The Real Russia. Today. Moscow City Hall's favorite software team, Yabloko's civil war, and two years for some Telegram posts

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

This day in history. On June 26, 1997, Kaspersky Lab was founded.

• A software developer with big Moscow City Hall contracts is behind a pro-Sobyanin “social movement”
• Yabloko is suing itself
• Academics come to Shaninka's defense
• Putin fires his firebrand envoy to Russia's Ural Federal District
• Ukrainian officials boot out another Russian journalist
• 200 people protest in Irkutsk against the jailing of a local disabled businessman
• A man in Kaliningrad gets two years in prison for a few Telegram posts
• Alexey Navalny loses another defamation lawsuit brought by a billionaire

Bankrolling Sobyanin's re-election 💰

The developers behind a supposed social movement’s pro-Sobyanin website, “ZaSobyanina,” appear to be from “Altariks” — the same company that has won tens of millions of rubles in no-bid procurement deals to build mobile apps for the city of Moscow, notably the “Active Citizen” electronic service that resembles SeeClickFix in the United States.

In 2017, Moscow city officials infamously cut off public access to an application programming interface (API) for an electronic diary meant for local school children, after a developer created freeware that would have obviated the need for paid services designed by Taktik Labs (a company with close ties to Altariks).

An apple divided against itself cannot nominate 🍎

The federal bureau of the “Yabloko” political party is being sued for refusing to nominate Moscow branch leader Sergey Mitrokhin as the party’s candidate in this September’s Moscow mayoral election. The party held primaries in Moscow, but the winner withdrew his candidacy in favor of Mitrokhin’s. Afterwards, Yabloko’s federal bureau refused to nominate Mitrokhin, though the party’s Moscow branch submitted his candidacy paperwork to the Moscow Election Commission.

It’s still unclear who exactly is suing Yabloko’s federal bureau: Mitrokhin or the party’s Moscow branch. Mitrokhin says the federal bureau’s refusal to nominate him constitutes a “gross violation of the party’s charter” and is meant to show “obedience” in a noncompetitive race that the incumbent, Sergey Sobyanin, is expected to win easily.

Academics rally to Shaninka's defense 🎓

More than 230 academics from Russia and other countries have signed an open letter calling on Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor) to reconsider its decision to revoke the state accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, better known as “Shaninka.” The letter describes the school as one of Russia’s leading humanities colleges and argues that the code violations discovered by inspectors can be addressed easily without any regulatory penalty.

The list of signatures includes Dmitry Zimin, the honorary president of the telecommunications company VimpelCom and the founder of the “Dynasty” private scientific research fund, which closed in 2015 after Russia’s Justice Ministry designated it as a “foreign agent.”

On June 21, 2018, Rosobrnadzor announced that it had revoked Shaninka’s state accreditation, after a planned inspection uncovered “multiple violations of education standards.” In 2016, the same agency withdrew the education license of the European University in St. Petersburg — another leading school in the humanities.

Meduza took a closer look at Russia’s college accreditation process, and spoke to Shaninka’s social sciences dean and sociology department head:

• Regulators have revoked their accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, one of Russia's last major private colleges
• “‘This whole farce would make a decent hands-on course of its own’: Shaninka’s social sciences dean discusses the school’s loss of Russian accreditation”

Putin's blue collar firebrand is out 👷

Vladimir Putin signed several executive orders on Tuesday, firing multiple federal district presidential envoys, including Igor Kholmanskikh, Putin’s representative in the Ural Federal District since 2012. He’s being replaced by Nikolai Tsukanov, who served as governor of Kaliningrad from 2010 until 2016 and Northwestern Federal District president envoy in 2016 and 2017.

Before representing Putin in the Ural Federal District, Kholmanskikh worked as chief assembly manager for Uralvagonzavod. In this capacity, at the height of anti-government protests in December 2011, he famously spoke to Putin during his live call-in TV show and offered to bring “his guys” to Moscow to confront the demonstrators.

Another Russian journalist is booted out of Ukraine 📰

Officials in Kyiv detained the Russian journalist Evgeny Primakov on Tuesday. He reportedly planned to speak at a conference for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. On Facebook, Primakov said he has been barred from visiting Ukraine as a national security threat, and the Ukrainian authorities would soon put him on a plane back to Moscow. Primakov heads an organization called “Russian Humanitarian Mission” and hosts an international news show on Russian state television. He’s also a member of Russia’s Civic Chamber.

On May 15, Ukrainian officials arrested Kirill Vyshinsky, the chief editor of RIA Novosti Ukraine, on charges of treason. Ukraine’s National Security Agency says Vyshinsky was carrying out subversive activities on the Kremlin's behalf. Vyshinsky says he renounces his Ukrainian citizenship (he also has a Russian passport). Federal investigators in Moscow are treating Vyshinsky’s arrest as an illegal obstruction of journalism and the knowing prosecution of an innocent man.

Mr. Lebowski is disabled, yes ♿

Roughly 200 people turned out for a permitted protest in Irkutsk on Tuesday, demanding the release of a disabled local entrepreneur jailed for supposedly organizing the kidnapping of his ex-wife and current business partner. Confined to a wheelchair for the past 15 years, Dmitry Matveyev also suffers from epilepsy, and therefore should not be confined to pretrial incarceration, argues a local disabled people’s rights group. The region’s human rights commissioner has also criticized Matveyev’s detention, saying that disabled suspects are usually placed under house arrest.

Two years for some audio posts 📣

A man in Kaliningrad has been sentenced to two years in prison for inciting acts of terrorism, the murder of police officers, and the violent overthrow of the state in audio messages posted on the instant messenger Telegram. Alexander Petrovsky shared the recordings in a chat group called “Revolution: Kaliningrad,” but he says prosecutors used his messages out of context. The verdict was handed down in late May, but journalists only learned about it a month later.

Petrovsky was detained on November 5, when Russian law enforcement arrested roughly 400 supposed sympathizers of the banned political movement Artpodgotovka. The movement’s founder, Vyacheslav Maltsev, was arrested in absentia last summer and has lived abroad ever since. Last November, Artpodgotovka activists planned a “revolution” on the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Another courtroom loss ⚖

Alexey Navalny has lost another defamation lawsuit brought by a billionaire. A Moscow district court ruled on Tuesday that Navalny defamed Mikhail Prokhorov when he claimed in a recent Anti-Corruption Foundation report that Prokhorov bribed then Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin by paying three times the market value for his Italian villa. Prokhorov insists that he paid a fair price (35.5 million euros, or $41.4 million), and Khloponin’s spokespeople say he paid all the necessary taxes on the sale.

Navalny has until 10 days after the ruling takes effect to retract his allegations, and he was also fined one ruble in accordance with Prokhorov’s request for symbolic compensation for non-pecuniary damages.

Navalny has previously lost similar defamation lawsuits brought by the billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Alisher Usmanov.