The Real Russia. Today. Expanded presidential immunity, America’s 1996 moment, and asylum horrors in Rostov
Thursday, November 5, 2020
- Russian lawmakers draft legislation that would make it harder than ever to prosecute a former president
- Oksana Shalygina reveals years of domestic violence during relationship with Russian artist Petr Pavlensky
- Pharmacies across Russia are running out of medications used to treat COVID-19, but increased demand isn’t the only problem
- Opinion and analysis: Latynina says Trump is being treated like Zyuganov, Chesnokov wants Russians to have a little pride, damnit, and Mediazona catalogs horrors at a Rostov prison asylum
- News briefs: raiding Navalny again, prosecuting Nexta in Belarus, COVID accountability in Omsk, and a mock crucifixion in Moscow
Feature stories
⚖️ Just try to stop him
Earlier this year, amid a global pandemic, Russia held a nationwide plebiscite on a series of constitutional amendments. Scholars and election watchdogs criticized how the vote was carried out, but the initiative passed with a whopping 77.9 percent and turnout hit almost 65 percent. Russian lawmakers are now writing the legislation needed to implement the new constitutional amendments. This week, the Parliament got to work on expanding immunity for former presidents. Today and for the foreseeable future, this means just two men: Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
📚 ‘It hurt to breathe’
In an interview with the website Wonderzine, Oksana Shalygina, the former partner of Russian political performance artist Petr Pavlensky, opened up about her newly released book, where she recounts shocking stories of domestic violence during their relationship. We summarized what she said here.
💊 ‘The drugs have disappeared’
Since late October, there have been reported shortages at local pharmacies of antiviral medications and antibiotics, including those used to treat the coronavirus infection (often ineffectively). The emptiest shelves are apparently in Novosibirsk, Saransk, Vladimir, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kostroma, and Tula. New regulations — not just spiking demand — has been blamed for the lack of pharmaceuticals. When journalists asked the Putin administration in late October about the missing drugs, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov punted the issue to the prime minister’s cabinet.
Opinion and analysis
In an op-ed for Novaya Gazeta, columnist Yulia Latynina argues that the U.S. media establishment’s supposed collusion against Donald Trump compares to the Russian journalists who lobbied actively for Boris Yeltsin’s presidential victory in 1996. After recycling many of the Trump campaign’s favorite talking points about Joe Biden (he suffers from cognitive decline, he “campaigns from his basement,” he “finds any excuse” to avoid debates), Latynina also says that American journalists’ bias against Trump is similar to the Russian mainstream media’s refusal to report on Alexey Navalny’s investigative work.
Latynina claims that U.S. news outlets declined to report on corruption allegations against Joe Biden involving his son’s business dealings in Ukraine and China, comparing Twitter’s efforts to block the sharing of disinformation with Kremlin pressure on Yandex’s news aggregator to purge stories by the independent press.
For Latynina, Donald Trump outperforming polling projections in many states is evidence that American voters were “afraid” to tell pollsters about their preference. “This is a classic sign of an unfree society,” she warns, likening it to Navalny’s supporters who lie to sociologists in Russia.
The lesson in all this supposed suppression and intimidation, says Latynina, is that sacrificing a fair and free electoral system (this is how she views the 2020 U.S. presidential race) to stop a perceived existential threat to the nation (Donald Trump, in the eyes of American liberals) imperils democracy itself. That is what Russian liberals learned after abetting Yeltsin’s illegitimate re-election in 1996.
🗳️ American dreams and distractions
In an article for Komsomolskaya Pravda, deputy international news editor Edvard Chesnokov expresses frustration that his compatriots obsess so much about presidential elections in the United States, repeatedly deluding themselves into believing that the next American leader will finally end the tensions with Russia. Chesnokov says many Russians still cling to the notion that Trump’s re-election would be better for them, ignoring the fact that the past four years have been as hostile as any.
The U.S. presidency, Chesnokov explains, lacks the agency needed to alter America’s course on Russia. It’s the “Deep State” that steers the ship, he says, which is how Barack Obama took office with the “Reset” and left the White House as the Kremlin’s greatest enemy.
Most insulting of all for Chesnokov is that Russians’ fascination with the U.S. political process reaffirms Moscow’s “provincial position” relative to Washington. Maybe it’s time Russians start worrying about their own country, he says.
🏥 Left for dead in Rostov
Mediazona correspondent Alla Konstantinova wrote about a psychiatric ward at a prison in the Rostov region where patients are tied to their beds for dangerously long durations — in some cases for several months at a time. Konstantinova describes one 42-year-old prisoner who died from sepsis and a bacterial infection that his daughter believes was the result of bedsores and other injuries sustained while confined to his hospital bed. The inmates aren’t running the asylum, but they are apparently tasked with tying down fellow patients. Human rights monitors say these individuals are guilty of gruesome acts of abuse, including various kinds of sexual assault.
Russia adopted legislation in 1992 that prohibits the prolonged, unsupervised restraint of psychiatric patients. The law also bans using patients to restrain each other.
In practice, however, prison psychiatric wards are legal “gray areas” because of the autonomy and secrecy afforded to penal institutions and medical facilities. Human rights workers told Mediazona that patients at the Rostov prison are often hospitalized after arguing with guards, committing acts of self-harm, or threatening other inmates. These men are typically admitted on a vague diagnosis of “acute psychosis.”
Some inmates’ concerned family members say they’ve asked prosecutors, detectives, and health inspectors to audit the prison’s psychiatric ward, but state regulators deny receiving such requests. The coronavirus pandemic has also disrupted planned inspections of the ward, but these audits were infrequent even before COVID-19 — about once every five years.
Watchdog observers say the only way to enforce existing regulations on patient safety in the psychiatric ward would be to install video surveillance cameras, which already exist everywhere else throughout the prison’s hospital, but the warden rejected the idea, even when members of the local public monitoring commission offered to pay for the new equipment.
Other news in brief
- 👮 Another Thursday, another raid. Court marshals searched Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation Moscow headquarters and his YouTube channel’s recording studio on Thursday. The raid apparently relates to debt Navalny now owes to oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin (it’s a long story). The two have crusaded against each other for years now.
- 👮 Criminal blogging. Belarusian state investigator opened a criminal case against opposition blogger Stepan Putilo (Stsiapan Putsila), the creator of the Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, and the platform’s former chief editor.
- 🚑 Heads are rolling. Omsk Governor Alexander Burkov has fired his regional health minister, Irina Soldatova. In a scandal last month, two ambulances brought COVID-19 patients to her office building after local hospitals turned them away.
- 🔥 Passion of the Christ. Russian activist Pavel Krisevich demonstrated outside of the FSB headquarters on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square on Thursday night. Advocating for political prisoners, Krisevich attached himself to a cross — you know, like Jesus.
🕵️ This day in history: 95 years ago today, on November 5, 1925, Sidney Reilly — known as the “Ace of Spies” — was executed in a forest outside Moscow. The Russian-born adventurer and secret agent allegedly spied for at least four different great powers and partly inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond character.
Yours, Meduza