free speech and the right to protest in putin's russia

catefrances

heard this mentioned on the radio news this morning. thought it was interesting, especially since ive been reading upmore closely on putin and just between you and me hes a dick.. a very dangerous dick(but i already knew that. and you all should know it too).



http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/arti ... 60703.html


A Moscow court on Wednesday ordered three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot to remain in jail while they await trial on hooliganism charges for a guerilla performance of an anti-Putin song inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

The band’s performance of “Holy Mother, Throw Putin Out!” within Russia’s holiest sanctuary on Feb. 21 has polarized the country and made the jailed band members international cause celebres, with some calling them political prisoners.

The Tagansky district court ruled that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 19, should remain in detention until July 24, rejecting a plea by their lawyers that they be released on bail until their trial begins.

The court sided with prosecutors who argued that the band members could destroy evidence while free.

The women, all students, were arrested in February and charged with hooliganism by an organized group as part of a premeditated conspiracy motivated by religious hatred. The women, two of them mothers of young children, face up to seven years in jail if convicted.

The episode originally came to widespread public attention through a YouTube video of the band purportedly playing the song inside the cathedral. But the women’s lawyers have argued that the band did not actually perform in the building and only shouted slogans before being ushered out by security.

The attorneys said the band later added audio that had been spliced with video of them playing instruments inside another church on a different day and have released unedited footage to back their claims.

Police hauled away 15 supporters of the women after scuffles broke out among several hundred noisy protesters — both for and against the band — who had gathered outside the court.

Several well-known artists, including poet Dmitry Bykov and punk musician Alexander “Chacha” Ivanov, came out in support of the band.

“I am an Orthodox Christian and the bible teaches to express compassion, so I am appealing to the authorities to express it,” Ivanov said.

Patriarch Kirill, who is close to President Vladimir Putin and has become one of the country’s most influential figures, has called the performance an “abomination,” and several high-ranking Russian church officials have called for the women to be punished.

Some Orthodox activists who stood outside the court wearing T-shirts bearing the imperial flag urged harsh justice for the members of the band.

“Those bastards have committed a sacrilegious act. Before the revolution, those kind of activities were punished with back-breaking labor,” said Vladimir Sergeyev, a churchgoer who said he works as an altar boy in a Moscow church.

Political columnist Mikhail Fishman said the church’s hardline position shows that it is fearful of losing respect among believers as a “sacred institution.”

“Many believers now see the Orthodox religion and Orthodox Church as separate things. It is a big blow and I don’t think the church would be able to recover quickly,” he said


Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/arti ... z1yOKLJTLj
The Moscow Times

catefrances

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/ ... edType=RSS



(Reuters) - Three members of Russian women's punk band Pussy Riot, who derided President Vladimir Putin in a protest in Moscow's main cathedral, were denied bail on Wednesday despite calls for their release by hundreds of supporters at the hearing.

Police hauled away more than 15 people when a crowd of about 300 whistled, chanted "Freedom" and unfurled banners demanding the released of the band members who have been held in pre-trial detention since early March.

Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich face up to seven years in jail for hooliganism after storming the altar of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral on February 21 in short dresses and colorful masks to sing a "punk prayer" that offended some Russian Orthodox believers.

Their rendition of "Holy Mother, throw Putin out!" was a protest against the close relationship between the Church and Putin, whom it backed in the presidential election he won in March.

The act was part of a protest movement against Putin's 12-year dominance that at its peak saw 100,000 people take part in winter street protests in Moscow. Their arrest has drawn widespread outrage among activists and human rights groups.

Amnesty International urged Russia in April to free the women, criticizing the severity of the response by authorities.

But in a packed courtroom the judge extended their jailing until July 24 after prosecutors argued they should be kept behind bars to prevent them fleeing abroad or planning another performance.

"NOT GUILTY"

"I am entirely convinced I am not guilty. It is strange they are keeping me here so long," said Alyokhina, who wore a beige dress and clutched a bible at the hearing.

Sitting next to her cage in the courtroom was her mother who is caring for Alyokhina's 5-year-old son while she is in jail.

Brought in one by one for separate back-to-back hearings, Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich looked calm, smiling to photographers and greeting friends and family through the bars of the courtroom defendant's cage.

Defense lawyers for the jailed women see the case as political and said they filed an appeal against their detention to the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday.

"(The documents) try not to make it look like a political case but focus on offence for religious feelings, and they also speak of inciting hatred," Violetta Volkova, lawyer for Samutsevich, told Reuters outside the courtroom.

"But for us, it's obviously political. And when somebody says there are no political prisoners in the country, we feel like laughing."

The Church's support for Putin, whose rule has been described by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church as a "miracle of God", has angered many members of the anti-Putin protest movement that has sprung up in the past seven months.

But some Orthodox believers have called for tough punishment for the women over an act they regard as blasphemous.

(Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; Editing by Sophie Hares)

Jason P

They found a really great way to promote their band.

unsung

I hear Putin and Obama swap kill lists over borscht.

peacefrompaul

The guy was in the KGB... I don't expect anything less.

catefrances

peacefrompaul wrote:

The guy was in the KGB... I don't expect anything less.

and then theres this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magaz ... wanted=all

Who Fears a Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky?


Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his country’s richest man, has resided in “gulag lite,” as he calls the Russian penal system under Vladimir Putin, for six years. Since the spring, on most working days he is roused at 6:45 in the morning, surrounded by guards and packed into an armored van for the drive to court. For two hours each way, the man who once supplied 2 percent of the world’s oil crouches in a steel cage measuring 47 by 31 by 20 inches. Convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 2005, Khodorkovsky now faces a fresh set of charges that add up to the supposed theft of $30 billion. In the dark of the van, Khodorkovsky tries to prepare for his trial, replaying in his mind his night reading, the daily stack of documents from his lawyers. But Russia’s most famous prisoner worries too about what would happen if a car slammed into the van. (Collisions are routine in Moscow’s clotted avenues.) “Your chances of making it out alive,” he wrote me one day this summer, “at any speed, are next to none.”

Khodorkovsky (pronounced ko-door-KOFF-skee) has spent more than 2,200 days behind bars. He cannot receive reporters. Yet the ban has brought a revival of a dissident tradition dating back to Ivan Grozny and Prince Andrey Kurbsky in the 16th century: the epistolary exchange. For several months this year, from July until October, Khodorkovsky and I were able to conduct a series of exchanges — as he has done with other correspondents, both foreign and native — filtered through the hands of lawyers (who transcribe his oral replies) and avoiding the eyes of prison officials. In court, he has maintained that he fails to understand the case against him. The new indictment runs 3,487 pages but boils down to a single accusation: that the former C.E.O. of the Yukos oil firm and his deputy, Platon Lebedev, were part of an “organized criminal group” that stole 350 million tons of oil from their company between 1998 to 2003. The tonnage exceeds Yukos’s production during the period in question. If convicted, Khodorkovsky, whose first sentence ends in 2011, could face an additional 22 years in jail.

In the decade since Putin’s rise, Russians have grown inured to celebrity criminal cases. The murders of politicians, journalists and human rights activists; apartment-house blocks bombed to ruins; the carnage of the hostage sieges in Moscow and Beslan — the acts of horror and terror have numbed the populace. The exception is the delo Khodorkovskogo — the Khodorkovsky case. No other affair has lingered as long in the minds of so many. The case marked a turning point for Russia, the divide between the turbulent Yeltsin years and the stricter rule of the Putin era. And today, in its second iteration unfolding in Moscow, much more than the fate of an oligarch hangs in the balance.

From the start of his presidency on New Year’s Day 2000, Putin was on a roll. But it was the takedown of Khodorkovsky in 2003 that upped the ante. Under Yeltsin, the chieftains of Russia’s vast financial-investment groups held sway over the vital industries (oil, metals, banking and media) and, to a large degree, held the government hostage. That changed on a frigid October night, when masked agents of the Federal Security Service boarded a plane on a Siberian tarmac and enacted one of the most famous perp walks in Russian history, an oligarch returned to the capital at gunpoint.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest stunned Russian nationalists and Western hedge-fund managers alike. Putin had forced the oligarchs to toe a new party line: profits could be blessed, but only if politics stayed off-limits. “The Yukos case marked the start, in 2003, of gosudarstvennoe reiderstvo” — “state raiding” — Khodorkovsky told me in a Russian-language reply last month. For edification, he explained ‘‘reiderstvo,” a word borrowed from Wall Street that has entered the language of Pushkin: “That is, the seizure of others’ property with the aid of state institutions (first and foremost, the organs of law enforcement).” The attacks, he argued from jail, spelled “a disaster for Russian business.” Under Putin, the state blithely acquired a string of Russia’s fattest companies — first and foremost, Khodorkovsky’s own. Despite assurances that the Kremlin would never nationalize Yukos, the state oil company Rosneft, led by Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant and former intelligence officer, soon took over Yukos’s most prodigious fields and refineries.

For Putin, the reclamation project proved a boon. Russia’s titans locked arms in a docile chorus and rushed to finance Kremlin projects. For years, as long as the price of Urals crude soared, Putin could forget about an unruly oligarch in a Siberian prison. He could even decamp from the Kremlin, usher in a handpicked successor (Dmitri Medvedev), move to the prime minister’s office and remain the power behind the throne. But the second Khodorkovsky trial has come at an inopportune time. For a decade, Putinism rested on an unsound social contract, a sacrifice of liberties for stability. Now, however, the global downturn has hit. Russia’s economy is projected to contract by 8 percent in 2009, and the number of Russians below the poverty line has grown to 17 percent. At the same time, the Putin-Medvedev diarchy — diarkhiya, pundits term it — is showing its seams, and the campaign against Khodorkovsky, a cornerstone of Putin’s rule, threatens to open fissures. In Moscow, the circle of those who question the hard line has widened beyond marginalized liberals — to oligarchs, politicians, even journalists, who once marched in lock step with the Kremlin. Their voices are unlikely to spur a groundswell of support for Khodorkovsky, much less an organized political opposition. But they do pose a discomfiting question, one that has hung over the Kremlin since the legal campaign began: Who fears a free Khodorkovsky?

THE ANSWER MAY lie in the history. At 46, Mikhail Khodorkovsky has lived several lives. As a boy, he never wanted to be a cosmonaut or a general or a soccer star. He dreamed of becoming a factory boss. That his dream came true, in such stunning fashion, leads you to wonder whether his meteoric rise was a matter of genius, luck, ruthlessness or connections. To be sure, timing, intelligence and muscle all played a part. But the son of engineers had no running start.

Boris Khodorkovsky and his wife, Marina, gave decades to Moscow’s Kalibr plant, maker of high-precision instruments. Yet by 23, their son was an ascendant graduate of one of the U.S.S.R.’s most prestigious chemistry institutes, a state loyalist who had served as the deputy chairman of the institute’s Komsomol, the Communist Youth League. As he sought to take advantage of the improbable opportunities that arose under Mikhail Gorbachev, Khodorkovsky’s Komsomol tenure, a rarity for a Jew in Moscow, would open state doors. By 26, even before the fall of the Soviet Union, he had made his first fortune — importing PCs and selling them at a sixfold profit. Soon he had founded a bank, Menatep, one of the first private brands in Soviet finance.

In 1991, as he reminded me, Khodorkovsky left his wife at home with a rifle and stood inside the besieged White House, seat of the Russian government, as Yeltsin climbed atop a tank and sped the Soviet collapse. In 1995, at 32, Khodorkovsky, leading the savviest team in Moscow, had amassed enough money and contacts to take over Yukos, a state-owned petroleum behemoth, for a $309 million down payment. The following year, he helped stave off the Communists’ revanche and re-elect Yeltsin. By 40, Khodorkovsky reigned among the oligarchs, with a portfolio that had spread from banking to agriculture to oil. As Russia entered the new century, and Yukos rose as its most prodigious oil company, its C.E.O. became a multibillionaire.

Moscow would soon grow famous for operatic oligarchs and Byzantine intrigues, but Khodorkovsky never got caught in a compromising position — never snared at an Alpine resort, a Moscow casino or on a Riviera yacht. Girls, power, even the money, seemed to hold no magic. Where others basked in pomp, he was shy and painfully soft-spoken; you never heard his squeaky voice, a semitone deeper than Mike Tyson’s, at dacha parties for the foreign press, let alone on television. He divorced young but stayed on good terms with his first wife. Inna, his second, he met at the institute. Khodorkovsky was never flashy — he wore jeans and turtlenecks; the family vacationed in Finland — but he radiated the unlikely allure of a muscular technocrat. And yet, even at the top, he seemed adrift, unsure of his role in society. Unlike older Jewish oligarchs, men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who were often animated by old scores to settle, Khodorkovsky did not seem to consider himself an outsider. Lacking a public persona, he came to personify, by default, the revenge of the Soviet geek.

By 2000, Putin had entered the Kremlin. But Khodorkovsky — his net worth reportedly $2.5 billion — tried on a new role. He’d changed, he told colleagues. If in the past, Yukos and Menatep had exploited tax havens, stringing a daisy chain of shell companies across the offshore zones of Europe, Khodorkovsky now became an advocate for corporate governance. The first signs of an evolution had come under Yeltsin. In 1998, Russia suffered a crash — the state devalued the ruble, defaulted on $40 billion in bonds and cut its umbilical cord to the capital markets. Banks collapsed, the stock market tanked and the oligarchs turned desperate. Khodorkovsky, or so he told colleagues at the time, saw the need to reform. Companies that believed in transparency and shareholders’ rights, he now preached, did not fear lean times; they attracted foreign investment, and they grew. Skeptics abounded. It was, at the least, a timely conversion.....

Jason P

It's quite obvious that Putin basically runs a soviet-style blueprint for control of Russia. You don't hear about it in the press much, because those journalist that criticize tend to get thrown out of five-story windows.

I still think it's funny that his ego is so big that he thought he could pull off that scuba diving stunt last year where he miraculously discovered ancient artifacts in the black sea while a horde of media just happened to be around.

peacefrompaul

Jason P wrote:

It's quite obvious that Putin basically runs a soviet-style blueprint for control of Russia. You don't hear about it in the press much, because those journalist that criticize tend to get thrown out of five-story windows.

I still think it's funny that his ego is so big that he thought he could pull off that scuba diving stunt last year where he miraculously discovered ancient artifacts in the black sea while a horde of media just happened to be around.

What ego? He obviously has talent


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4IjHz2yIo

Jason P

putin and JCVD