishing in their brazenness.

Things started to go awry from the moment we entered the airport. As I placed my bag in the x-ray machine before check-in, a police officer approached me and asked for my passport and ticket, which had been reserved through Mr Kasparov’s office, although the Telegraph had paid for it.

The officer led me to a counter and told me there was a problem: The Aeroflot computer could not read my ticket. It seemed unlikely - he hadn’t even punched my travel details into the keyboard.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Kasparov and his colleagues arrived and was promptly told he would have to check in upstairs. “Why can’t I check in at the check in counter?” he asked - a reasonable enough question in the circumstances.

Airport officials clearly hadn’t worked out their story very well. Some of us were told the flight was overbooked, others that the tickets were unreadable.

If you thought that was ludicrous, read on:

Events turned even more surreal with the appearance of four medical orderlies in white coats, who handed out leaflets claiming that Mr Kasparov and Eduard Limonov, the leader of the radical National Bolshevik Party, were deranged and needed to be committed.

A stunt, it turned out, pulled by members of the Nashi youth wing, set up by the Kremlin to counter the spread of democracy.

The movement would later claim the orderlies had convinced airport staff to keep Other Russia officials off the flight because their madness posed a danger to other passengers.

All those who wanted to travel that day - including the journalists - were barred from flying and sent home, with a warning that they would probably face further investigation.

I’m particularly fascinated that this whole event took place (and directly affected) the world’s media. I can’t make up my mind whether this was intentional, to send a message, or whether they didn’t realise who his travelling companions were until it was too late, and this is a monstrous PR disaster.

Interesting post at Publius Pundit about a loophole in the law that could mean Russian bloggers being held to the same standards as fully fledged media publications.

Publius worries that this could lead to a crackdown on blogs.

I’m a little puzzled though, as I’d always thought it was pretty much common practice everywhere in the world that blogs be held to the same standards as media outlets - ie, don’t libel, etc.

Is there something more in this law that makes Russia stand out from the rest of the world, or is it just worries about the way in which Russia might implement the law?

Update:  Russophile has posted some more background on the law while in the comments La Russophobe posts a clarification of a couple of points relating to her original post.

As for me, well, it’s made my day to see that both a Russophile and a Russophobe seem to be in complete agreement

Robert Amsterdam posts an interview with one of the men who has shared a cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Here’s a snippet from the author’s introduction:

They wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to listen and to hear everything his cellmate lives and breathes, and then to report all of this to those who put him in the cell to sit there – just like a farmer puts a real brood hen on eggs to sit on them until they hatch.

Fascinating.

A couple of posts about statistics have caught my eye recently. One set of statistics show Russia in a relatively positive light, the other in a more gloomy light.

First up, the negatives. Apparently, more journalists have been killed in Russia over the past 10 years than anywhere else in the world bar Iraq:

The Top 21 bloodiest countries over the past 10 years have been Iraq (138), Russia (88), Colombia (72), Philippines (55), Iran ** (54), India (45), Algeria (32), the former republic of Yugoslavia (32), Mexico (31), Pakistan (29), Brazil (27), USA (21), Bangladesh (19), Ukraine (17), Nigeria, Peru, Sierra Leone & Sri Lanka (16), Afghanistan, Indonesia & Thailand (13)

And now the positives. If you’re not a journalist, you’re safer in Moscow than you are in Washington DC:

Moscow’s rate of homicide is 9.13 per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas Washington D.C.’s comes in at a whopping 35.42 per 100,000 inhabitants.

I suppose I should come out with a cliche here about dammed lies, or something.

“Khodorkovsky content with choice of prison” reads the interfax.ru headline.

Khodorkovsky posted a statement on his official website on Tuesday to “thank” the authorities for sending him “to a land of political prisoners, convicts and the Decembrists [participants in the 1825 uprising in Imperial Russia].”

Somehow, I don’t think the wonderful facilities are the reason for his contentment.

By the way, lawyers reckon that, with parole for good behaviour, Khodorkovsky could be eligible for release from prison in 2009, which would open the way nicely for whoever follows Putin to release Khodorkovsky early in their Presidency without having to go down the Presidential pardon route.

Following his sentencing, ex-Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been sent to a jail in Siberia - YaG-14/10 to be precise, which is near Chita. His co-defendant, Platon Lebedev has been sent to a prison in the Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets, 2,000 km north of Moscow.

There is some concern about the legality of these moves, with his lawyers, and human rights activists saying that Russian law stipulates a prisoner should be imprisoned close enough to his home city that relatives can visit relatively easily (which, of course, would mean that he would have to be somewhere close to Moscow):

His confinement in IK-10 camp will put him a six-hour flight plus a seven-hour car ride from Moscow, and human rights bodies accused authorities of violating Russian law by sending him so far from his home and family.

“The law says that a general regime prisoner should serve his term somewhere close to his home. The Russian authorities are spitting on their own law,” said Yevgeny Ikhlov of the All-Russian Movement for Human Rights.

“This is being done on purpose to complicate as much as possible Khodorkovsky’s contacts with his family, his defence and with society. Khodorkovsky is a prominent public figure and prominent opposition ideologist and everything is being done to isolate him,” Ikhlov told Reuters.

Clearly the choice of his prison - far, far away from Moscow and the prying eyes of the international press - was intentional. Whether it breaks Russian law, I have no idea. If it does, expect to see Khodorkovsky’s lawyers back in action pretty soon.

The BBC, by the way, has a profile of Khodorkovsky’s prison - which used to service Uranium mines in the 1960s:

Today, YaG-14/10 is chiefly a garment factory where inmates sew protective clothing for the prison system and the police, as well as making bed linen and doing private orders.

Khodorkovsky will find himself about 4,700km (3,000 miles) east of Moscow.

On the evening the name of his prison was revealed, it was -9C in Krasnokamensk; by January, the average daily temperature should range between -18C and -33C.

According to Zabinfo, most of YaG-14/10’s inmates are serving between three and five years and the average age is 24 - significantly younger than Khodorkovsky, 42.

The most common conviction is theft with 40% of inmates sentenced for it.

Russia Blog has more information on the prison, which seems to indicate that, as Russian prisons go, YaG-14/10 isn’t so bad:

As of 2002, the colony had 1389 prisoners. There were rumors that the prisoners were forced to work in the mines, but the rumors were false. Today, the colony is one of the top prison facilities in the country; the prisoners live in two-story brick buildings, and sleep in bunks. There is a TV in the recreation room, and on the weekends prisoners are allowed to attend a “club”. Prisoners can be employed to sew textiles or work in a metal shop.

By the looks of this report from Mosnews, Khodorkovsky has already found a useful way to occupy his time while he serves at Putin’s pleasure - he’s going to write a PhD dissertation:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a graduate of the National Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow. His Ph.D thesis will likely be dedicated to his work. According to Russian law he can defend it even in prison.

Good for him.

According to Mosnews, though, Khodorkovsky has brought two suitcases filled with books with him. Question: Just how much luggage is the average Russian prisoner allowed to bring with them?

Last week I wrote about the disgraceful number of closed cities in Russia, another of those leftovers from an anarchic age that Russia remains addicted to, despite (or perhaps because of) the restrictions it places on the human rights of their 1.7 million residents.

In a rather timely decision, the BBC have just decided to publish a feature article about the Russian cosmodrome at Plesetsk. Now, Plesetsk isn’t a closed city, but Mirny, the town next door is. The BBC reporter managed to get a precious invitation to visit Mirny, and this is what he saw:

Home to about 80,000 military staff and their families, at first glance, it seems like any other town, save the austere apartment blocks and lack of road signs.

We are taken to the space museum in the town square, then the kindergarten, where children dressed in traditional clothes sing Russian songs.

Despite the presence of occasional teams of foreign engineers, most of the town remains off limits to visitors. They can walk around only a small central section and must not stray outside the designated area.

The town was never on the map and its inhabitants can still only be officially reached under a military field post number.

I’ve just been to see if I could find Mirny using both GoogleEarth (the satellite imaging programme) and Expedia maps. I tried every spelling of the name I could think of without any luck (although I did discover there is a village with the same name in Southern Russia). I think I’ll have to investigate further, to see whether any of the closed cities that the Russian government has admitted to (and Mirny isn’t one of them) are on any maps.

So far, the only other account I’ve been able to find about a visit to a closed city, is Tajikblog’s visit to Taboshar, the city where the uranium for the first Soviet nuclear bombs was mined. Taboshar - in Tajikistan, by the way, and not Russia - is no longer a closed city. But it certainly doesn’t seem a very welcoming place…

Either way, we just slowly begin to explore the town. It’s really quite a nice town with birch trees and huge stone houses lining the streets, aside from the fact that most of the buildings are empty and starting to fall apart. Soon enough, though, another set of suspicious men appears (with their wives and children in tow, not exactly an intimidating sight) and the confrontation begins.

The mayor (who prior to this had a good reputation among internationals) was at the center of the posse. I wanted to meet him anyway hoping for a tour, so this was as fine a time as any to say hello. I must have caught him at a bad time, though, as his mood was sour.

After the initial “hi I’m Peter XXX, photographer from New York” schtick, it was time for the inquisition.
Why are you here? Who guided you here? What do you know about this town? Etc. etc.
Nargiza steadfastly translates the questions and my answers, but suddenly his suspicion and temper rise.

One thing that set him off, I think was my knowledge of the town’s having a high-tech science lab. Stephanie told me about it as the mayor’s sad attempt to attract people to his town, to create a center for technology. Maybe something else is going on, because he certainly didn’t want to speak about it.

I’m going to keep searching for stories about Russian closed cities (and others around the Former Soviet Union if I can find them). If you have any links, or stories of your own, please feel free to share them here.

If you thought that the demise of the Soviet Union meant the demise of closed, or secret cities, then you’d be wrong. Today, it is thought that there are up to forty closed cities (also referred as ZATO’s, or Zakrytye Administrativno-Territorial’nye Obrazovaniia) in Russia, although the Russian government will only confirm the existence of ten. These ten alone are home to 1.7 million people, who are severely restricted in their movements and their ability to participate in the democratic process, compared to their compatriots in neighbouring cities.

Freedom of movement is the biggest practical problem. True, movement generally is still quite restricted in Russia - for example, the need for residential permits means that many people who have moved to Moscow are living there illegally and have limited legal rights - but the issues facing closed cities are a class apart. Roemer Lemaître of the Belgian Institute for International Law [pdf file] observes that:

Apart from the right to freedom of movement the entry and residency restrictions imposed by the ZATO Law infringe directly or indirectly on a considerable number of other rights belonging to natural and legal persons resident within the ZATO as well as to outsiders. Identity checks and searches of bags and vehicles upon entry or exit from the ZATO run afoul of the right to privacy (Article 17 of the ICCPR and Article 8 of the ECHR). According to the same provisions, the right to family life might be violated if someone is not allowed to live with his/her close family because he/she did not get the required security clearance. Limitations on property rights (especially those that largely exclude property rights for outsiders) contradict Article 1 of the First Protocol to the ECHR.

Foreigners also face many restrictions, as this news report about the announcement that the mining city of Norilsk was to become a closed city indicates:

Under the restrictions, as of Monday the city is closed to all non-Russians – except Belarusians. Any foreigner wishing to travel to Norilsk must first obtain special permission from the FSB, the Russian state security police.

Lebed stated that he will demand that all foreigners – whether living as residents or presently visiting – leave Norilsk.

The restrictions placed on residents in closed cities also directly inhibit their ability to participate fully in the democratic process - such as it is in Russia these days. The role of the media, in particular, is heavily restricted:

Federal and local mass media have no access to closed cities. Besides, local media are poorly developed, scanty and usually controlled either by agencies that they belong to, or by commercial price of information. Almost the whole volume of information flow in and out of ZATOs is censoring in order to assure its safety for ZATOs system’ existence. None of independent pressmen are allowed to visit ZATOs.

I haven’t specifically seen any sources mentioning it, but I would imagine that freedom of association - for example, in the sense of the ability to join protests - is also heavily restricted.

No other democracy today has closed cities. Today, with the exception of Russia, they are the preserve of crackpot dictatorships, like North Korea. Even China doesn’t feel the need to close off whole cities from its own people.

Unless there is something that Russia and North Korea know that the rest of the world doesn’t, I think it is safe to conclude that closed cities are no longer necessary for security. And, if that is the case, then Russia’s justification for restricting the human rights of almost 2 million of its own citizens rings hollow.

What happens when you try to buy Russian literature in small town Queensland?

So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era oppression might have been a crime against humanity, I said,”No, SOLZHENITSYN”.
“Oh, Soldier Nitsyn ! No I don’t think we’ve got any. How do you spell that ?”
At which point I pretty much gave in.

I guess you’ve just got to accept that some battles just aren’t worth fighting any more…

OSCE delegates are considering a raft of Russian proposals to make the organisation ‘more effective.’  Russia effectively held a gun to the OSCE’s head a year ago, when it threatened to withold it’s budget contributions unless it’s proposals were taken seriously.

In particular, Russian diplomats want to force changes to the Office of Democratic Institutions (ODIHR), which monitors elections.  In particular, says RFE/RL:

Russia dislikes its custom of issuing a comment on elections soon after the polls close. In Russia’s view, ODIHR should submit its reports to the Permanent Council in Vienna and allow it to decide whether they should be published.

The Russian government is unhappy with the OSCE monitors, of course, because they tend to take a critical position on elections held in countries allied with Russia - countries which, to put it charitably, have a tendency to not hold free and fair elections.  Submitting reports to the Council for approval would, they hope, allow Russia to either moderate the content of election monitors’ reports or, at the very least, to delay their publication until well after the election in question, at a time when the news cycle has long since moved on.

Russia is a key member of the OSCE and, as such, has every right to make its demands heard.  The heavy handed way it has done so, however, has not won it any friends, and shows clearly how out of step Russia is with most other members states.*  The OSCE should, and I think will, reject these proposals.  If they reject them out of hand, so much the better.   

Nathan at registan.net has a couple of posts on the topic, including this typically forthright opinion:

At the very least, one would hope that the OSCE would grow a spine and tell Russia to quit acting like a spoiled crybaby.

*Although I’m critical of Russia’s heavy handed methods here, I am finding it hard to resist the temptations to draw parallels here with the way the United States has at times used the threat of witholding part of it’s UN dues in an attempt to prompt reform within that organisation.

Can you imagine ambassador from the US, or an EU country saying this?  They’d be fired before you could even blink.

Russian Ambassador to Latvia Viktor Kalyuzhny thanked Cardinal Janis Pujats, head of Latvia’s Roman Catholics, for the latter’s criticism of the recent gay and lesbian parade in Riga, the Baltic Times newspaper reports.

The paper quoted the Russian diplomat as saying that it would be impossible to organize such a parade in Russia, as “it is anti-human.”

He also criticized authorities’ decision to allow the march, which took place on July 23.

GayRussia.ru are hoping to organise a parade in Moscow for next summer, by the way, but they’ve met with a negative reaction from Yuri Luzhkov, the city’s Mayor:

"If I receive such a letter, I will refuse," Luzhkov told the Interfax news agency late Friday, explaining that he "guards the Muscovites’ interests, and the capital’s inhabitants would be categorically set against such an initiative."

There is still a long way to go for gay rights in a country that only legalised homosexuality in 1993, and until 1999 classified it as a form of mental ilness. 

Having said that, though, from my own private observations, acceptance of homosexuality does seem to be increasing.  In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, for example, a major local nightclub used to hold well attended fortnightly gay nights.

I’ve just read this transcript of a report from Russian tv show The Main Theme, which essentially seems to be about how unfair it is that Russia is accused of human rights abuses when the United Kingdom is abusing them far more than Russia. 

The only problem with this argument, of course, is that it is rubbish. 

Compared to the United Kingdom Russia appears to be an extremely liberal country despite its long fight against terrorism. Just consider this. After the scandal in connection with the killing of the Brazilian man, Scotland Yard chief Ian Blair said that he could not rule out that the Brazilian man would not be the last victim of anti-terrorism operations. Police will still operate a shoot-to-kill policy against alleged suicide bombers. Somebody else could be shot, Ian Blair said. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw considers the shoot-to-kill policy against suspect suicide bombers justified. Who are suspects? One suspect has already been killed and he had no connection whatsoever to suicide bombers.

Imagine that [Russian Interior Minister Rashid] Nurgaliyev goes on air and says: An official order has been issued to shoot at anyone who is suspected of terrorism. And immediately the next day headlines in the foreign press read: Gulags are back, Stalin’s repression and such. But Russia is not the one to have repression. It is Britain. And by the way isn’t it time for Russia to finally head the international human rights movement, if only because we have stronger nerves?

[Source: Russian tv show The Main Theme.  Translated by BBC Monitoring, reported in Johnson’s Russia List #9120]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but:

• Don’t Russian troops routinely round up and imprison, beat, steal from, shoot, etc, Chechens they suspect of being terrorists?
• Didn’t Vladimir Putin once promise to blow up terrorists (specifically Chechen terrorists, I think) while they were sitting on the toilet? 
• Didn’t the Russian government recently announce that it was prepared to shoot down any suspicious airplanes as they approached cities, civilian airliner or not?   
• And is anyone out there seriously going to tell me that police in Moscow won’t use lethal force against someone with a dark complexion who they suspect of being a suicide bomber on the metro?

Stronger nerves?  Please. 

The US State Department has just released its 2004 Human Rights Report.  I haven’t had chance yet to do more than read the introduction yet, in which Russia features strongly. 

Here are the key paragraphs from the introduction relating to both Russia and Ukraine, I’ll post more over the next few days if I find any nuggets in the full text:

On Russia:

In contrast to developments in a number of countries that increased direct citizen control over government authorities, in Russia changes in parliamentary election laws and a shift to the appointment, instead of election, of regional governors further strengthened the power of the executive branch. Greater restrictions on the media, a compliant Duma (Parliament), shortcomings in recent national elections, law enforcement corruption, and political pressure on the judiciary also raised concerns about the erosion of government accountability. Racially motivated violence and discrimination increased, despite considerable legislative prohibitions. Authorities failed to investigate actions against minorities while subjecting them to more frequent document checks, targeting them for deportation from urban centers, and fining them in excess of permissible penalties or detaining them more frequently. Government institutions intended to protect human rights were relatively weak.
…
In Russia, the September attack on a school in Beslan in North Osettia and the ongoing disappearances of civilians detained by security forces underscored the extent to which both sides in the expanding conflict in the North Caucasus continue to demonstrate little respect for basic human rights. There were credible reports of serious violations, including politically motivated disappearances and unlawful killings, by both the government and Chechen rebels. Individuals seeking accountability for these abuses also continued to be targeted, and Chechen rebels continued to attack Russian civilians, including a bombing of a Moscow subway.
…
The increase in government pressure and control of media in Russia continued to weaken freedom of expression and independence of the media there, as a trend of increasing control and harassment of the press was noted in a number of Eurasian countries, especially Belarus and some countries in Central Asia. The Russian approach centered on use of controlling ownership of broadcast media to limit access to information on sensitive issues, such as Chechnya. Government pressure also increased self-censorship of journalists.

On Ukraine:

In Ukraine, the presidential election campaign was marred by government pressure on opposition candidates and by widespread violations and fraud during the voting. The Kuchma government engaged in fraud and manipulation during the presidential election in both the first and second round of voting on October 31 and November 21. The Government censored media outlets and journalists to influence news coverage, which sparked the so-called "journalist rebellion" among reporters who refused to follow government directives. Eventually, popular demonstrations against the official results of the flawed November 21 vote gradually swelled into an "Orange Revolution," the campaign color associated with opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who was widely believed to have won the election.

Respect for human rights in Ukraine took a decided turn for the better when, on December 3, the country’s Supreme Court invalidated the runoff election as fraudulent, vindicating the observations of many domestic and international monitors about numerous violations of electoral procedures, harassment of opposition candidates, heavily biased coverage in government-controlled media, and widespread voting and counting fraud. In the court-mandated repeat election on December 26, the people of Ukraine selected their new President. International observers of that vote, won by Yushchenko, noted the improvements in media coverage, increase in transparency of the voting process, decrease in government pressure to support a particular candidate, and fewer disruptions at the polls. The new President expressed a strong commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and observance of human rights.

Nathan at The Argus has more on Central Asia’s human rights scorecard.