Updated Daily. This week’s issue: – Further Peace March Arrests: 7 in St. Petersburg; 2 in Yekaterinburg; 2 in Barnaul – Peace March of 26,000 in Moscow Finishes Without Incident; A Few Arrests Reported – At Least 10,000 in Peace March in Moscow – AP – 5,000 March in St. Petersburg Despite Ban – ‘If […]
Tag: Sergei Sobyanin
Moscow Confines Ukrainian Officer in Notorious Serbsky Institute
Staunton, September 4 – In an action that recalls some of the worst behavior of Brezhnev’s times, the current Russian government has sent a Ukrainian officer it seized and illegally transferred to Russia for “forensic psychiatric evaluation” at Moscow’s Serbski Institute where Soviet-era dissidents were infamously treated for “sluggish schizophrenia.” That has prompted a group […]
Moscow’s Orthodox Churches Deserted While Streets are Filled with Muslims
Staunton, July 30 – This year, the Russian Orthodox ‘Day of the Baptism of Rus’ coincided with the Muslim holiday of Uraza Bayram [The Sugar Feast, when Muslims traditionally break the fast – The Interpreter]. On Monday, in what many will see as symbolic, Moscow’s churches, with the exception of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, […]
Russia to Abolish Mayoral and City Duma Elections
This summer, the biggest story in Russia was that, for the first time in recent memory, a serious opposition candidate, Alexei Navalny, could win an important election. Navalny was running for Moscow’s mayor against President Putin’s favored candidate, Sergei Sobyanin. Despite being arrested, tried and convicted for fraud, and then released, Navalny still received a […]
Moscow Officials Fired in Wake of Race Riots
In response to the anti-immigrant riots in the southern Moscow district of Biryulyovo, the Russian government has been forced to act. While almost all of the rioters were released from jail and will have no serious legal consequences, Russian officials have raided the target of the riots, a market and vegetable warehouse in the district, […]
Kremlin’s Response to Moscow Race Riots May Make Things Worse
To say that racism is pandemic in Russia these days might be an understatement. Sunday’s race riots in Moscow were certainly not the first time The Interpreter has raised the alarm over the increasingly-radical nationalist movement. Over the summer, a Russian paratrooper was killed by a Chechen immigrant in the North Caucasus town of Pugachev. Though […]
Court Clears Putin of Suspicion of Illegally Promoting Sobyanin
A Moscow court has decided that the results of the september mayoral election will stand, thus dismissing the complaints brought forward by opposition candidate Alexei Navalny. Most notably, the court decided that President Vladimir Putin did not break campaign laws when he gave an interview the week of the election where he suggested that Navalny […]
“People’s Elections Commission” Drives Government Into a Narrow Corridor
This editorial by Dmitry Oreshkin in Novaya Gazeta provides a statistical argument that the results of the Moscow Mayoral Election were rigged. However, what’s far more interesting is that Oreshkin also argues that, despite the fact that Sobyanin stole the last few percentage points needed to avoid a runoff, democracy has been achieved. For the first […]
Navalny Submits 448 Complaints to Moscow Courts
Moscow courts received 448 claims from Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, including the principal petition to cancel the results of the elections for the Mayor of Moscow submitted to the Moscow city court. “According to the information on the number of applications for revocation of the local election commissions’ decisions submitted to the district courts, […]
The Mayoral Election Divided Moscow Into Three Parts
The following is a translation of the breakdown of the official Moscow mayoral election results by district. Some key facts pop out right away. In the Gagarinsky, where independent monitors reported the fewest amount of irregularities, Navalny actually beat Sobyanin. Furthermore, he scored 7% points higher than Putin’s opponent in the 2012 Presidential election. In […]