Radio Free Europe: Is Anarchism Russia’s Solution?
March 22, 2010
A column by Russian TV journalist Andrei Loshak is making waves in Russia, with over 400,000 people having read it so far. (Read it in English here.)
In the piece, Loshak detects a major change in the public attitude to the state. “Instead of anxiety and apathy,” he argues, “wrath comes to the fore.” Furthermore, he answers the two eternal, “cursed questions” of Russian thinking about society: “Who is guilty?” and “What is to be done?”
Loshak’s answer: the state is to be held responsible, and the solution, surprisingly enough, is anarchism.
OpenSpace.ru: Kafka’s Castle is collapsing
March 19, 2010
Kafka’s Castle is collapsing
You can’t reason with the absurd, as IKEA found when it tried to build a model business in Russia. Institutional corruption is out of control. Kafka’s Castle is finally collapsing. This is good news, as Russians, ordinary Russians are losing their fear. Now they’re just angry, says Andrei Loshak.
The Economist: Cops for hire
March 19, 2010
Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy
THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
The Global Graft Report: What Happened To Sergey Magnitsky?
March 18, 2010
Hermitage Capital Management was the biggest foreign investor in Russia. Then in 2005, it all went wrong. CEO William Browder was banned from the country on what he says was a pretext. Two years later, 50 police officers from the Moscow Interior Ministry raided Hermitage’s offices and those of its lawyers. The police took corporate documents and seals. Those same instruments were allegedly used in 2008 to fraudulently obtain $230 million that the Hermitage Fund companies had paid in taxes two years earlier.
Also in 2008, one of Hermitage’s lawyers who didn’t leave Russia or go into hiding, Sergei Magnitsky, above, was thrown into jail. He died in custody in November 2009 at age 37. His jailers first said he ruptured his abdominal membrane; then they said it was a heart attack. Officials have refused his family’s requests for an independent autopsy.
DasErste: Rückschau: Russland. Gefängnisreform in Russland — ein langer Weg.
March 15, 2010
Dieser Fall sorgt in den russischen Medien für großen Wirbel: Der 37-jährige Anwalt Sergej Magnitskij stirbt Ende 2009 in der Moskauer Untersuchungshaft. Sie verhafteten ihn wegen Steuerhinterziehung, doch Magnitskij untersuchte millionenschwere Korruption im Beamtenapparat. Vermutlich wollte man ihn zu Aussagen bringen. Sergej Magnitskij starb an Herzversagen, heißt es.
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