The Real Russia. Today.

Meduza speaks to an accused spy, Vkontakte offers help to ‘extremists,’ and a ‘mothers' march’ is coming to Moscow

Monday, August 13, 2018

This day in history. On August 13, 1990, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev signed an executive order restoring the rights of all victims of Soviet political repressions between the 1920s and 1950s.

• Meduza interviews the energy-industry executive arrested for espionage in Russia
• Vkontakte announces new privacy features to combat Russia's expanding war on ‘extremist’ Internet content
• Russian man is sentenced to five years in prison for defending ISIS on social media
• Seven Russian journalists from a new ‘counterculture almanac about violence’ say they're being targeted by hackers
• For the first time ever, Russian fines a ‘foreign agent’ for failing to identify itself as a foreign agent on Facebook
• A teenager burns down Russia's historic Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin
• Mothers of two jailed ‘extremist’ teenagers plan an unpermitted march through central Moscow this Wednesday
• A Kremlin aide's tax-hike proposal costs Russian oligarchs more than $3 billion in one day
• The speaker of the State Duma uses a bad joke to try to manage popular anger about raising Russia's retirement age
• Russian Culture Minister Dmitry Medinsky is making another attempt to exert greater control over the country’s film industry
• 120 cultural figures sign open letter calling for release of Oleg Sentsov
• Ksenia Sokolova reportedly flees Russia to escape criminal charges over misused charity funds

“I'd comment on the charges, if I understood them” 😕

On July 15, Russian Federal Security Service agents arrested Karina Tsurkan, a top executive at the energy company “Inter RAO.” She is charged with espionage for allegedly being a foreign citizen and collaborating with businessmen who have ties to either Moldovan or Romanian intelligence. The FSB has released no further details about the case. Still jailed at Moscow’s Lefortovsky pretrial detention facility, Tsurkan has been mostly inaccessible to journalists, but Meduza managed to pass her several questions through her lawyer. We’re now publishing a translation of the answers we received.

• Read the interview here: “Meduza interviews the energy-industry executive arrested for espionage in Russia”

Shut up, extremists 🤫

Administrators at Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, are speaking out against the “groundless persecution” of Internet users. In a public statement, Vkontakte managing director Andrey Rogozov said, “Law enforcement agencies often fail to take into account context, not distinguishing between posts and reposts, and treating images with questionable jokes like incitements to dangerous crimes.” Rogozov says the website will soon introduce new privacy settings, allowing users to hide their entire profiles entirely from everyone except their approved friends.

In recent years (and especially in recent weeks), police officers have opened criminal cases against Russian Internet users, typically charging individuals with hate speech, extremism, offending religious views, or propagating Nazism. The vast majority of these criminal cases are filed against users of Vkontakte, which surrenders virtually all personal data, whenever requested by law enforcement, according to human rights activists. On August 6, Vkontakte’s parent company, Mail.ru, publicly condemned these prosecutions.

⏳ Five years for a post

On August 13, a court in Oryol sentenced a man to five years in prison for posting a comment on Vkontakte in support of the terrorist organization ISIS. The suspect confessed to the crime and threw himself at the mercy of the court, avoiding a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.

📰 Counterculture criminals

Seven journalists from the beleaguered Moloko Plus project say someone recently tried to hack their email and Facebook accounts. According to the group’s founder, Pavel Nikulin, the intrusions came from Internet users with IP addresses in Brazil and the United States.

On July 14, a day before Moloko Plus was unveiled at a presentation in Krasnodar, Nikulin was forced to appear at a local police station and hand over copies of his almanac, so they could be examined for possible extremism. Police also interrupted the unveiling presentation, apparently responding to a call that Moloko Plus “propagates how to commit extremism and use illegal drugs.” Nikulin says the “tip” came from Mikhail Banazarov, a local conservative activist. Before the presentation that day, two men sprayed Nikulin and one of his team members in the face with an unknown gas.

The Moloko Plus project is a “counterculture almanac about violence,” dedicating each magazine issue to a specific theme (drug abuse, neo-Nazism, radicalism, racism, religious hatred, separatism, and so on).

Watch those Facebook pages, foreign agents 🚫

For the first time ever, a Russian court has fined a registered “foreign agent” for failing to identify itself as a foreign agent on its Facebook page. On August 13, a court in Yoshkar-Ola imposed a 300,000-ruble ($4,430) fine on the “Chelovek i Zakon” (Person and Law) group, which was blacklisted in 2014. This isn’t the first time the group has been fined for violating Russia’s regulations on foreign agents: in 2016, it was fined 150,000 rubles ($2,215) for failing to identify a blog post by one of its staff on the news site 7x7 as the work of a foreign agent.

Chelovek i Zakon says its page used to identify the group as a foreign agent in Russia, but Facebook apparently modified its page features without any notification, removing the section that contained that information. Lawyers for the organization say they plan to appeal the ruling.

Russia’s law on foreign agents applies to any organization that accepts money from abroad and engages in so-called political activity. The Justice Ministry currently designates 76 foreign agents, including several human rights groups like Memorial, Golos, Agora, and others.

Raptured wood 🔥

On August 10, a fire consumed the historic Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in the Karelian town of Kondopoga, and police reportedly suspect a teenager who’s been described by sources as mentally handicapped and a Satanist. According to unconfirmed reports, the boy either wanted to see his name in headlines, or he “simply didn’t like the church.” The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda says the perpetrator was visiting his grandmother in the area. Rebuilding the church will cost an estimated 80 million rubles ($1.2 million). A source later told the news agency TASS that the suspected teenage arsonist confessed to the crime.

The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin was built in 1774 on the bank of Lake Onega. The structure represented the pinnacle of Russia’s wooden architecture in the late 19th century and apparently contained an iconostasis with Christian Orthodox icons from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Mothers' March ✊

Protesters will march through Moscow this Wednesday, August 15, demanding the release of Anna Pavlikova and Maria Dubovik, two teenagers arrested in March for allegedly belonging to the “Novoe Velichie” (New Greatness) extremist movement. Organizers are calling it the “Mothers’ March,” and calling on demonstrators to carry their children’s favorite toys. The event does not have a permit from the city. At the time of this writing, 910 people have RSVP’d for the march on Facebook.

Vladimir Chernikov, the head of Moscow’s Transportation Department, is calling on organizers to reschedule the demonstration for a time when they can obtain a permit. Maxim Pashkov, the lawyer representing Anna Pavlikova, has also spoken out against unsanctioned protests, warning that disturbances of the peace in his client’s name could harm her case.

Pavlikova and Dubovik’s mothers previously published a video appeal to Vladimir Putin, demanding that he order their daughters’ release and punish the officers who “framed” them. The mothers also accuse the police of fabricating evidence against their children. “Do you really have no other enemies than my daughter?” Pavlikova’s mother asks in the video. According to the websites OVD-Info and Medizazona, police had at least one officer embedded undercover in the movement.

Since being jailed, Pavlikova and Dubovik have reportedly become seriously ill, leading Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova and Presidential Human Rights Council Chairman Mikhail Fedotov to call for their release, though a court recently ignored these requests.

Thanks a lot, Andrey 💸

“Russia’s super-rich tycoons lost more than $3 billion in one day after a top economic aide to the president proposed raising taxes on the nation’s giant metal and mining companies. In a letter to Vladimir Putin, aide Andrey Belousov named 14 companies that could pay more. The resulting investor exodus saw $3.1 billion wiped off the fortunes of their affluent bosses.” Read the story at Bloomberg.

Don't quit your day job, Slava 🤡

Over the weekend, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin attended a town hall meeting in Saratov, where a woman asked the inevitable question about lawmakers’ initiative to raise the country’s retirement age. “We won’t live [to collect payments under the new system]! We’re barely crawling, as it is,” the woman told Volodin, who tried awkwardly to lighten the mood by joking that the elderly can always start hitting the gym to stay alive.

In mid-July, carried by Volodin’s political party, United Russia, the State Duma voted to adopt the first reading of legislation that would raise the country’s retirement age from 60 to 65 for men by 2028, and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034. The final vote tally was 328 in favor and 104 opposed. Deliberations on amendments to the legislation are scheduled to conclude by September 24. According to sociological studies, roughly 89 percent of Russia’s population opposes the pension reform plan.

Cultural happenings

📽️ Conquering Russian kino

Russian Culture Minister Dmitry Medinsky is making another attempt to exert greater control over the country’s film industry: according to the newspaper Vedomosti, the Culture Ministry is asking the government for the authority to appoint the Cinema Foundation’s leadership and control its finances. Currently, the Culture Ministry appoints the foundation’s board of directors, which in turn selects an executive director. The proposed reforms would let Medinsky manage this entire process. Sources told the newspaper Vedomosti that he’s likely looking for ways to replace the foundation’s current director, former Kremlin official Anton Malyshev, with someone more pliable and loyal.

Founded in 1994 by the state to promote domestic films, the Cinema Foundation develops, produces, and distributes Russian screen content. Medinsky has previously sought the right to veto spending decisions by the foundation, arguing that government money shouldn’t go to art-house movies, like Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Oscar-nominated film, “Leviathan.”

✉️ Another open letter for Sentsov

Roughly 120 cultural figures, including the directors Jean-Luc Godard and Ken Loach, as well as French Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen, have signed an open letter calling for the release of Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker now imprisoned in Russia for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea. The letter — addressed to the European Union and United Nations — urges the international community to pressure Vladimir Putin to intervene on behalf of Sentsov, who has been on a hunger strike since May 17.

In early August, Sentsov told his cousin that his health had become “catastrophically bad,” warning that “the end is near.” Russian prison officials insist, however, that Sentsov’s health is “satisfactory.”

Don't call it fleeing 🛫

Ksenia Sokolova, the former president of the Doctor Liza humanitarian foundation, has fled Russia in an apparent attempt to escape criminal prosecution for misusing the organization’s funds, a source told the TV station Dozhd. Sokolova and her attorney deny this report, however, saying that her current trip abroad is planned business travel.

On August 6, federal officials announced an investigation into the alleged misuse of the Doctor Liza Foundation’s money by unnamed staff to hire two lawyers for the same work. Sokolova says Investigative Committee General Igor Komissarov is gunning for her personally. After she was removed as president of the group, Sokolova accused her opponents of staging a “raiders’ takeover.”

Yours, Meduza