Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Meduza reported from Moscow yesterday: Prosecutors have asked for a four-year prison sentence in the case of 21-year-old Egor Zhukov [or Yegor; the name is a folk version of George], a student at the Higher School of Economics… Zhukov has…
Russians are still pretty apolitical animals but they are gradually realizing that their passivity is contributing to the country’s stagnation and general hopelessness. When they quit the “quiet desperation” mode, they look to others who have made it farther into…
Environmental protests have been going strong in different parts of Russia in the past year or two but have yet to coalesce into a national movement. It’s local or regional concerns, typically, that drive people outdoors to protest. When an…
The fearsome shaman’s march on Moscow has been interrupted – suspended – reversed perhaps – but echoes of his tambourine will be troubling the sleep of Kremlin denizens for some time. Why am I so sure? Because both they and…
More details on Alexander Gabyshev, the anti-Putin shaman: “Armed security services blocked the highway, quickly encircled our camp and headed straight to the shaman’s tent,” Viktor Yegorov, one of Gabyshev’s supporters, said in a video from the scene. “They drove…
Here’s Meduza on the experimental “electronic voting” at the Moscow city election: …[O]fficials have assembled something even more obfuscated than traditional voting… [O]nline observers effectively will have no way of knowing if electronic votes have been counted properly. In essence,…
More from last Sunday’s election in Moscow: The candidate Putin reportedly voted for came third out of three in his district. The leader of United Russia’s faction in the city council lost his seat. Protest voters elected a dummy in…
At the previous election to the Moscow city council (aka the Moscow city Duma, Mosgorduma), the Kremlin’s puppet party (United Russia, UR) won 38 seats out of 45. Yesterday, UR’s candidates – all of them running as independents as the…
Putin in Helsinki, August 22, 2019: Russian opposition members were banned from running for Moscow’s legislature because they had submitted “falsified” signatures, President Vladimir Putin has said, playing down the election protests that rocked the capital this summer… “This was…
Judging by various Russian sources, yesterday’s rally – officially permitted by the city authorities – numbered 50,000 to 60,000 thousand. That’s probably the maximum possible turnout during this dead season of summer vacations and dachas. When an officially authorized rally…
Estimates of the size of yesterday’s rallies in Moscow are all problematic because groups of protesters turned up in different places unexpectedly and sometimes dispersed before police showed up to attack and detain them. A crowd of mostly young people…
Yesterday’s street protests in Moscow were large-scale, spectacular and non-violent on the protesters’ part, yet the police response was at times brutal. It’s remarkable (as I’ve said before) that protesters rallying in Moscow – whether with or without permission from…