Travel, Fun and Business in Russia

Tens of thousands of people have demonstrated to express their anger at alleged rigging in Russia’s parliamentary elections, as a human rights group set up by the Russian president has recommended that a snap election be held. Opposition activists staged their second set of nationwide rallies on Saturday to protest against what they say were rigged elections on December 4.

Is this the start of the downfall of the Putin regime?

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Every Wednesday evening, an artsy Moscow café bursts with middle-aged women who look like accountants or mid-level managers. At least that is what they would do if they were not spending all their time working to get their husbands out of prison.
Wednesday is the night that Rus Sidyashchaya (Russia Behind Bars) meets. The organisation was founded by Olga Romanova, a journalist-turned-prisoners’ rights activist. “I’ve told the men,” another of the group’s leaders says to me, “If you don’t make a monument to Romanova out of solid gold, then you are worthless.”

Romanova’s husband, Alexei Kozlov, was jailed in 2008 and sentenced the following year to eight years in prison for fraud. Romanova tried everything to get him out. The usual route, bribery, did not work, so she launched her own investigation, turning up evidence that her husband’s conviction was based on forged documents. She got the case to the Russian supreme court, which overturned Kozlov’s sentence twice (the first time did not work), and, a few months ago, she travelled to a distant prison colony to pick up her husband. The video of their reunion went viral in Russia.
Romanova, 45, heavy-set and with dyed-red hair, walks over to a bespectacled woman. “What are you here for?” she asks. The woman’s answer is inaudible. “159! Fraud!” Romanova booms. “We are all here because of Article 159. Come join in!”
Human rights activists estimate that 15 per cent of Russian inmates are entrepreneurs jailed as a result of business disputes. Article 159 is the most common vehicle, and most cases are initiated by a partner seeking to take over another’s shares in a business. Then it is a matter of forging documents and bribing and pressuring judges. In the bespectacled woman’s case, though, it’s a Moscow apartment that was at stake: Yelena says her husband was recently sentenced to four years in prison on charges stemming from the purchase of the couple’s property. “The investigator told me he’d drop the charges if we just signed the apartment over,” she says.
A group forms in the centre of the room. Their relatives are in jail under Article 228: drugs. At first glance this seems a different story, but the narrative is chillingly similar: forged documents, disregard for judicial procedure. A woman tells of her son, sentenced to six years for possession of 13g of hashish with intent to distribute. She says she has found dozens of other families whose trials mirrored her son’s: the same buyer, the same two witnesses and identical wording in the verdict. The people gathered around her nod vigorously. The alleged crimes may be different, but a single truth unites these people: once your loved one is snatched by the Russian criminal-justice system, you have little hope.
A striking blonde in her mid-thirties is lecturing a slight, pale woman. “Don’t tell him he’ll get out soon,” she says. “Don’t tell him it will be all right, because it probably won’t be.” The younger woman nods, tears in her eyes.
Her 22-year-old boyfriend, a Russian-nationalist activist, is facing two years’ imprisonment for throwing water in a prosecutor’s face following the trial of two of his friends.“I feel guilty,” Ira, the younger woman, says, “because some days I don’t think about him at all.”
“Ha!” the blonde woman will have none of this. “I used to feel guilty. For a year and a half, I couldn’t eat, because what did he have to eat in prison? I got anorexic. What use am I to my three kids, or to him, if I’m starving myself to death? Be human. In the end, either you’ll wait for him, or you won’t.”
The blonde’s name is Yulia Roshchina, and her husband’s story is the classic business-partner-against-business-partner. The 36-year-old importer was arrested three years ago and sentenced to 18 years in maximum security prison for contraband and money laundering. An appeal court later knocked 10 years off his sentence, ruling the money-laundering charges unfounded. On December 7, the same day as this meeting, President Dmitry Medvedev signed penal-code reform into law that decriminalised what used to be called contraband. “I was driving and I heard on the radio that he signed this, and I cried,” Roshchina tells me.
“And I thought, ‘Why am I crying? It’s just a piece of paper.’” There is no guarantee that her husband will now be released.
“There are so many of us,” Roshchina continues. “A million people behind bars in Russia, and at least 700,000 of them are innocent – I’m judging by all the people my husband has shared cells with. That’s a revolution!”
A revolution is brewing just outside the door as we talk. Over the first two days of protests more than 500 people have been jailed – with all sorts of procedural and legal violations. Any way you look at it, the new Russian revolution will turn on those who are behind bars.

Senior Russian government figures have rebelled against a deal between President Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, to switch jobs next year.
The rebellion indicates that the handover arrangement will not be as smooth as the two leaders had anticipated.

After Saturday’s announcement that Mr Medvedev would take over as prime minister, while backing Mr Putin to return to the presidency in March 2012 elections, Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, announced during a meeting in Washington that he would “definitely refuse” to work with Mr Medvedev in the cabinet.

“I don’t see myself in the new government. Nobody has offered me a position, but I think that the disagreements I have will not allow me to be a part of the new government,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings.

Four stunning recent events showed how the wheels are coming off the dictatorial regime of Vladimir Putin.

First, Putin was humiliated by being denied Germany’s annual Quadriga award after international pressure forced the Germans with publicly withdraw it.

Then, a new public opinion poll revealed that Putin is becoming just as unpopular at home as he is abroad.

Then it got much worse.

Next, Putin came in for extremely intense pressure from the United States. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Abkhazia and Ossetia, and the State Department implemented a ban on more than 60 Kremlin officials from entering the U.S. because of their complicity in the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky.

Finally, Putin was utterly humiliated by a brilliant bit of reporting from the Moscow Times, which showed that Putin’s efforts to discipline corrupt cops were entirely fraudulent, since the dismissed officers waltzed right back into cushy positions in the government.

The only question now is whether the craven people of Russia and the equally cowardly leaders of the NATO countries will somehow manage to find the courage to act in response to these developments, act in a meaningful way to directly challenge Putin’s authority. The notion that Putin is an unassailably popular and/or successful leader has been shattered, and the malignant consequences of his evil regime have been exposed. But so long as Puitn is allowed to act with impunity, with only superficial gestures like Quadriga and Magnitsky to obstruct him, Putin will continue to butcher his own people and undermine world security.

If the West needed any reminding of how horrifyingly evil Putin really is, that was delivered when Putin appeared before his answer to the Hitler-Jugend, Nashi, and declared that the United States was a nation of parasites and when it was revealed that Putin’s KGB henchmen had bombed the U.S. Embassy in Georgia. The world should have learned its lesson with the expansion of the USSR that it is not possible to wait when confronted with evil.

The world must act decisively against Putin today, or it will pay dearly for its failure tomorrow.

A nursery school in Sweden has prohibited teachers to use words that would indicate a child’s gender. Since “he” and “she” can’t be used, children must be defined by the neutral gender. Completely making a mockery of both grammar and common sense, Sweden has taken political correctness to a new level of absurdity.

I could not even imagine Russia taking such absurd measures. Political correctness is not something I would tend to associate with Russia. What do you all think?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently confirmed that Lady Gaga’s recent appearance at the gay pride parade in Rome on June 11 was organized by the US State Department. During her speech in Rome, the singer cracked down on Russia for the country’s discrimination of the right of sexual minorities.

Moscow’s two largest exchanges on Wednseday agreed to merge as part of a tie-up aimed at turning the Russian capital into an international financial centre by 2020.

The deal is valued at $5bn, with shareholders in Micex, the larger of the two exchanges, owning 75 per cent of the new combined group and RTS shareholders holding 25 per cent.

Is this really going to turn Moscow into a Financial Centre? It seems to me that confidence in Russia as a place to do business has dropped to a five year low. Are overseas companies going to see this latest development as reassurance that doing business in Russia is safe? I’m not so sure.