First in line for a battering was Nigel Gould-Davies, first secretary at the British embassy in Moscow. He was attacked at 1am on Saturday morning, as he walked across the Theatre Square in Chita, the last stop in his Siberian lecture tour. According to news reports, he was treated in hospital for bruising to his face, but wasn’t seriously hurt. The BBC add that the motive for the attack is unclear, but police are leaning towards the ‘random attack’ explanation:

Russian police believe students celebrating their graduation could have been responsible for the assault.

Next up were British gay rights activists, Mark Tatchell (famous for attempting to place Robert Mugabe under citizen’s arrest) and Richard Fairbrass (an eighties (?) singer, famous mostly for singing “I’m too sexy”. They were beaten while protesting against the decision to ban a Gay Pride march in Moscow and, to add insult to injury were arrested for their troubles.

Tatchell writes:

We arrived at the city hall at 12 o’clock on Sunday. Our intention was to hand a letter to the Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, but the police allowed gangs of neo-Nazis to infiltrate our group. They started attacking people in an absolutely shocking way. The police stood and watched while people punched me, knocked me to the ground and then kicked me. Eventually the police arrested me and let my neo-Nazi assailants walk free. I was taken into a police van with others, including the German MP Volker Beck, and the Italian MEP Marco Cappato. When we sat in the bus the police taunted us. They said: “Are you members of the sexual minority?” We said yes. They said: “We are going to have some fun with you at the police station.”

I spent 45 minutes at the station trying unsuccessfully to register a complaint. When we left, neo-Nazis attacked us again and pelted us with eggs. A Russian orthodox priest ran across the road and attacked us too. There were hundreds of riot police who could have easily prevented the neo-Nazis from assaulting us.

As well as Tatchell and Fairbrass, 31 others were arrested, including an Italian MEP.

Video of both attacks can be found on the BBC website. Obviously, they’re short clips, but the attacks looked unprovoked to me.

For more detailed, hour by hour reporting on the events at Moscow Gay Pride, see UK Gay News.

British diplomats and activists attacked in Russia is a post from: Siberian Light

Publius worries that this could lead to a crackdown on blogs.

I’m a little puzzled though, as I’d always thought it was pretty much common practice everywhere in the world that blogs be held to the same standards as media outlets – ie, don’t libel, etc.

Is there something more in this law that makes Russia stand out from the rest of the world, or is it just worries about the way in which Russia might implement the law?

Update:  Russophile has posted some more background on the law while in the comments La Russophobe posts a clarification of a couple of points relating to her original post.

As for me, well, it’s made my day to see that both a Russophile and a Russophobe seem to be in complete agreement

Russian blogs under legal threat? is a post from: Siberian Light

There is some concern about the legality of these moves, with his lawyers, and human rights activists saying that Russian law stipulates a prisoner should be imprisoned close enough to his home city that relatives can visit relatively easily (which, of course, would mean that he would have to be somewhere close to Moscow):

His confinement in IK-10 camp will put him a six-hour flight plus a seven-hour car ride from Moscow, and human rights bodies accused authorities of violating Russian law by sending him so far from his home and family.

“The law says that a general regime prisoner should serve his term somewhere close to his home. The Russian authorities are spitting on their own law,” said Yevgeny Ikhlov of the All-Russian Movement for Human Rights.

“This is being done on purpose to complicate as much as possible Khodorkovsky’s contacts with his family, his defence and with society. Khodorkovsky is a prominent public figure and prominent opposition ideologist and everything is being done to isolate him,” Ikhlov told Reuters.

Clearly the choice of his prison – far, far away from Moscow and the prying eyes of the international press – was intentional. Whether it breaks Russian law, I have no idea. If it does, expect to see Khodorkovsky’s lawyers back in action pretty soon.

The BBC, by the way, has a profile of Khodorkovsky’s prison – which used to service Uranium mines in the 1960s:

Today, YaG-14/10 is chiefly a garment factory where inmates sew protective clothing for the prison system and the police, as well as making bed linen and doing private orders.

Khodorkovsky will find himself about 4,700km (3,000 miles) east of Moscow.

On the evening the name of his prison was revealed, it was -9C in Krasnokamensk; by January, the average daily temperature should range between -18C and -33C.

According to Zabinfo, most of YaG-14/10′s inmates are serving between three and five years and the average age is 24 – significantly younger than Khodorkovsky, 42.

The most common conviction is theft with 40% of inmates sentenced for it.

Russia Blog has more information on the prison, which seems to indicate that, as Russian prisons go, YaG-14/10 isn’t so bad:

As of 2002, the colony had 1389 prisoners. There were rumors that the prisoners were forced to work in the mines, but the rumors were false. Today, the colony is one of the top prison facilities in the country; the prisoners live in two-story brick buildings, and sleep in bunks. There is a TV in the recreation room, and on the weekends prisoners are allowed to attend a “club”. Prisoners can be employed to sew textiles or work in a metal shop.

By the looks of this report from Mosnews, Khodorkovsky has already found a useful way to occupy his time while he serves at Putin’s pleasure – he’s going to write a PhD dissertation:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a graduate of the National Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow. His Ph.D thesis will likely be dedicated to his work. According to Russian law he can defend it even in prison.

Good for him.

According to Mosnews, though, Khodorkovsky has brought two suitcases filled with books with him. Question: Just how much luggage is the average Russian prisoner allowed to bring with them?

Khodorkovsky sent to prison in Siberia, plans to complete PhD is a post from: Siberian Light

In a rather timely decision, the BBC have just decided to publish a feature article about the Russian cosmodrome at Plesetsk. Now, Plesetsk isn’t a closed city, but Mirny, the town next door is. The BBC reporter managed to get a precious invitation to visit Mirny, and this is what he saw:

Home to about 80,000 military staff and their families, at first glance, it seems like any other town, save the austere apartment blocks and lack of road signs.

We are taken to the space museum in the town square, then the kindergarten, where children dressed in traditional clothes sing Russian songs.

Despite the presence of occasional teams of foreign engineers, most of the town remains off limits to visitors. They can walk around only a small central section and must not stray outside the designated area.

The town was never on the map and its inhabitants can still only be officially reached under a military field post number.

I’ve just been to see if I could find Mirny using both GoogleEarth (the satellite imaging programme) and Expedia maps. I tried every spelling of the name I could think of without any luck (although I did discover there is a village with the same name in Southern Russia). I think I’ll have to investigate further, to see whether any of the closed cities that the Russian government has admitted to (and Mirny isn’t one of them) are on any maps.

So far, the only other account I’ve been able to find about a visit to a closed city, is Tajikblog’s visit to Taboshar, the city where the uranium for the first Soviet nuclear bombs was mined. Taboshar – in Tajikistan, by the way, and not Russia – is no longer a closed city. But it certainly doesn’t seem a very welcoming place…

Either way, we just slowly begin to explore the town. It’s really quite a nice town with birch trees and huge stone houses lining the streets, aside from the fact that most of the buildings are empty and starting to fall apart. Soon enough, though, another set of suspicious men appears (with their wives and children in tow, not exactly an intimidating sight) and the confrontation begins.

The mayor (who prior to this had a good reputation among internationals) was at the center of the posse. I wanted to meet him anyway hoping for a tour, so this was as fine a time as any to say hello. I must have caught him at a bad time, though, as his mood was sour.

After the initial “hi I’m Peter XXX, photographer from New York” schtick, it was time for the inquisition.
Why are you here? Who guided you here? What do you know about this town? Etc. etc.
Nargiza steadfastly translates the questions and my answers, but suddenly his suspicion and temper rise.

One thing that set him off, I think was my knowledge of the town’s having a high-tech science lab. Stephanie told me about it as the mayor’s sad attempt to attract people to his town, to create a center for technology. Maybe something else is going on, because he certainly didn’t want to speak about it.

I’m going to keep searching for stories about Russian closed cities (and others around the Former Soviet Union if I can find them). If you have any links, or stories of your own, please feel free to share them here.

Closed cities from the inside is a post from: Siberian Light

Freedom of movement is the biggest practical problem. True, movement generally is still quite restricted in Russia – for example, the need for residential permits means that many people who have moved to Moscow are living there illegally and have limited legal rights – but the issues facing closed cities are a class apart. Roemer Lemaître of the Belgian Institute for International Law [pdf file] observes that:

Apart from the right to freedom of movement the entry and residency restrictions imposed by the ZATO Law infringe directly or indirectly on a considerable number of other rights belonging to natural and legal persons resident within the ZATO as well as to outsiders. Identity checks and searches of bags and vehicles upon entry or exit from the ZATO run afoul of the right to privacy (Article 17 of the ICCPR and Article 8 of the ECHR). According to the same provisions, the right to family life might be violated if someone is not allowed to live with his/her close family because he/she did not get the required security clearance. Limitations on property rights (especially those that largely exclude property rights for outsiders) contradict Article 1 of the First Protocol to the ECHR.

Foreigners also face many restrictions, as this news report about the announcement that the mining city of Norilsk was to become a closed city indicates:

Under the restrictions, as of Monday the city is closed to all non-Russians – except Belarusians. Any foreigner wishing to travel to Norilsk must first obtain special permission from the FSB, the Russian state security police.

Lebed stated that he will demand that all foreigners – whether living as residents or presently visiting – leave Norilsk.

The restrictions placed on residents in closed cities also directly inhibit their ability to participate fully in the democratic process – such as it is in Russia these days. The role of the media, in particular, is heavily restricted:

Federal and local mass media have no access to closed cities. Besides, local media are poorly developed, scanty and usually controlled either by agencies that they belong to, or by commercial price of information. Almost the whole volume of information flow in and out of ZATOs is censoring in order to assure its safety for ZATOs system’ existence. None of independent pressmen are allowed to visit ZATOs.

I haven’t specifically seen any sources mentioning it, but I would imagine that freedom of association – for example, in the sense of the ability to join protests – is also heavily restricted.

No other democracy today has closed cities. Today, with the exception of Russia, they are the preserve of crackpot dictatorships, like North Korea. Even China doesn’t feel the need to close off whole cities from its own people.

Unless there is something that Russia and North Korea know that the rest of the world doesn’t, I think it is safe to conclude that closed cities are no longer necessary for security. And, if that is the case, then Russia’s justification for restricting the human rights of almost 2 million of its own citizens rings hollow.

Closed cities and the Democratic Deficit is a post from: Siberian Light

So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era oppression might have been a crime against humanity, I said,”No, SOLZHENITSYN”.
“Oh, Soldier Nitsyn ! No I don’t think we’ve got any. How do you spell that ?”
At which point I pretty much gave in.

I guess you’ve just got to accept that some battles just aren’t worth fighting any more…

Solider Nixon is a post from: Siberian Light

In particular, Russian diplomats want to force changes to the Office of Democratic Institutions (ODIHR), which monitors elections.  In particular, says RFE/RL:

Russia dislikes its custom of issuing a comment on elections soon after the polls close. In Russia’s view, ODIHR should submit its reports to the Permanent Council in Vienna and allow it to decide whether they should be published.

The Russian government is unhappy with the OSCE monitors, of course, because they tend to take a critical position on elections held in countries allied with Russia – countries which, to put it charitably, have a tendency to not hold free and fair elections.  Submitting reports to the Council for approval would, they hope, allow Russia to either moderate the content of election monitors’ reports or, at the very least, to delay their publication until well after the election in question, at a time when the news cycle has long since moved on.

Russia is a key member of the OSCE and, as such, has every right to make its demands heard.  The heavy handed way it has done so, however, has not won it any friends, and shows clearly how out of step Russia is with most other members states.*  The OSCE should, and I think will, reject these proposals.  If they reject them out of hand, so much the better.   

Nathan at registan.net has a couple of posts on the topic, including this typically forthright opinion:

At the very least, one would hope that the OSCE would grow a spine and tell Russia to quit acting like a spoiled crybaby.

*Although I’m critical of Russia’s heavy handed methods here, I am finding it hard to resist the temptations to draw parallels here with the way the United States has at times used the threat of witholding part of it’s UN dues in an attempt to prompt reform within that organisation.

Russia demands OSCE reforms is a post from: Siberian Light