The Real Russia. Today. More details about Shaninka’s accreditation loss, pension reform protests are coming, and a 75-year-old Stalin assassination case is declassified

Friday, June 22, 2018

This day in history. On June 22, 1941, the Axis invaded the USSR. Operation Barbarossa started with the German bombing of major cities in Soviet-occupied Poland and an artillery barrage of Red Army defenses along the entire front. Stalin didn’t address the nation about the Nazi invasion until July 3.

• The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (“Shaninka”) loses its state accreditation
• Navalny’s people try once again to register a political party
• City officials across Russia decide whether or not to allow protests against proposed pension reforms
• Yandex.Taxi’s self-driving car completes its first long-distance trip
• A Moscow city committee is offering $382,000 to help thwart protests against unpopular urban planning policies
• A Russian soccer fan apologizes for groping and kissing a Deutsche Welle reporter on live TV
• Russia declassifies records from a case against four soccer legends accused of plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin
• Russia’s Central Bank revokes the license for Mosuralbank (co-owned by Igor Sechin’s ex-wife)
• The former spokesman for Russia’s federal censor gets some good news, but he’s still under house arrest

The crackdown against Shaninka 🎓

The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, known as “Shaninka,” is one of Russia’s main universities for the study of the humanities. Rosobrnadzor determined that Shaninka doesn’t observe Russian education standards, and now the school can’t issue state-recognized diplomas. The inspection was planned, and Shaninka was prepared. An unconfirmed report suggests that the results were obvious before they were announced.

• Read Meduza’s report here: “Regulators have revoked their accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, one of Russia’s last major private colleges”

Alexey Navalny and friends

✊ The People’s Progress Party of the Future

Staff from Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation have submitted paperwork to the Justice Ministry to register a new political party called “Russia of the Future.” The group’s founding convention took place in mid-May, when Navalny was serving out a month-long jail sentence for organizing unpermitted anti-Putin protests on May 5. The group kept the party’s name a secret until the last moment, trying to prevent “spoiler parties” from stealing their name and blocking their registration for a third straight time.

Navalny has been trying to register his own political party for the past five years. First he tried to establish “The People’s Alliance,” and then came “The Progress Party.” The Justice Ministry refused to register these groups, saying it never received copies of registration documents from regional offices in more than half the regions in Russia (a requirement for registering a national political party). Navalny’s most recent rejection was in January 2018, and he is challenging that decision in the European Court of Human Rights.

Navalny has had to change his initiative’s name several times because political opponents keep stealing the name and registering their own groups, blocking his applications. In 2013, the political consultant Andrey Bogdanov snatched away the name “The People’s Alliance,” and in 2018 one of Navalny’s former associates teamed up with Bogdanov to steal “The Progress Party.”

🧓 Protesting the proposed pension reforms

Seven cities have issued demonstration permits to Alexey Navalny’s supporters for protests on July 1 against proposed pension reforms. The authorities in Stavropol, Lipetsk, Belgorod, Krasnodar, Khabarovsk, Murmansk, and Komsomolsk-on-Amur all agreed to allow rallies, though they offered the activists “alternative venues” at less central public spaces. At least three cities have rejected permit requests from Navalny’s activists. The Anti-Corruption Foundation hopes to stage protests in 20 cities.

How do officials justify their refusal to grant protest permits? The deputy mayor of Novosibirsk claims that the region’s anti-terrorism commission has tracked incitements shared online to stage July 1 “terrorist attacks against the government in every city and riots with arson attacks against those who defend the state.”

On June 21, Moscow City Hall rejected three permit requests for protests in early July against Russia’s proposed pension reforms. City officials say the demonstrations would interfere with FIFA World Cup festivities.

Russia’s second-largest trade union, the Confederation of Labor, launched a petition on Change.org against the pension reforms, attracting more than a million signatures in just three days. (At the time of this writing, the petition had more than 2.3 million signatures.) The petition argues that the authorities can address the pension system’s deficits by cracking down on “informal employment,” without raising the retirement age. The union says it’s filed protest permit requests in more than 50 cities, and it’s already received permits in four cities.

Earlier this month, the Russian government submitted draft legislation to the State Duma, establishing a plan to raise the country’s retirement age from 60 to 65 for men by 2028, and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034. The reforms would supposedly increase pension benefits for those who live to collect them. Political analyst Konstantin Gaaze recently argued in a Meduza text that the Kremlin isn’t all that afraid of mass protests against pension reforms — yet. Read his piece here.

Where we’re going we don’t need drivers 🚗

Yandex.Taxi’s self-driving car has completed its first long-distance test drive, traveling 11 hours from Moscow to Kazan (485 miles). Throughout the trip, the car was “99 percent in self-driving mode.” Most of the drive was spent on the M7 “Volga” federal highway. You can watch a time-lapse video of the ride here.

Yandex has been working on self-driving cars since 2016. It premiered its first prototype in May 2017, and six months later the company released footage of test drives in the Moscow region.

Procuring some repression 💰

Moscow’s Architecture and Urban Planning Committee is soliciting bids for “informational-analytical support” at public hearings this year and next year. The bids start at 24.1 million rubles. In other words, Moscow City Hall is offering at least $382,000 to any enterprises that can help suppress protests against its unpopular architecture and urban planning policies.

Whoever wins the procurement contract is supposed to forecast the potential controversy of particular city projects, how these situations might develop, and make recommendations for “guiding ‘complicated’ public hearings, when necessary.” The city is accepting bids until July 7.

Moscow’s public hearings offer a forum to discuss projects like land use and development and land surveying, as well as the city’s General Plan and any new reforms. In the past, this has been a venue for public objections to Moscow’s renovation program, which involves the demolition of several thousand homes, especially Soviet-era five-story apartment buildings.

He’s sorry 😘🖐

A Russian man named Ruslan has publicly apologized to the Deutsche Welle reporter Juliette Gonzalez Teran, whom he kissed and groped while screaming “Russia is the champion!” during a live broadcast from Moscow on June 14. Seven days later, the man came to Deutsche Welle’s Moscow correspondent point and spoke to Gonzalez Teran via Skype in broken English, admitting that he acted “uncourteously.”

“I thought I was putting my hand on her shoulder, but apparently I missed a little and touched her chest with my left hand,” Ruslan explained, confessing that “a dumb joke about a kiss on the cheek became sexual harassment.” Gonzalez Teran accepted his apology, adding that she “refuses to be a victim.”

A blast from the past 🕰

The Russian media hiccuped slightly on Friday, reporting that an old face from the Yeltsin presidency has returned to the Kremlin, citing an executive order published on the Kremlin’s website on June 22, stating that Putin has appointed Valentin Yumashev to serve as an unsalaried adviser. Yumashev was Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff in the turbulent years of 1997 and 1998. In 2000, he became one of the founders of the Yeltsin Center.

Why did the media “hiccup”? Yeltsin Center deputy director Lyudmila Telen quickly clarified that Yumashev has served as the president’s unsalaried adviser for the past 18 years. “His status hasn’t changed,” she told the website Znak.com. Putin’s official spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, later confirmed this information, but he refused to explain why reporters have been unable to find any past confirmation of Yumashev’s adviser role in the Kremlin.

Yumashev is married to one of Yeltsin’s daughters, and his own daughter from his first marriage is now married to the billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

75 years later ️⚽️

On June 20, the newspaper Kommersant published an article revealing new details about the criminal case against Nikolai Starostin, the founder of the Spartak Moscow soccer club, and his three brothers, who played on the team — all of whom were arrested in 1942. The Federal Security Service finally declassified the first two volumes of the case in June 2018, making the documents available to researchers. The rest of the case materials will be unsealed next year. The Soviet authorities tried to convict these brothers — now legends of Russian soccer — of plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin at the 1937 May Day Parade in a series of terrorist attacks.

• Read Meduza’s summary here: “The Starostin brothers: After 75 years, Russia has finally declassified a case against four soccer legends accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin”

Ms. Sechina’s dirty dealings 🏦

Russia’s Central Bank has revoked Mosuralbank’s license, accusing it of “serving shareholders’ interests” and providing unreliable financial records. One of the bank’s co-owners is Igor Sechin’s ex-wife, Marina. (They divorced in 2011, when Sechin was a deputy prime minister.)

“The bank’s business model had a distinct captive nature and was focused on serving the interests of shareholders and affiliated persons, which led to a significant number of toxic assets on its balance sheet,” the regulator concluded, adding that Mosuralbank filed false reports with the Central Bank. Officials have reportedly provided information about Mosuralbank’s possible criminal actions to Russian law enforcement.

In terms of assets, Mosuralbank is Russia’s 269th largest bank. It has branches in Moscow, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Sverdlovsk, and Chelyabinsk.

The “dead souls” case is down to one 💀

Vadim Ampelonsky, the former press secretary of Russia’s federal censor, got some good news this week. According to the lawyer for one of the suspects named in his embezzlement case, the charges now concern “one episode” instead of nine. It’s unclear, however, what incident has become the sole focus of the investigation. On June 22, the Moscow City Court refused to release Ampelonsky from house arrest while police build their evidence against him.

Ampelonsky and his accomplices allegedly organized a criminal scheme wherein they billed the government for fictitious staff. The suspects in the case say any extra money they earned at Roskomnadzor was payment for “irregular work.”