À â «Âîêðóã câåòà» îáðàòíî ÿ íå ïîéäó. Ïðîñòî ïîòîìó, ÷òî íå ìîãó ðàáîòàòü â æóðíàëå, ãäå ãëàâíîãî ðåäàêòîðà íàçíà÷àåò Ïóòèí. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
MOSCOW — I’ve long told myself and anyone else who would listen that things in Russia will get a lot worse before they get better. I have even thought, in accordance with an old dissident adage, that “the worse, the better”: the faster and more cruel the crackdown, the sooner the regime itself will crack. What I did not realize was just how bad “worse” was going to feel.
I did not imagine that it would get to the point where I would wake up in the morning, get my bearings — where I am, what happened yesterday, what is expected to happen today — and feel like howling in pain.
When I said to myself and others that things would get worse, I did not imagine this despair.
For the last two weeks, I watched as Parliament passed and then President Vladimir Putin signed into law a ban on American adoptions from Russia. About 50 children who had already met their future parents will now have to stay in orphanages, and thousands are losing a chance to gain a family. I have long known that it is increasingly difficult for foreigners to adopt in Russia (and there not nearly enough potential Russian adoptive parents), and the law itself is cruel and cynical, but what I found devastating was the spectacle of Russian politicians clamoring to argue for it — and the upper house of Parliament unanimously voting in favor.
I have also long followed the practice of denying Russian visas to journalists and activists who have been critical of the government’s policies. I have also known that this has derailed careers and separated friends and families. But last week a friend’s child, visiting relatives in Moscow, became seriously ill, and the mother could not come to her child’s bedside because she is banned from getting a Russian visa.
Another new law bans Russians who also hold U.S. passports from leading or even being members of nongovernmental organizations; several people I respect may have to give up their lives’ work. And Russian politicians are already demanding that the ban be extended to journalists.
The last few days of the year also brought news of the firings of several journalists and television hosts who had expressed opposition views; all were dismissed from nominally independent, privately owned media outlets. It is one thing to know that it is increasingly difficult to practice journalism in my country; it’s another to talk on the phone to someone I like and respect and hear just how lost and hurt a person feels when his career is effectively declared to be over.
And as the year drew to a close, there was a spate of hunger strikes. Mothers of three or more children in Moscow stopped feeding themselves to protest being denied housing guaranteed by federal law. An activist named Vladimir Malyshev has been holding a hunger strike in a central Moscow shopping mall for more than a month; he demands the release of the more than a dozen people held in connection with police clashes following a protest on May 6. And one of those people, 51-year-old Sergei Krivov, has been on hunger strike fore more than two weeks. These hunger strikes are not publicity stunts — they have received precious little publicity. They are acts of pure despair.
When I said to myself and others that things would get worse, I did not imagine this despair, other people’s or my own. We humans are not very good at imagining how we will feel in the future. More to the point, we have a way of forgetting that dictatorships are frightening places, where people get killed, jailed and hurt — not just any people but people we know, our friends, our kids, ourselves. That makes “the worse, the better” a very frightening bargain. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
"Íà ñëåäóþùèé äåíü îíà îòêàçàëàñü. Òàê òîìó è áûòü", - çàêëþ÷èë Ïåñêîâ. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Íó êàê æå æ, êàê æå æ, à äåëå ãîâîðèì î ìîåé êàðüåðå, î ìîåé ðàáîòå!
Áåññîâåñòíîå ïîâåäåíèå. Ëèøåíà âñÿ÷åñêèõ ïðèíöèïîâ. Ïîäóåò âåòåð èç-çà îêåàíà - áóäåò ðóãàòü Ïóòèíà. Ïîäóåò âåòåð èç Êðåìëÿ - çàòêí¸òñÿ è áóäåò íîðìàëüíî ðàáîòàòü, çàðïëàòó ïîäíèìóò - òàê åù¸ è Äÿäóøêó ïí¸ò. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
MOSCOW — They came for the human rights activists, the environmentalists, the L.G.B.T. activists, the Catholics and every other nongovernmental organization they could find. Throughout the last week and a half, authorities all over Russia have been conducting raids on nonprofit groups.
The work of the nonprofit sector has been effectively paralyzed.
There have been at least a hundred raids, and hundreds more are expected. The raids usually involved the prosecutor’s office and the tax police, but some organizations have also been visited by the fire marshal, health inspectors and even the Emergencies Ministry. The authorities have demanded financial documentation but also sifted through the trash and taken apart air-conditioners.
NGO staffers have been posting on their blogs pictures of stacks of binders and papers — the thousands upon thousands of pages of documents assembled to satisfy the authorities’ demands. The work of the nonprofit sector has been effectively paralyzed and, if the raids continue, will be for months.
“Why now?” Western media have asked. Were the Russian authorities this scared by last year’s protests? Has the liberal part of the elite lost out to the hard-liners? President Vladimir Putin has in turn issued an obtuse defense of the raids, claiming that they are at once routine and a response to an extremist threat. With the Kremlinologists trying to read meaning into nonsensical attacks and the Kremlin obscuring any sense that can be found, Russia has never looked more like the Soviet Union.
Graffiti next to an entrance to the “Memorial Group” rights organization in Moscow reads “A foreign agent.”Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Graffiti next to an entrance to the “Memorial Group” rights organization in Moscow reads “A foreign agent.”
And as in Soviet times, the search for hidden meaning or complicated signals is misguided. The Putin administration’s rhetoric, practice and law have been remarkably consistent — and the agenda for the months ahead is laid out in plain sight.
In December 2011, responding to the emergence of the protest movement, Putin accused the U.S. State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of personally inciting the unrest. Once he was re-elected president, the Kremlin shepherded a succession of new laws through Parliament. These included a law requiring nonprofits that receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents” and submit to debilitating reporting requirements; amendments allowing virtually anyone to be prosecuted for high treason; a law restricting the civic activities of Russians who have U.S. passports and giving the authorities discretion to shut down any nonprofit that receives money from the United States. A law on “foreign agents” in the media is in the pipeline.
Masha Gessen
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The Man Behind Putin
Russia’s New Normal
From the Safety of Switzerland
The current spate of raids has been linked to — and largely explained by the authorities as stemming from — the law on foreign agents. Literal and liberal enforcement of the other laws will follow. Organizations will be forced to shut down. Some of their leaders and other activists will be accused of high treason. Russians who have links to the United States will be strong-armed into leaving their jobs and, often, the country. Civil society in Russia will be crushed.
None of this should surprise anyone. It’s all there, in black and white, in Russian law. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-mad-race-for-moscow-mayor/?_r=2 The Mad Race for Moscow Mayor
By MASHA GESSEN
Immigrants, many from Vietnam, are forced into a detention camp in Moscow, ahead of the mayoral election.Maxim Shipenkov/European Pressphoto Agency Immigrants, many from Vietnam, are forced into a detention camp in Moscow, ahead of the mayoral election.
MOSCOW — There is an election campaign in the city. It is not like most election campaigns: It lacks many typical election-campaign characteristics, and the winner is preordained. But it has already claimed its first casualties: hundreds of illegal immigrants, many from Vietnam, who are being rounded up all over the Russian capital and forced into a cluster of tents erected in the Golyanovo neighborhood on the city’s eastern edge.
The last mayoral election in Moscow was held a decade ago. A year later, President Vladimir Putin canceled the elections of governors and the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg; this move was inexplicably billed as a counterterrorism measure. Last year, the government partially restored the system of regional elections as one of a handful of concessions to the protest movement.
The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, appointed to his post in 2010 by then-President Dmitri Medvedev, has decided to try gaming the system before it could threaten him by running while he is still popular. Instead of facing re-election in 2015, he resigned from the position in June, forcing an early election this September.
Almost immediately, Putin appointed him acting mayor. Sobyanin will compete against several hand-picked candidates, and one real one: the anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who is popular but is banned by law from becoming mayor because he is a convicted felon.
It is an odd campaign. Precious few media outlets in Moscow aren’t controlled by the Kremlin, and most of those rent office space from the city at heavily discounted rates, so they prefer to avoid criticizing the authorities. In addition, Sobyanin has refused to take part in debates. He takes his cue from Putin, who has always been openly disdainful of honoring his opponents by sharing a stage with them.
Still, if you look closely, you will see a few signs that a campaign is under way. There are some billboards. Navalny holds regular meetings with voters all over Moscow. Residential buildings in the city center are having their facades repainted: Mine had not seen a paint job in the 15 years I have lived there, and now its sole entrance is blocked by scaffolding.
And there is the tent city. Both of the leading candidates have made blatantly nationalist statements, blaming immigrants for rising crime and virtually all of Moscow’s other problems, even though statistics do not bear this out. Navalny’s lapses into xenophobic rhetoric have alienated a small part of the opposition but have probably won him many more supporters. This may be one reason Sobyanin has sprung into action: For the last two weeks, Moscow police have been rounding up undocumented aliens who work in the city’s marketplaces and other menial jobs, starting with the Vietnamese.
A temporary settlement that looks very much like a refugee camp, with huge tents filled with metal bunk-beds, has been speedily constructed. It is not clear exactly how many people are there, but the police have reported detaining as many as 1,500 immigrants in raids over the last couple of weeks. Human rights activists are reporting that the conditions in the camp are intolerable and that the state has provided no legal grounds for holding people there.
Moscow courts are already choking on the number of deportation cases suddenly coming in. Eventually, thousands of Vietnamese citizens, as well as anyone else the Moscow police choose to round up before the September election, will probably be deported. Until then, they will suffer heat, hunger and indignity in the tent city funded and tolerated by the residents of Moscow.
One marvels at how a Russian bureaucrat can turn holding an election into an opportunity to make life in the city that much worse. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà