On this page you will find statements and opinions by members of
Rights in Russia's Advisory Committee (International).
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posted 12 May 2013 13:29 by Rights in Russia
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updated 12 May 2013 13:30
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10 May 2013 By Jens Siegert Source: Heinrich Boell Foundation Russia Blog Following the sweeping “inspections” of over 600 Russian NGOs carried out since March this year by state prosecutors and other agencies, the reprimands have started coming in, as expected. Based on the information compiled on the Human Rights Youth Movement website as of 10 May 2013, over 39 NGOs with very different profiles across the whole country have been affected, from human rights organisations such as the Anti-Discrimination Centre in St. Petersburg (primarily focusing on Roma rights), the Ryazan Memorial (a typical regional Memorial branch, with a mix of dealing with abuses of the past, current human rights and care for victims of political repression), through the Aid Society for Mucoviscidosis Sufferers in Istra, near Moscow, to the Crane and Stork Refuge on the Amur river in the Far East. [Read more] |
posted 12 May 2013 13:25 by Rights in Russia
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updated 12 May 2013 13:28
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3 May 2013 By Jens Siegert Source: Heinrich Boell Foundation Russia Blog Andreas Schockenhoff, the Federal Commissioner for Social Cooperation with Russia and deputy leader of the CDU/CSU faction in the German Bundestag, struck lucky. At the end of last year, when he started planning the conference on the Russian NGO "foreign agents" law, hosted by the Foreign Office (FO) in Berlin at the end of April, nobody could have foreseen quite how relevant this would be at this point in time. Since the beginning of March Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad – over 600 to date – have been subjected to sweeping inspections by the Ministry of Justice, the Tax Office, and other agencies. [Read more] |
posted 13 Apr 2013 11:45 by Rights in Russia
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updated 13 Apr 2013 12:52
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6 April 2013 Source: Jens Siegert's Russia BlogIt’s happened again. And not just once. In November Vladimir Putin lied to Angela Merkel’s face at the Kremlin, claiming that Pussy Riot had participated in “anti-Semitic actions”. Many people wondered already at the time whether Putin was merely misinformed or whether he was consciously and brazenly telling lies. And here we go again. [Read more] |
posted 17 Feb 2013 07:00 by Rights in Russia
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updated 17 Feb 2013 07:01
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10 February 2013
By Jens Siegert Source: Russia Blog, Heinrich Boell Foundation Let’s start with the main bit of news: the so-called Foreign Agents Law isn’t doing too well. One might say that the Kremlin has put it into a kind of induced coma. That doesn’t mean the law is dead. But since the patient is currently not sentient when awake, it seems preferable to wait for better times. What are we to make of this? [Read more] |
posted 15 Feb 2013 15:23 by Rights in Russia
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updated 16 Feb 2013 09:27
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posted 21 Jan 2013 02:57 by Rights in Russia
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updated 21 Jan 2013 02:59
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12 January 2013By Jens Siegert Source: Russland-Blog On 12 January 2013, following a long illness, Yury Schmidt passed away in his native St. Petersburg. In actual fact, the name of Yury Schmidt’s native city wasn’t St. Petersburg. It was Leningrad. For it was in Leningrad that he was born in 1937, in – of all times – the year of the Great Terror. [Read more] |
posted 19 Dec 2012 01:38 by Rights in Russia
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updated 19 Dec 2012 02:01
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10 December 2012By Jens Siegert Source: Jens Siegert’s Russia Blog Shortly before the anniversary of the first major protests against vote-rigging in the December 2011 parliamentary elections, the pro-Kremlin political analyst Alexei Mukhin of the Centre for Political Information in Moscow published a study entitled "Are the Turbulent Times over?“ Predictably, Mukhin’s answer to this – presumably rhetorically intended – question is a resounding "Yes". His study claims that following the protests of the last winter and spring Putin is again wholly in charge. Moreover, he was able to deal with the “turbulence” without having tanks roll down the streets of Moscow. Purely by political methods, so to speak. The arrests and convictions of demonstrators as well as the host of repressive laws rushed through the parliament hardly get a mention in Mukhin’s study. Could he and other Putin acolytes be right? [ Read more] |
posted 29 Nov 2012 03:04 by Rights in Russia
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updated 29 Nov 2012 03:05
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Source: Russia Blog by Jens Siegert He is not the first minister to be sacked by Vladimir Putin. But none have been recently dispatched as ignominiously as Minister of Defence Anatoly Serdiukov (Serdyukov), even though he was very close to the Putin clan. As a matter of fact, it was this closeness that had elevated Serdiukov to high office in the first place. In 2000, following a less than dazzling career as a furniture dealer, he married the daughter of Viktor Zubkov. Back in St. Petersburg Zubkov had served as a second-in-command to the then deputy mayor Vladimir Putin. When Putin was promoted to a Moscow job his former deputy was promoted to head Russia’s inland revenue office. During Putin’s second term as President, Zubkov became Prime Minister. In 2008 he had to yield his post to Putin following Dmitry Medvedev’s elevation to President, but stayed on as first deputy Prime Minister. Serdiukov followed in Zubkov’s wake, first joining the tax office and then taking over from Zubkov as its director until February 2007 when Putin appointed him Minister of Defence. [ Read more] |
posted 30 Jul 2012 02:02 by Rights in Russia
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updated 30 Jul 2012 02:04
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30 July 2012by Noah Birksted-BreenI've just got back from Russia, supported by a StepBeyond grant from the European Cultural Foundation - where I met with Elena Gremina, who many consider to be Russia’s foremost political playwright, most famous for her play One Hour Eighteen Minutes, a landmark documentary play about the death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in state custody, which my company Sputnik will be producing in November this year in London (see http://sputniktheatre.co.uk/productions/). In an email to me after the recent Presidential election in March 2012, Elena wrote (I’ve translated it): “Random arrests by police have increased after the elections. It’s a good motivation to keep working - but it would be better without it”. [ Read more] This Comment was first published on the website of Sputnik Theatre: www.sputniktheatre.co.uk and is reprinted here by kind permission.
Noah Birksted-Breen founded and runs Sputnik Theatre Company which is dedicated to bringing contemporary Russian plays to the UK. Sputnik has premiered eight new Russian plays in the UK in their first English language translations. In 2010, Sputnik launched the Russian Theatre Festival in association with Soho Theatre. |
posted 14 Jul 2012 14:21 by Rights in Russia
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updated 14 Jul 2012 14:27
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When the cherry orchard was finally sold and something unique was sacrificed in the name of the progressive capitalist future, it was in a way a relief for those naive people who had been fondly hoping that something or someone would somehow turn up and save a thing of beauty from destruction. I think that now even those nice, humane people (or useful idiots?) who believed that Medvedev would get a second term and then, even after Putin became the President again, suggested that once he was reinstalled in the Kremlin he would begin a genuine Perestroika-2, have no more excuses if they persist in failing to understand the essence of the present neo-Soviet political regime and its strategies. [ Read more]
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