The Real Russia. Today.

Angering (and arresting) Moscow’s soccer fans

Monday, November 29, 2021

1. Hundreds of CSKA Moscow fans arrested over pyrotechnics at Sunday’s soccer match against Zenit St. Petersburg
2. Law and order: a pride flag tests of limits of ‘tolerance’ at a school, prisoners’ rights advocates trade allegations, Gennady Timchenko falls to Earth, the beheading of Team Navalny, prosecuting Sergii Romanov, and fraud at the National Guard
3. Ex-Georgian president seen in public for the first time since arrest and hunger strike
4. International: A world unsatisfied with Russia’s account of the Navalny poisoning, plus an American scholar is deported from Russia
5. The pandemic: two paramedics get inventive when the COVID beds run out, Siberia’s fake doctor flees to Georgia, and Sputnik manufacturers promise Omicron-targeting vaccine within 45 days
6. Public policy: an A.I. to flag troublemakers, how Putin ditched Russia’s flat tax to raise money for sick kids, and a sick kid who never got the medicine she needed to live
7. Culture: another blacklisted standup comic, a modest request from Stalin’s great-grandson, and the swag Russia Today doesn’t want you to see

Law and order

⚽ Soccer madness: ‘A shot in the back’

During a home game on Sunday, November 28, CSKA Moscow fans set off pyrotechnics inside the VEB Arena after their team suffered a 2–0 loss to Zenit St. Petersburg. Upon discovering that the stadium’s surveillance cameras were down, Moscow police kept spectators in the stands for three hours, while carrying out hundreds of arrests. On Monday morning, the police reported that they had detained 408 soccer fans in total and filed 51 administrative offense protocols. In response, the Russian Premier League decried the actions of the police, but CSKA Moscow drew even more backlash by condemning fans for committing “unlawful acts.” Meanwhile, State Duma lawmakers have seized upon the incident to argue in favor of introducing a “Fan ID” system for sporting events.

More law-and-order news

1. 🏳️‍🌈 Teacher and principal disciplined after LGBT pride flag appears in school’s International Tolerance Day presentation (state prosecutors in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug’s Labytnangi concluded that the display “harmed” the students’ “moral and spiritual development”)
2. ⚔️ Gulag.net founder accuses Russia Behind Bars founder Olga Romanova of sexual harassment (Vladimir Osechkin’s allegations follow Romanova’s public speculation that the FSB is actually responsible for leaking the videos that comprise Gulag.net’s recent revelations about prison torture in Saratov)
3. ⚖️ Court rebuffs billionaire Gennady Timchenko’s attempt to vouch for Magomed Magomedov and get him out of remand prison (Magomedov and his brother, among others, face charges of large-scale embezzlement, fraud, and forming a criminal organization. Despite Timchenko’s close relationship with President Putin, the court turned him away, faulting him for not knowing the consequences of vouching for Magomedov and for having no plan to ensure his good behavior. Novaya Gazeta’s Vera Chelishcheva speculates that the decision confirms the FSB’s apparent control over the case.)
4. 🛫 Kommersant: More than a third of Navalny’s former campaign office coordinators have left Russia (The whereabouts of three more remain unknown, plus 10 are under some form of criminal investigation. Only nine are still involved in politics.)
5. ⚖️ Prosecutors seek four-year prison sentence for ex-communicated Orthodox priest who seized convent outside of Yekaterinburg (Sergii Romanov allegedly urged believers to commit suicide under the guise of spreading Christian ideology)
6. 👁️ Four National Guard generals suspected of fraud (they allegedly embezzled 192 million rubles — about $2.6 million — allocated for the installation of a new information system and then forged documents claiming that the system was functional when, in fact, it never existed except on paper)

International

⚖️ Saakashvili on trial

Jailed former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who ended a seven-week hunger strike on November 20, has been seen in public for the first time since his arrest in early October. On Monday, November 29, Saakashvili was brought to the Tbilisi City Court to be put on trial on charges of abuse of power over the violent dispersal of an opposition demonstration in November 2007. Several hundred of Saakashvili’s supporters gathered outside the courthouse on Monday; police allegedly used tear gas to break up the crowd. Saakashvili was president of Georgia from 2008 to 2013. He was convicted in absentia on several counts of abuse of power in 2018. Georgian authorities arrested Saakashvili on October 1, after he secretly crossed the border into Georgia, returning to the country for the first time in eight years. There are several other criminal cases against Saakashvili, including one opened in October on charges of illegally crossing Georgia’s state border.

More international news

1. ☣️ Fifty-five countries endorsed a statement condemning the use of a chemical weapon against Alexey Navalny (The signatories declare that the Russian government has provided insufficient information to “answer the doubts and concerns raised.” The 55 nations also demand accountability for whomever is responsible for the attack on Navalny.)
2. 🛂 American teacher who ran Bard College’s study abroad program at St. Petersburg’s Smolny College is deported (Bard is now an “undesirable organization” in Russia. Michael Freese had been living in Russia for a decade, where he married and had a child, but he was given just two days to leave.)

The pandemic

1. 🚑 Two paramedics in Vladimir region are reprimanded for bringing COVID-19 patient to local administration building when no hospital beds turn up (The paramedics’ supervisor reportedly told them to return the woman to her home, but she needed breathing support and could have died without medical aid. After they brought her to the administration building, officials suddenly found a hospital bed for her at a local facility.)
2. 🛫 Siberian man flees to Georgia after posing as doctor to care for his COVID-infected grandmother and sharing videos documenting dismal state of Russian healthcare (Sergey Samborsky’s grandmother later died. The state media then ran several negative reports about him, and he feared police reprisal, leading him to worry about his family’s safety.)
3. 💉 Makers of Sputnik say modified versions of their vaccines could be ready to tackle omicron strain within 45 days (the Gamaleya Center has already begun the work and says the new doses could be ready for export by February 20, 2022, with more than 3 billion doses available in 2022)

Public policy

1. 🧠 Russian government funds research into creating an artificial intelligence that could scan social media and flag persons with anti-social tendencies (some of the research guidelines suggest that one of the project’s goals is to use people’s social-media content to identify potential anti-government protesters and “extremists”)
2. 💰 The ‘Circle of Good,’ financed by a special tax on the rich, owes its existence to Novaya Gazeta’s Dmitry Muratov and Ekho Moskvy’s Alexey Venediktov (A new investigative report by BBC Russia shows how the foundation created to procure rare medicines for ailing children won Putin’s approval as a “symbolic measure” ahead of last year’s constitutional reforms. The organization itself gets little of the new tax money, however, while the Health Ministry handles the lion’s share of the funds, buying drugs for Circle of Good from a small group of suppliers with government connections, often accepting bids without competition. A cleric named Alexander Tkachenko with broad political and pharmaceutical ties heads the foundation.)
3. 🕯️ Ten-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis dies in Moscow after Nizhny Novgorod healthcare officials fail to procure life-saving foreign medicine (A year’s worth of Trikafta costs roughly $300,000, but a court had nevertheless ordered Russia’s Health Ministry to buy it. Eva Voronkova’s parents say they will seek criminal charges after officials made no attempt to purchase the medicine.)

Culture

1. 🎭 Standup comedian Ruslan Belyi says he’s been blacklisted for telling political jokes in recent YouTube specials (He says venues have canceled three of his upcoming five live shows, and Ivan Urgant’s talk show also backed away. Belyi joins a growing list of comics who encountered problems after crossing certain thresholds of what’s allowed in Russia, such as Denis Chuzhoi, Idrak Mirzalizade, Alexander Dolgopolov, Ariana Lolaeva, Andrey Neretin, and others.)
2. 🪦 Stalin’s great-grandson wants his body exhumed, analyzed for poison, and moved to Novodevichy Cemetery (Selim Bensaad is appealing to Patriarch Kirill, insisting that his great-grandfather was a “man of faith”)
3. 👕 Following claim letter from RT, Feelosophy Store releases new t-shirt in support of Meduza and other ‘foreign agents’ (following RT’s complaint, Meduza had to pull Feelosophy Store’s “foreign agent” t-shirt from its own online shop)

⚔️ Tomorrow in history: 82 years ago, tomorrow on November 30, 1939, the USSR invaded Finland with 450,000 men and bombed Helsinki, launching the so-called Winter War. Despite superior military strength, especially in tanks and aircraft, the Soviet Union suffered severe losses and initially made little headway. The invasion cost the USSR its seat in the League of Nations.

Yours, Meduza