EDITORIAL: Do Russians Really Love Germans That Much?

EDITORIAL

Do Russians Really Love Germans That Much?

Below, in another original translation from the Russian press, we emphasize the growing revelations regarding the complicity of the Kremlin in the Moscow apartment bombings that were used as justification for Putin’s war on Chechnya. We continue to be amazed at the extent to which the world in general, and the Russian people in particular, seem willing to stick their heads in the sand when confronted by the increasing horror represented by the neo-Soviet Kremlin. And yet, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, the world in general, and Russia in particular, have a long history of ignoring serious problems, allowing them to fester until they become life-threatening, and only then taking action.

In a book review for the Weekly Standard dealing with Russia’s role in World War II, editor Robert Messenger states: “In four years of terrible slaughter, the Red Army did not just defeat Hitler and National Socialism, but also put an end to Prussian militarism. It was a Soviet victory over something that had menaced Europe for two centuries. Stalin was a barbarous man, and in the end, that is what it took to finally draw the curtain on the German Way of War.”

What’s left unsaid is that while doing this kindly favor for the people of Germany, Stalin forgot about the people of Russia.

It was a costly gift. As Messenger writes: “The numbers are difficult to digest. The German army left 4 million men on the battlefields of Eastern Europe, but they killed 27 million. The Red Army lost 11.5 million soldiers, and 15.5 million civilians died in the territories occupied by the German army. Nearly 10 Russians died each minute that the war lasted, 14,000 each day.” It took three Russian soldiers to kill one German, and more than six Russian citizens. Whole Russian cities were literally razed to the ground, including most especially the one named after Stalin himself. Reflecting on numbers like these, it’s actually rather difficult to conclude that what Russians achieved in this “Great Patriotic War” was “victory.” Seems a lot more like defeat.

And for what? So that today Germany could have a population that may soon exceed Russia’s? So that the USSR could be tossed into the dustbin of history, and Russian men could live less than 60 years on average, working for less than $4 per hour? So that Germany could be respected the world around as a player at the international table and an economic force to be reckoned with, selling a host of products famous for their quality, while Russians are famous for re-electing a proud KGB spy to rule them?

Do Russians really love Germans that much?

The Nazi soldiers may have murdered over 15 million Russian civilians, but how many did Stalin murder in his Gulag Archipelago? The figure is likely far in excess of 15 million, and yet Stalin is being rehabilitated by the Putin regime as all the unpleasant facts of Russian history are being sanitized.

Meanwhile, the country is going right into the toilet. Just look at the appalling litany of outrage set forth in the stories we report below in just one virtual issue, from torture to fraudulent official statistics to barbaric levels of corruption to human rights atrocities in Chechnya to blatant electoral fraud. Instead of attempting to address at least one of these terminal diseases, Russians instead applaud wildly as Putin launches a new cold war with the U.S., a country that has an economy twelve times larger than Russia’s and many strategic allies, where Russia has none.

Is Russia committing suicide? Is the only real unhappiness in Russia that it hasn’t yet managed to carry it out?

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Another Original LR Translation: Russians Killing Russians (by our Original Translator)

Straight Talk the British Way

Aleksandr Goldfarb

Yezhednevniy Zhurnal

February 4, 2008

David King came right out and said what everyone has known but most of the time was afraid to say [about the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999]. Because everyone who has seriously considered this question long ago came to the conclusion that the Russian authorities were behind these explosions. We do not yet know what proof the British services may have, so what is significant now is not the content of the statement, but the fact that they decided to make it exactly now.

I think the British are sending a kind of signal to the Kremlin, in order to pour oil on the fire of the power struggles that are expected after the change of presidents. I expect this whole story will be hauled out of the archives, and will gain momentum, because it represents a weak point for the Putin regime, something the regime has succeeded in sweeping under the carpet as long as Vladimir Putin has sat in the Kremlin. But all that will be rolled back in an instant by those who oppose him in the battle of the clans that is just now beginning. The fact that this story has not been concluded is now completely obvious. Clearly, Litvinenko was killed exactly because of his statements on this subject.

Everything else is just the fallout from these events. The British are letting everyone concerned know: Hey guys, don’t get too carried away now with your attacks and persecutions against us, because we have this little ace in the hole. And if this story about the apartment bombings gets on the official agenda, then those who organized it and those who are members of the Putin clan will be up to their necks in it.

Until now the people who risked their lives trying to get this topic on the agenda have, by and large, met a conspiracy of silence from officials in the West – in both the U.K. and America. And for a completely understandable reason: no one wanted to come out in open confrontation with the Russian authorities. But now this wall of silence has been torn down, and the recent announcement by King is both a trial balloon and a warning signal.

Aleksandr Goldfarb is a human rights worker and head of the Fund for Civil Freedoms (FGS).

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Paul Goble Confirms Russian Government Data is Useless

Paul Goble reports:

Like its Soviet predecessor, the Russian government does not understand how important accurate statistical information is for itself and other institutions in society, and as a result, it both fails to support the collection of good data and sanctions the falsification of even the most fundamental sources like the census. In an interview in current Argumenty nedeli, Andrei Milekhin, who heads ROMIR, the largest non-governmental research center, said that as a result, the authorities in Russia, unlike their counterparts in Western countries, are forced to rely on guesswork rather than on facts. Milekhin said that this attitude among Russian officials cast a dark shadow over the gathering and dissemination of such data because in the Russian Federation, the government is far and away the largest customer and is thus in a position to insist that survey firms give the authorities exactly the results they want.

Compounding that problem, he said, is the government’s willingness to set up what are in effect its own pocket firms, entirely controlled by the government and willing to do its bidding, a step Milekhin said no Western government interested in accurate information would ever consider doing. On the one hand, he continued, officials in Western governments are used to relying on statistical information and survey data and thus do not want it to be distorted, even if their use of this material in the design of policies may be. And on the other, unlike in Russia, they are subject to freedom of information laws. That means, Milekhin pointed out, that few Western officials would want to take the risks involved to themselves and their government of gathering or using poor data given that the media or the legislature could expose exactly what they had done. But the situation in the Russian Federation is entirely different.There, “government agencies are under no obligation to provide such data” to the public, sometimes because it might be embarrassing but quite often simply because knowing that they will never have to release such information, they simply do not bother to collect it in the first place. Consequently, they don’t care how reliable the data sets they do get are, as long as the conclusions attached to this information serve their interests and those of their bosses.

Such official attitudes also help to explain why “many methods which work beautifully well in the West do not work with us,” Milekhin said. But they are not the only ones behind the sad state of polling data and statistical information in the Russian Federation. In addition, the ROMIR head says, the Russian population is far less homogeneous than that of the United States or most other Western countries. Consequently, the size of the sample needed for accurate conclusions is vastly larger, and the construction of an adequate one requires reliable census data. But that is precisely what the Russian authorities, again like their Soviet predecessors, are not willing to provide. ROMIR and other agencies, he said, are often forced to rely on statistics from the nearly 20-year-old census of 1989 to design their surveys. “Of course, in 2002, another census of the population was conducted. But it was not done, to put it mildly, in a very reliable way,” and Milekhin, who has been designing surveys for years, added that he “does not even know whether its result was published completely or not.” (Similar problems with such data continue. Despite expectations, the State Committee on Statistics this year has not yet published population data for the country as of January 1. The apparent reason? No one wants to release any figures, lest the declines they show “traumatize the voters”.)

A second problem arises from the lack of understanding of survey data among Russian businesspeople. Like their Western counterparts, they know the need to do market research as part of their efforts to come up with new products that will sell. For everyone in business, such surveys are “the artillery barrage in advance of the attack.” But Russians in business, like their political counterparts and associates, seem to view this whole process as being more about putting on a show than in getting real information. Thus, they often prefer not surveys but focus groups, and they fail to understand the limitations of the latter form. Consequently, the group that one might reasonably expect would begin to push the Russian authorities in the right direction, the ROMIR sociologist continues, remains trapped in the same mindset as the political elite, a fact of Russian life that makes change in this area all the more difficult.

And there is yet a third problem, Milekhin says, which gets in the way of accurate data. While survey methods in the Russian Federation are much the same as those in the West, those who do not have a good grasp of Soviet and Russian realities will find it “extremely complicated” to interpret them in an adequate way. Not long ago, he said, his firm investigated the wine market in Russia. The survey found that people in Siberia and the Far East preferred and drank more Georgian wine, while those in European Russia preferred and drank more wine from Moldova. “Just try to explain that,” he challenged his interviewer. But then Milekhin himself came up with the answer: “It turned out that in Soviet times, Georgian wines were dispatched primarily to regions beyond the Urals. And over the course of 30 or so years, consumers there had gotten accustomed to it.” If you don’t know that history, of course, you will make the most absurd mistakes, he concluded.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin’s Torture Colonies

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside undressed in the freezing cold. . . . As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.

“Next day, on 17 January, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open. . . .”

The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is to 2008 — that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And correctional colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.

That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”

The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”

Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.

Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.

As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Mr. Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr. Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never went away.

That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Mr. Ponomarev says. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”

Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is Gulag, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warns Mr. Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”

Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for “Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr. Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch. But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year. [LR: The video is currently down, we are researching its status and will report back]

To watch video from the author of this piece, click here.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin’s Torture Colonies

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside undressed in the freezing cold. . . . As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.

“Next day, on 17 January, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open. . . .”

The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is to 2008 — that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And correctional colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.

That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”

The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”

Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.

Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.

As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Mr. Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr. Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never went away.

That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Mr. Ponomarev says. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”

Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is Gulag, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warns Mr. Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”

Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for “Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr. Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch. But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year. [LR: The video is currently down, we are researching its status and will report back]

To watch video from the author of this piece, click here.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin’s Torture Colonies

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside undressed in the freezing cold. . . . As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.

“Next day, on 17 January, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open. . . .”

The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is to 2008 — that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And correctional colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.

That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”

The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”

Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.

Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.

As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Mr. Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr. Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never went away.

That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Mr. Ponomarev says. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”

Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is Gulag, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warns Mr. Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”

Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for “Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr. Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch. But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year. [LR: The video is currently down, we are researching its status and will report back]

To watch video from the author of this piece, click here.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin’s Torture Colonies

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside undressed in the freezing cold. . . . As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.

“Next day, on 17 January, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open. . . .”

The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is to 2008 — that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And correctional colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.

That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”

The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”

Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.

Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.

As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Mr. Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr. Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never went away.

That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Mr. Ponomarev says. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”

Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is Gulag, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warns Mr. Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”

Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for “Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr. Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch. But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year. [LR: The video is currently down, we are researching its status and will report back]

To watch video from the author of this piece, click here.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin’s Torture Colonies

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside undressed in the freezing cold. . . . As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.

“Next day, on 17 January, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open. . . .”

The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is to 2008 — that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And correctional colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.

That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.

The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” says Mr. Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”

Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and (most terrifying of all) “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500 miles east of Moscow.

“The receipt of convicts ‘through the corridor’ takes place in the following manner,” Mr. Ponomarev reports. “From the [truck] in which a newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought… employees of the colony line up, equipped with special means — rubber truncheons and dog handlers with work dogs. . . . During the time of the run, each employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon. . . . The convicts run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those [places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash.”

The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. “After this,” Mr. Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony “threatened to rot me in the dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg festers [and] pus runs from the bandage. . . The festering has crossed over to the second leg.”

Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.

Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a so-called “penalty isolator” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. . . . The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for a week.

As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Mr. Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr. Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never went away.

That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Mr. Ponomarev says. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”

Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is Gulag, even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warns Mr. Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”

Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for “Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr. Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch. But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year. [LR: The video is currently down, we are researching its status and will report back]

To watch video from the author of this piece, click here.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Russian Corruption: Horror by the Numbers

Jonas Bernstein of Eurasia Daily Monitor reports:

In his February 8 speech to the State Council laying out Russia’s development strategy for the next 12 years, President Vladimir Putin contrasted his eight years in power favorably with, as he put it, “the chaos, economic ruin, and breakdown of the old system that we saw in the 1990s.” However, he also said that the “state system” today is “weighed down by bureaucracy and corruption and does not have the motivation for positive change, much less dynamic development.” More specifically, he said that small businesses today are working under “very difficult conditions” and that “what federal bodies in the regions with the support of regional and local authorities do” is, in a word, “awful.”

“One cannot start one’s business for months,” Putin said. “People have to give bribes in every controlling institution – fire prevention, environmental services, medical permissions – you need to go to all of them, and it’s just terrible.” He called for doing away with the “excessive administrative pressure on the economy that has become one of the biggest brakes on development” and for establishing “competitive conditions for attracting the best and the brightest into the civil service, and make them more accountable to society” (Kremlin.ru, February 8).

On the issue of corruption, Putin’s speech was similar to the one that Putin’s designated successor, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, delivered last month to the Civic Forum, a gathering of representatives from Russian non-governmental organizations and other groups sponsored by the Kremlin-appointed Public Chamber. In it, Medvedev called Russia a country of “legal nihilism” that manifests itself in the form of “crime,” including “corruption in the power bodies,” which, he said, exists on a “huge scale” in Russia today. No country, he said, can boast of such “disdain for the law.”

In their respective speeches, both Putin and Medvedev either tacitly or unwittingly conceded the failure to make good on the pledge made by Putin at the start of his presidency to end the disorder of 1990s and establish a “dictatorship of law” (see EDM, January 30).

Meanwhile, another group of independent observers has produced data illustrating the extent of corruption in Russia. Vedomosti reported on February 6 that the Institute for Public Projects (INOP), with the participation of the Institute for Comparative Social Research (CESSI), carried out a research project called “The Nature and Structure of Corruption in Russia,” based on interviews with 36 experts who were not named but, according INOP Deputy Director Mikhail Rogozhnikov, are connected with the sectors about which they were interviewed. The study found that the highest degree of corruption in Russia can be found in the areas of taxation, the judicial system, law-enforcement bodies (particularly the Federal Road Safety Service), public health, and property disputes.

The experts interviewed about corruption singled out the state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, the state monopoly Russian Railroads, and the state pipeline monopoly Transneft, with one of the experts stating that law-enforcement or judicial bodies, on the basis of an “understanding” with the presidential administration, exert “pressure” on companies that are sitting on “interesting deposits.” The experts estimated that Transneft annually writes off two percent of the oil it handles – more than four million tons – to leakage and that $1.5 billion-$2 billion a year is stolen. (Vedomosti reported that Transneft and Gazprom refused to comment on the report.) A recent paper on the Putin years written by former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov and former deputy energy minister Vladimir Milov described Gazprom as the “champion” for placing “important assets in the hands of mysterious third parties.” Nemtsov and Milov concluded that an “authoritarian-criminal regime” has developed in Russia over the last eight years (Novaya gazeta, February 7).

Perhaps most interestingly, the INOP-CESSI study also produced a “price list” of bribes. According to the list, a place on a party list for a State Duma election cost $2 million-$5 million while getting legislation introduced in the Duma for consideration costs $250,000. For a state monopoly to win a “goszakaz,” or state purchase order, it must pay 20% of the order’s total value; for it to participate in a national project, it must pay 30-40% of the project’s total value; for it to get a line item in the federal budget, it must pay three percent of the project’s total value.

A large private company must pay $1 million-$5 million to get a license, prevent a license it has from getting revoked or get a competitor’s license revoked. For a large private company to win a “goszakaz,” it must pay a third of the order’s total value. For a small business to ensure that a transaction is carried out, it must pay a third of the transaction’s value; in order to get “help” from officials, a small business must pay 10% of its total profits. Getting customs duties reduced costs 30-50% of the sum on which the duties were assessed; getting tax arrears written off costs anywhere from $1000 to 30-50% of the sum of the arrears.

To get the Central Bank to begin examining documents costs a bank $500,000, while winning the right to transfer federal budget funds costs a bank five percent of the sum of the transfer. To win a case in a civil court or an arbitration court costs 10% of the awarded damages. To win a grant costs a charitable foundation 20-30% of the value of the grant. Finally, according to the INOP-CESSI study, to get a television “talking head” to criticize an official costs $20,000 a month (Vedomosti, February 6).

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Neo-Soviet Barbarism: The Presidential Charade

The Moscow Times reports:

Ads at polling stations will inform voters that presidential candidates Gennady Zyuganov, Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Andrei Bogdanov concealed their true incomes while applying to run, the Central Elections Commission said Monday.

First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, confirmed by President Vladimir Putin as his chosen successor and nominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, is the only candidate who comes out clean in the ad.

In accordance with election laws, posters containing information about undeclared income by the three candidates will be placed inside voting booths, commission member Nikolai Konkin said in an e-mailed statement, adding that all regional commissions will receive the posters by Tuesday. According to information provided by Konkin, each of the three candidates misrepresented his income and assets in his application to run. “Information about incorrect data contained in the section concerning real estate assets was obtained from the Federal Tax Service [and] the Federal Registration Service,” Konkin said. Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, failed to declare gifts from a charitable organization of just over 17,000 rubles ($690), the commission said in an e-mailed statement. “They alleged that I had concealed 17,000 rubles,” Zyuganov told Ekho Moskvy Monday. “But they didn’t give me a kopek — this is nonsense.” Zyuganov spokesman Alexander Yushchenko confirmed that Zyuganov failed to declare gifts in the form of a medal and a certificate in recognition of his “contribution in the development of orphanages,” Yushchenko said. When asked to put a price on the medal, he answered, “I don’t know, it was an ordinary, metallic medal.”

Democratic Party leader Bogdanov failed to declare a Moscow apartment owned by his wife with an area of 64.3 square meters. Bogdanov said he did not mention the apartment in his application because his wife had actually never lived there and was only joint owner of the property with her parents. He said he wasn’t really troubled by the posters. “You can’t blame the mirror if the face in it is crooked,” he said.

Zhirinovsky, meanwhile, is charged with failing to declare over 12.6 million rubles ($512,000) in interest income from bank deposits, earnings from Moscow State Open University over the previous four years of 25,000 rubles ($1,010) and a 576-square-meter plot of land in the Saratov region. “I have never concealed anything,” the Liberal Democratic Party leader said Monday in an e-mailed statement.

The fourth presidential candidate, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, did not conceal any income, Central Elections Commission member Maya Grishina said.

Medvedev reported an income of $71,000 per year over the past four years, owns a 367.8-square-meter apartment in Moscow, a 4,700-square-meter plot of land outside the city, and savings of 2.74 million rubles (about $110,000). His application says he does not own a car. Along with his post in the government, Medvedev is chairman of Gazprom, which in 2006 reported a profit of $13 billion. Putin declared an income of about $81,000 last year when he ran for parliament. He said he owned a small apartment in St. Petersburg and a plot of land outside Moscow.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Goble on Russian Barbarism in Chechnya

Paul Goble reports:

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the Russian Federation had stabilized during his time in office, almost eight years to the day that the forces he sent into a Chechen village committed what one human rights activist says was “the most terrible event “ of the second post-Soviet Chechen war. And in an article about that crime which appeared on the Caucasus Times site even as Putin was delivering his speech, Aleksandr Cherkasov of Memorial reminded the world about the terrible price Chechens had paid for the stability for which the Russian President was then taking credit.

What happened in the Chechen village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, has been extremely well-documented by Western human rights organizations despite the fact that Moscow attempted to throw a blanket of silence over it at the time and has refused to bring any of the perpetrators to trial. Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report shortly after the events took place entitled “February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldy,” and lawyers for the families of the victims have provided additional information as they have sought compensation for what was done. But in the Russian media in the first months of Putin’s time in office, Cherkasov points out, “people spoke about [Moscow’s] victories” in Chechnya and did not offer much in the way of honest reporting about how those victories were achieved, a pattern that Putin continued in his speech last week.

On that February day, Russian military units passed through Novye Aldy in the course of their advance on the Chechen capital. As they left that village, they warned the people there that “terrible people are coming behind us,” a reference to the Russian interior ministry’s OMON units. When the latter arrived, Cherkasov writes, “they moved through the village, going into each household, killing, stealing, extorting money (in certain cases it was possible to buy one’s life), [and even] pulling out gold fillings from the teeth of those who were not in a position to pay off” the OMON soldiers. This group killed 55 of the villagers, and that number would doubtless have been far higher had it not been for the quick thinking of a local nurse who urged people to gather in the streets in the hopes that even the OMON would not be willing to shoot down people in front of a crowd of witnesses. Over the next several years, the families of the victims tried with little success to get Russian prosecutors to investigate what happened and to bring charges against those who had violated the Russian constitution, common decency, and international agreements Moscow has committed itself to fulfill. But Russian prosecutors and other officials cut short the few investigations they did launch and have never charged any of the OMON soldiers or officers with a crime, despite the fact that officials know exactly what unit was in Novye Aldy on that date and have been given extensive forensic evidence on the victims.

As a result, the Novye Aldy families took the only other step left to them: they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And in a unanimous decision last July, that court ordered Moscow to pay them almost $200,000. More important than the money both to the families and to history was the Court’s stinging indictment of Russian prosecutors and by implication the Russian government as a whole. “The astonishing ineffectiveness of the prosecuting authorities in this case,” the Court said, “can only be qualified as acquiescence in the events.”

“The killings” in Novye Aldy, the Court continued in far harsher language than it has used in most of the cases from Russia that have come before it, “had been committed in broad daylight, and a large number of witnesses, including some of the applicants, had seen the perpetrators face to face.” But “despite all that and notwithstanding the domestic and international public outcry caused by the cold-blooded execution of more than 50 civilians … no meaningful result whatsoever had been achieved [before the case came to Strasbourg] in the task of identifying and prosecuting the individuals who had committed the crimes.”

Echoing the European Court’s ruling, Memorial’s Cherkasov argues that “all Russia ought to be interested in finding and punishing the criminals.” But for the last eight years, “we have heard [only] about the victories [of Russian arms in Chechnya] and the glorious operations of ‘the hunt for wolves.’” One can only hope along with Cherkasov that both Russians and the international community will both find out about and condemn other crimes that Moscow has visited upon the Chechens and their neighbors in the North Caucasus as President Putin, often to the applause of Western leaders, has pursued “stability” there.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !