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The Real Russia. Today. Nazi social networking and a new Telegram crackdown

Source: Meduza

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

This day in history: 75 years ago, on February 4, 1945, the “Yalta Conference” got underway, as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met in Crimea to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe.
  • How a Moscow man from an Uzbek family started the world’s biggest neo-Nazi forum
  • FSB agents reportedly interrogate the administrators of a popular Telegram channel known for spreading ‘kompromat.’ Apparently they wanted to cash out.
  • Opinion: Ivan Davydov says the authorities sold their reputation for cheap, and Andrey Kolesnikov doesn’t expect the FSB to implement Putin’s newfound archival liberalism
  • The news in brief: law and order, politics, and Russia and the world
  • News briefs: unblessed bombs and ECHR cash money

Facebook for Nazis ✊

In 2011, an English-language forum called IronMarch.org appeared online. Within a few years, it had become what the British tabloid The Sun called “Facebook for Nazis.” The forum’s users organized a number of neo-Nazi groups, including the Atomwaffen Division in the U.S. and the Antipodean Resistance in Australia. Those groups then committed five murders in the United States, including that of a 19-year-old gay and Jewish university student, and attempted to carry out a terrorist attack in Canada. The founder of Iron March wrote under the username Alexander Slavros. In reality, he is Alisher Mukhitdinov. In 2017, both Mukhitdinov and his forum inexplicably disappeared from the Internet. In a new report, the BBC Russian Service reveals that he is still living under the radar in a prefabricated apartment block in southwest Moscow.

No sale 👮

In a media landscape starved for information about the byzantine goings-on of officialdom, public channels on the instant messaging service Telegram have grown immensely popular in Russia. The network’s appeal is several years old already, having survived even a concerted attempt by the state to block the app, and the political gossip circulated on Telegram continues to draw readers and infuse the biggest channels with real market value. Journalists have explained how Russia’s authorities often buy out troublesome authors, but police crackdowns seem to be becoming increasingly common, as the state tries to maintain control over Telegram’s most trafficked political outlets. The latest apparent targets in this campaign are two individuals connected to a Telegram channel named after an enormously wealthy cellist.

Opinion and analysis

🖕 Davydov: Cheap respect

In an article for Republic, columnist Ivan Davydov looks ahead to March 29, when Russia’s ban on insults against state officials will have been on the books for a full year. Davydov says the law stands out as an Internet policy that has been enforced regularly, despite “optimistic criticism” that the restrictions were drafted too incompetently to be implemented in reality.

Last year, Internet users paid roughly 1 million rubles ($15,900) in fines assessed for insulting state officials (Putin was the most common target), according to a new study by the “Agora” human rights group and activists at “RosKomSvoboda.” Davydov says this is the price the state has put on its own reputation, insofar as it’s impossible to take seriously those who demand respect by ultimatum.

🔎 Kolesnikov: Putin’s unlikely archival policy

In an article for Gazeta.ru, columnist Andrey Kolesnikov gives a spirited defense of the “Memorial” human rights group for its efforts to name the victims and perpetrators of political repressions in the USSR. Responding to a new initiative by President Putin to create a new unified database of terror victims by October 2020, Kolesnikov says he’s skeptical that Russian officials will agree to declassify the records they’ve guarded for years against Memorial’s researchers. Instead of aiding the group in its fight against Russians’ “collective amnesia,” agencies like the FSB have kept Soviet secrets, hiding behind legalistic technicalities that Kolesnikov says are more about whitewashing the Russian state’s legacy than protecting individual privacy. He ends with a warning that the state can’t stop Russian society from fighting for the truth, no matter how hard the authorities try to blacklist or co-opt those who go digging.

The news in brief

Law and order

  • 🔥 The Kaliningrad police department is suing a local newspaper for its reporting about Ivan Vshivkov, a prisoner who died last year while in jail. The authorities argue that Novye Kolesa’s coverage of Vshivkov’s death (which featured incendiary headlines) was deliberately crafted to “damage the department’s professional reputation.” Vshivkov died in October 2019 after sustaining burns to 70 percent of his body. Officials say he went berserk in his cell and ripped a radiator from the wall, though Vshivkov’s relatives suspect foul play. The officers responsible for guarding him are now under investigation for criminal negligence. 
  • ⚖️ The European Court of Human Rights has asked Russian officials several clarifying questions related to a lawsuit brought by Alexey Navalny and the website Mediazona against alleged freedom-of-speech violations related to a ban on publishing Navalny’s investigative report about former Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko. Russian officials have until May 25, 2020, to respond. (The February 2018 report famously tied Prikhodko to billionaire Oleg Deripaska and several “escort girls,” including “Nastya Rybka.”)

Politics

  • 📈 A new report by the “SOVA” human rights group says hate crimes against minorities and the LGBTQ community in Russia increased last year, albeit not dramatically. A main takeaway from the study is that researchers are dependent on very incomplete numbers. The report also found that long-dormant ethnic gangs are “reactivating” in some parts of the country.
  • 👰 State Duma Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy is worried that gay people are trying to “grab extra rights,” which is why he now supports inserting a “traditional definition of marriage” into Russia’s upcoming constitutional amendments.
  • 🤞 On a visit to the city of Cherepovets on Tuesday, President Putin said he isn’t rewriting Russia’s Constitution in order to extend his rule, explaining that the changes he’s proposed “are dictated by life” and will lead to a “higher form of democracy.”

Russia and the world

  • ⚰️ Sources told the newspaper Novaya Gazeta that the four FSB agents recently killed in Syria were snipers on special assignment (traveling under false names) to provide security for talks with senior Turkish officials. The insurgents who ambushed the Russian officers allegedly had help from members of President Assad’s “Party of War,” apparently in an effort to derail the negotiations with Turkey.

News briefs

Yours, Meduza