Christmas tree in picket

Novaya's columnist Boris Vishnevsky talks about why the dictatorship doesn't know how to deal with crises

medical workers have died in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (*according to the “Memory List”)

Dilyara Rainina, coordinator of the Khodorkovsky Defense Group, was fined. The activist was accused of holding an “unauthorized public event” on April 27 – a picket at the US Consulate General. The opposition claims: there was no picket...

The opposition was tried in absentia

Rainina is surprised

On May 3, the trial participants gathered in the 201st precinct of Magistrate Olga Vasilenko, but the conversation took place exclusively in the deliberation room. There it turned out that the police did not attach to the case file the notice of picket submitted by Rainina, and the original document was taken from Rainina by the deputy head of the Central District Department of Internal Affairs, Lieutenant Colonel Kuzmichev, who took part in her arrest. After the judge announced that she would summon Kuzmichev and only then begin the trial in the courtroom, Rainina and her lawyer Ivan Pavlov left the station and began to wait for a summons to assign the case. Imagine their surprise when on May 15 it turned out that everything had already been considered! And even then, on May 3...
The resolution on the “Rainina case”, issued to her, is a truly amazing document.
It turns out that Rainina, having stated that she had sent a notice to the city administration, “refused to give other explanations and left the court premises during the interrogation of the witness” (all this, we recall, happened in the deliberation room; the meeting was not legally opened). It turns out that witness Sokolovsky, an employee of the Central District Department of Internal Affairs, reported that “at about 5 p.m., a group of citizens led by an organizer approached house 15 on Furshtadskaya Street (where the US Consulate is located) and began picketing.” It turns out that, according to Sokolovsky’s testimony, “after some time another group of citizens joined them and began to disturb public order, namely, they shouted loudly, threw leaflets, then they put up a wooden Christmas tree and tried to set it on fire,” in connection with which Sokolovsky “made a decision to detain the organizer of the event.” It turns out, finally, that “when detained, Rainina did not present a notice of holding a public event.” Meanwhile, the Committee on Legality, Law and Order and Security “due to the fact that the declared location of the public event is a narrow pedestrian zone” and “taking into account the holding of anti-terrorism events at the locations of foreign consulates and in order to ensure the safety of picket participants and citizens” (!), suggested that Rainina hold a picket not in front of the US Consulate, but in front of the Lenin monument at the Finlyandsky Station... In light of all this, the court found Rainina’s guilt fully proven and fined her under two articles of the Code of Administrative Offenses for a total of 1,500 rubles.
“The only thing I completely agree with,” says Dilyara Rainina, “is that when proposing to move the picket to the Finlyandsky Station, the administration really cared about the safety of the picket participants. Judging by how the police greeted us at the US consulate, Finlyandsky would have been much safer. True, I don’t really understand who at the station we would hand over an appeal to the US Congress... Everything else is a complete linden. Mr. Sokolovsky states that we started picketing at about 5 p.m. - but I have a lot of witnesses who can show that I did not reach the place where the picket was supposed to take place and was detained on the approaches to the consulate, and there simply was no picket. By the way, even in Sokolovsky’s report it is written that I was detained at 16:30. I showed all the notices to the police - there are also many witnesses to this. As for the Christmas tree, there was one, but it was brought by picketers from the United Russia Young Guard! They hung apples and lemons on it (they probably read Surkov’s works that “apples and lemons now grow on the same branch”) and tried to set it on fire. But why on earth should I be considered the organizer of their picket? Of course, we will appeal this court decision, but this is simply chaos: to make a decision in the absence of those who are accused, openly flouting procedural norms. Or will they now have such a practice – trials in absentia of the opposition? So we already had this...

Boris VISHNEVSKY
Photo by Alexander BANKOV