The Real Russia. Today. Attacks in Chechnya, counting Russia's torture cases, and surprise inspections ahead of massive military drills

Monday, August 20, 2018

This day in history. On August 20, 1940, acting on orders from the NKVD, Ramón Mercader attacked Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico. Trotsky died a day later at the age of 60, succumbing to blood loss and shock.

• A series of coordinated attacks by militants in Chechnya
• Meduza lists all reported torture cases in Russia since the beginning of the year
• Former Russian lawmaker's son leaps to his death, handcuffed to his girlfriend
• Russian extremism case suspect begs for help, as co-defendants are released on house arrest
• Russian blogger uncovers a treasure trove of police records at an abandoned station in Moscow
• Is Russia giving up on building helicopter-carrier ships? (Maybe.)
• Putin orders surprise combat-readiness inspections ahead of massive military drills with China
• Russian composer is charged with falsely reporting an act of terrorism because he threatened his noisy neighbors
• Sergey Udaltsov's hunger strike is making him unwell
• Joking about Russian chauvinists could land a St. Petersburg man in compulsory psychiatric care
• Samara's ‘pyramids of shame’ are over
• Parents appeal to Putin for help with access to unregistered antiepileptic drugs, as Health Ministry officials deny any problems
• New national polls show ignorance about the Prague Spring and paranoia about foreigners undermining Russia's values and history

Chechnya “at peace” 💥

Chechnya sustained what appeared to be a series of coordinated attacks on August 20. At the time of this writing, the only confirmed attack was against a police station in the Shalinsky District by two men armed with knives, where two officers were reportedly injured, and the attackers were shot. An anonymous source also told the news agency RIA Novosti that a woman bystander was injured. A source told TASS that one of the attackers was carrying an explosive. A suicide bomber also attacked traffic police officers in Mesker-Yurt (in the same Chechen district), reportedly failing to kill anyone, including himself.

According to unconfirmed reports by the Telegram channel Mash, there were also attacks in Grozny, where a militant was shot after hitting a traffic policeman with his car, and officers and militants shot at each other at the intersection between Pervyomaiskaya and Isaev streets, possibly killing one officer.

Sources told Interfax that there were four attackers in all. At least five police officers and two bystanders were injured in the attacks.

Here are all the reported torture cases in Russia's prison system, so far this year 📇

People in Russia are tortured all the time. By prison guards, police officers, investigators, FSB agents, and others. They’re beaten with fists, clubs, bottles of water, kicked, handcuffed, tied up, electrocuted, suffocated, strangled, gassed, and waterboarded. They’re starved, deafened, and forced to shit themselves. But it’s impossible to say how many people are tortured in Russia — there are no reliable statistics here. Victims are afraid to come forward, and the authorities often refuse to open criminal investigations, even when people speak up. Meduza as compiled a list of all reported torture cases in Russia this year, relying on information published by journalists and human rights organizations. The list is incomplete, of course, but the several dozen cases we found should help readers grasp the scale of the problem.

• Read the list here.

An unlikely protest icon jumps to his death ⚰️

On Saturday, August 18, the Telegram channel Mash reported the deaths of two young people in the town of Zheleznodorozhny, outside Moscow. An 18-year-old male and a 20-year-old female jumped from the roof of a high-rise building. According to Mash, the two were handcuffed to each other.

The young man was Roman Shingarkin, the son of the former State Duma deputy Maxim Shingarkin, who has confirmed his son’s death. Roman was a student at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. Before he killed himself, Roman set his Vkontakte profile picture to an image of Legos forming two figures joining hands above the word “suicide.” In his final post on social media, he wrote that his life had become a “chain of suffering,” and said “it will be better this way.”

Roman Shingarkin made headlines thanks to his actions at an anti-corruption protest on March 26, 2017, when young people turned out in large numbers at a political rally for the first time in years. Organized by the activist Alexey Navalny, the demonstration didn’t have a permit from Moscow city officials, and police ended up detaining more than a thousand people, four of whom were later convicted of resisting arrest. Shingarkin evaded the police by climbing a street lamp and watching the protest from above. He and another demonstrator were eventually caught and detained. Footage of the incident — a show of civil disobedience from the son of a former federal lawmaker — spread quickly online.

• Read the whole story: “Former Russian lawmaker's son leaps to his death, handcuffed to his girlfriend”

Still behind bars 🚨

Anna Pavlikova and Maria Dubovik, the two teenage women locked up as members of the “Novoe Velichie” (New Greatness) extremist movement, went “free” on house arrest last week. Activists celebrated the news, but 30-year-old Dmitry Poletaev — another suspect in the case — has been in pretrial detention since March 16, and he’s just shared a letter with the OVD-Info human rights media project where he says he’s “desperate for any support, moral or financial,” to help him get out of jail. Poletaev sent the letter through his mother, who redacted some of the text.

Poletaev claims he was the victim of someone “trying to stir up trouble” who “cleverly and cynically embedded himself” in their group. He says this person tried to “turn ordinary people into combatants,” and taught Novoe Velichie’s members “idealistic worldviews,” in order to manipulate them. Poletaev never names the “provocateur” who infiltrated the group, but journalists have reported that an undercover police officer joined Novoe Velichie, posing as someone named “Ruslan.”

Four suspects in the Novoe Velichie case remain behind bars. In addition to Dmitry Poletaev, there’s the group's supposed leader, Ruslan Kostylenkov, and two more participants: Vyacheslav Kryukov and Petr Karamzin. The remaining six defendants have been released on house arrest. On August 16, the Solidarity With Political Prisoners Union announced a crowdfunding effort for the Novoe Velichie suspects. The money will support legal fees and care packages sent to the people still in jail.

• Read the whole story: “The girls have gone free, but what about Dima? Russian extremism case suspect begs for help, as co-defendants are released on house arrest”

At an abandoned police station, mountains of old passports 👮

On August 16, blogger Lana Sator, a self-described “urbex [urban exploration] tourist” published photographs from an abandoned building on Bolshaya Cheremushkinskaya Street, which once housed a police station and office of the (now dissolved) Federal Migration Service. Sator says she crawled into the two-story building through an open window. The building was unguarded and the gate in the fence surrounding the site was unlocked.

“Observing the protections on personal data with all their hearts!” Sator wrote sarcastically on social media. “There are cubic meters of documents abandoned in this building: applications with copies of various certificates, boxes with Muscovites’ IDs and passports, criminal and misdemeanor case files, juvenile delinquents’ records, officers’ personnel files, and more.” Sator also showed Meduza several photos of the abandoned station that she didn’t publish on social media.

Police have now removed the documents, but Sator says there are many other abandoned buildings throughout Moscow. Sator told Meduza that you can almost always find documents lying around in abandoned government buildings. “They’re constantly leaving behind waste paper, but it’s rare to find personal documents or official records like this,” the blogger explained.

• Read Meduza's full report here: “Russian blogger uncovers a treasure trove of police records at an abandoned station in Moscow”

Military stuff

🚁 All dressed up and no helicopter to go

There’s some confusion in Russia’s shipbuilding business about whether or not the country is done trying to build helicopter carriers. Russia’s industry and trade minister, Denis Manturov, said in an interview with the news agency Interfax on August 20 that these projects, “in a pure sense of the word,” are over, though the Navy will retain a few such ships. (Manturov added that Russia is still discussing the construction of a second aircraft carrier.) Almost immediately after the interview was published, however, a “high-placed source in Russia’s shipbuilding industry” told RIA Novosti that the Defense Ministry hasn’t yet made up its mind about the future of helicopter-carrier construction in Russia.

In June 2017, Viktor Bursuk, the deputy head of Russia’s Navy, said the country planned to acquire two helicopter-carrier ships and complete work on a new aircraft carrier before 2025.

Moscow wanted to buy two Mistral-class helicopter-carrier ships from France, but the deal fell through in 2015, following the annexation of Crimea. Those vessels, built for Russia, were ultimately sold to Egypt.

📯 A-ten-hut!

Vladimir Putin has ordered surprise combat-readiness inspections of Russia’s Central and Eastern military districts, Northern Fleet, and Airborne Troops, ahead of the “Vostok-2018” military exercises, which Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu says will be Moscow’s biggest since Soviet war games at Poland’s border in 1981. Soldiers from China and Mongolia will participate in Russia’s military drills next month. The unscheduled troop review will run from August 20 until August 25.

Criminal justice

📞 Don't call angry

The composer Mikhail Orlov faces felony charges for threatening his neighbors, after remodeling noise repeatedly interrupted his work at his home studio. Orlov is accused of making a false report about a terrorist attack because he called his neighbors in a fit of rage and screamed, “I’ll blow you all to hell!” Police apparently hadn’t responded to his complaints about the noise, but they showed up at his door after the phone call and booked him. Orlov faces a possible fine or up to three years of probation.

🍽️ Russia's other hunger strike

Leftist activist Sergey Udaltsov is committed to his hunger strike, even after being hospitalized on August 19, five days after he was jailed for “repeated violations of laws on public demonstrations” at a protest against raising Russia’s retirement age. Udaltsov’s wife says he is refusing to eat or drink anything and is surviving on intravenous injections. He’s also started to hallucinate. She describes his condition as “not good.” Udaltsov is currently serving a 30-day jail sentence.

On August 8, 2017, he went free from prison after serving 4.5 years for allegedly organizing an anti-Kremlin riot in May 2012.

🙏 Blessed are the vatniki

A man in St. Petersburg faces extremism charges over two reposts on Vkontakte from 2015, when he shared a joke about the impossibility of positive changes after elections and later reposted a cartoon about “vatniki” (militant supporters of Russia’s military actions abroad). On August 20, prosecutors asked the court to order the man to undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment, citing testimony that his “extremist actions” were the result of mental illness. The suspect’s lawyer is trying to get that expertise thrown out.

In 2017, a court in Saratov convicted a local Internet user of extremism for posting negative comments about vatniki, sentencing him to 160 hours of community service.

🔺 Shame is over

Samara’s little experiment with “pyramids of shame” has apparently come to an end. Since May, a local utility company has been installing the gigantic pyramids outside the homes of customers who fall behind on their bills. (The company even used a crane to hang one outside a client’s apartment window.) In late July, one man decided to rid himself of the pyramid by hiring a truck to cart it away. The company later retrieved the object and filed a theft report against him. Police opened a criminal case, and the debtor suddenly faced up to two years in prison. No longer. On August 20, prosecutors closed the case and announced that the utility company doesn’t have the right to deposit “shame pyramids” outside the homes of its customers.

• Read more about the “pyramid heist” in late July here.

Dear Putin ✉️

Parents of terminally ill children and children with epilepsy, as well as staff at palliative care centers, have addressed an open letter to Vladimir Putin, calling on the president to provide access to vital medicines not currently registered in Russia — specifically the calming substance Diazepam. The letter’s authors complain that Russia currently lacks a system for determining how many children in the country today need unregistered antiepileptic drugs. In a recent interview, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova claimed that only seven children nationwide need such medicines, but the letter to Putin says the real number is closer to 23,000.

In June 2018, a woman in Moscow named Ekaterina Konnova was charged with trafficking illegal drugs after she tried to sell her personal supply of Diazepam, left over from treating her child. If convicted, Konnova could have gone to jail for as long as eight years. The case became a national scandal, and police promptly dropped the charges after public criticism from the Kremlin.

Sociological surveys

👍 The Prague Spring

“More than a third of Russians say the Soviet Union was correct to intervene in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and nearly half of the population says it knows nothing about the invasion at all, according to new polling data obtained by The Guardian before its release on the 50th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague spring. The polling data reflects the resurgence of ‘Brezhnev-era propaganda, stereotypes of the Soviet period,’ said Lev Gudkov of Russia’s Levada Center.” Read the story at The Guardian.

🤢 Nasty foreigners

Two-thirds of Russians (63 percent) say they believe there are organizations working to destroy Russians’ spiritual values and propagate “unconventional sexual relations,” according to a new national survey by the state-owned pollster VTSiOM. This paranoia is most common among people between the ages of 45 and 59 and Russians with advanced degrees. Less than a quarter of the population (24 percent) say they believe that activists defending LGBT rights are not working to destroy the country’s spiritual values, arguing that “gay propaganda” is a myth. Roughly half (48 percent) of Russians between the ages of 18 and 24 express this view.

Even more Russians (66 percent) say they believe a certain group of people want to rewrite the country’s history in order to “harm Russia and diminish its greatness.” Twenty-six percent of respondents dismissed this idea, with 47 percent of young people saying that historians are only interested in uncovering the truth about past events.