The Real Russia. Today. Sex lives for Russia's disabled, Bill Browder's new indictment, and Putin's lucky old bodyguards

Monday, November 19, 2018

This day in history. On November 19, 2012, Russian science fiction author Boris Strugatsky died at the age of 79. His most famous novel, co-written with his brother, was “Piknik na Obochine,” which was adapted by filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky into the Soviet classic “Stalker.”

• Disabled people want sex lives and they’re talking about it, but no one in Russia is listening
• Moscow accuses Bill Browder of poisoning Sergey Magnitsky, as Russia is expected to win Interpol's next presidency
• Moscow remodeling controversy leads to encampment and clashes with protesters
• Russian lawmakers want to start regulating the volunteer posse that helps rat out Internet offenders
• Putin's old bodyguards mysteriously acquire lavish real estate outside Moscow
• Tatiana Stanovaya looks at Alexey Navalny as the Kremlin sees him

Afraid for these feelings ♿

There are virtually no legal options available to disabled people in Russia who seek to satisfy their sexual desires. Meduza correspondent Irina Kravtsova traveled to Kaliningrad and spoke to a man with cerebral palsy, to find out more about how Russia treats the sex lives of its most vulnerable adults, and to learn about the work of surrogate partner therapists.

• Read the full report here: “Disabled people want sex lives and they’re talking about it, but no one in Russia is listening”

An incredibly timed announcement ⏲️

The Russian Attorney General’s Office announced on Monday that it is investigating financier and economist Bill Browder as a suspect in the death of Sergey Magnitsky, who died in November 2009, after 11 months in pretrial detention. Russian officials believe Magnitsky and several other “Browder criminal associates” might have been poisoned secretly with certain “chemicals containing aluminum compounds.” Prosecutors say Oleg Lurye, a journalist imprisoned on extortion charges who shared a pretrial detention cell with Magnitsky, apparently endorses their theory.

The Attorney General’s Office is also accusing Browder of involvement in the deaths of businessman and whistle-blower Alexander Perepilichny and three men Russian officials claim helped Browder “facilitate tax fraud and help transfer the proceeds to a network of global bank accounts,” according to The Guardian: Octai Gasanov, Valery Kurochkin, Sergey Korobeinikov.

In an effort to add Browder to international wanted lists and seize his assets abroad, Moscow has opened an organized crime case against him, arguing that companies in Cyprus, Latvia, and Switzerland have been created to cash and launder hundreds of millions of dollars for Browder.

The allegations against Browder come as the Interpol General Assembly is meeting in Dubai, where Russian Interior Ministry official and Interpol Vice-Chair for Europe Alexander Prokopchuk is expected to be elected the organization’s new president.

Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer working for Browder’s investment fund and asset management company, Hermitage Capital Management, uncovered a massive scheme by Russian law enforcement agents to steal 5.4 billion rubles (more than $81.9 million today). As a result, he was arrested on controversial tax evasion charges and subsequently died in pretrial detention.

Russian courts have twice sentenced Bill Browder in absentia to nine years in prison for fraud, tax evasion, and deliberate bankruptcy. Browder says he’s being persecuted because he helped uncover the theft of government funds by high-ranking state officials. While visiting Spain in May 2018, Browder was arrested by local police on a Russian Interpol warrant and transferred to an undisclosed Spanish police station. Two hours later, however, he was released, after Interpol’s general secretary advised Spain not to honor the Russian arrest warrant. Browder said this was the sixth time Russia had “abused” Interpol in his case.

Moscow's apartment politics 👷

The PIK Group, one of the largest real estate and home-builder companies in Russia, is in hot water in Moscow’s Kuntsevo District, where it’s preparing to remodel two apartment buildings. The company has distanced itself from the city’s controversial renovation plan (approved a year ago), stating that it’s actually completing work contracted a full 20 years ago, when Yuri Luzhkov was still Moscow’s mayor.

Despite promises by the PIK Group that displaced locals will be first in line to resettle in the new, more spacious apartments, roughly two dozen protesters started camping at the construction site in Kuntsevo on November 13, blocking access to the area and preventing the start of demolition work. Protesters told Meduza that they’re afraid the new apartment complex will completely gobble up a beloved local courtyard. On November 17, a group of “old ladies and children” were apparently bused to the construction site, where state television cameras filmed them demonstrating in favor of the remodeling work. TV crews ignored the protesters, however. The next day, several police officers came to the encampment and detained three activists, including the politician Sergey Mitrokhin. Others were forced to pack up their tents.

On November 19, construction workers returned in force, accompanied by upwards of 80 private security guards, who shoved their way through the protesters, and escorted heavy machinery to the building site, before it was surrounded by a fence. Protesters then reassembled at the gates to the construction site and tried to block incoming vehicles, leading police to detain another handful of demonstrators, including at least one elderly woman. Protesters said they worry they will be resettled in a more remote part of the city, beyond the Moscow Beltway.

Spokespeople for the PIK Group say they reached out to locals earlier in the year to inform them about the remodeling plans, insisting that residents will be getting upgraded housing. The company also told Meduza that it offered to soundproof locals’ windows, to cut down on disruptions during the construction, but protesters refused. PIK Group has also suggested that the protesters in Kuntsevo are likely outsiders come to stir up trouble or generate publicity for themselves, like Mitrokhin, who will run in the Moscow City Duma elections next year.

Neighborhood watch program in force 🚨

Lawmakers from United Russia are planning to introduce draft legislation that would regulate the country’s patchwork system of “cyber-neighborhood-watch” (adult volunteers who report illegal online content to law enforcement agencies. The law will likely apply to a wide variety of illegal Internet content, including child pornography, hate speech, alcohol sales, prostitution, and far more.

According to human rights monitors at Roskomsvoboda, Russian courts have blocked more than 76,000 websites. State prosecutors frequently submit virtually identical paperwork to judges on multiple websites at once, and courts only very rarely reject censorship requests. The owners and operators of these websites, moreover, typically aren’t invited to these legal proceedings, despite a ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court in April 2018 that this practice is unlawful.

So what’s the main takeaway here? With more volunteers reporting to Roskomnadzor, the Attorney General’s Office, and other agencies in a regulated system, the Russian authorities would likely block even more Internet content.

Putin's lucky bodyguards 💂‍♂️

Novaya Gazeta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project have teamed up for another investigative article, this time revealing that Vladimir Putin’s former bodyguards have managed to acquire valuable real estate in the Moscow region’s Odintsovsky District, scooping up land that was scammed away from sovkhoz farmers in the late 1990s. According to the new report, the farmers were given worthless corporate stock in exchange for the land they received after the USSR’s collapse. The business responsible for seizing this real estate, “Agrocomplex Gorki-2,” even forged several farmers’ signatures on these deals and had protesters prosecuted and beaten.

In 2003, Agrocomplex Gorki-2 sold almost 30 acres of the land to the “Zarya” nonprofit partnership, founded earlier that year by three high-ranking Federal Protective Service officials. The group then divided up this property into 64 plots and proceeded to dole it out — either for free or for a pittance — to fellow FSO officers and security officials who guarded President Putin. Some individuals named in the report are former director of the president’s personal guard Oleg Klimentev, Klimentev’s 16-year-old daughter, Klimentev’s wife, Tula Governor Alexey Dyumin, Dyumin’s father, Dyumin’s brother, Federal Emergency Management Agency head Alexander Kolpakov, Kolpakov’s wife, and others.

Read Novaya Gazeta’s report here in Russian, and check out OCCRP’s write-up here in English.

Navalny as the Kremlin sees him 👀

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist and R.Politik director Tatiana Stanovaya argues that the Kremlin’s main problem with oppositionists like Alexey Navalny is Moscow’s lack of instruments for managing political challenges. Contrary to what most Western observers believe, Stanovaya says, the Kremlin does not fear Navalny and considers him a “built-in” but “manageable destabilizing factor” in Russia’s political system. To “manage” Navalny and keep him outside the system, the state denies him ballot access and keeps him vilified in the media.

Stanovaya says Alexey Navalny currently enjoys three statuses in Russia: political, legal, and informational. In other words, he’s the country’s only “real opposition” because he offers an alternative to the Putin regime; he’s responsible for exposing weaknesses in the Russian justice system by winning lawsuits in the European Court of Human Rights; and he raises tensions among the ruling elites by publishing investigative reports that embarrass top officials and enrage the law enforcement officers who want to see him locked up (like the recent episode with Viktor Zolotov).

The Kremlin’s “management tools” only work, Stanovaya says, when the Putin regime and the state-controlled media enjoy high public support. As domestic concerns overtake the country’s fixation on foreign adventures, as trust in television falls, and so on, federal officials have less power to keep Navalny and others like him from breaking into “systemic politics.” In Russia’s more remote regions, for example, Putin’s endorsement used to be enough to swing an election, but that “magic effect” is gone now, and Navalny has started establishing himself as a genuine political alternative in regional politics, throwing his weight behind “technical candidates” who recently won upset victories in gubernatorial elections.

To manage this rising threat to the Putin regime, Stanovaya says the Kremlin has to decide between “political and strong-arm mechanisms.” Whether the state chooses thaw or crackdown, the options for both approaches narrow, the longer the Kremlin clings to “inertial tactics.”