WHAT'S IT LIKE LIVING IN RUSSIA TODAY?

Russian shock at 'gagged' babies

BBC News
Thursday, 1 February 2007

Russian prosecutors are investigating allegations that hospital staff in Yekaterinburg gagged babies because they did not want to hear them crying.

The patient at the hospital in the southern Urals who reported the case heard the children's muffled cries.

She used her mobile phone to film a baby lying in a cot with his mouth taped, while others had dummies taped to their mouths. They are all orphans.

The case, covered widely by Russian media, has caused deep shock.

Russians are used to scandals in the hospital, but this case has touched a raw nerve, says the BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow.

Criminal probe

The patient who reported the incident, Elena Kuritsyna, had been in the hospital with her own children.

She said she heard the suppressed crying of young children in the next ward.

"I heard that a baby was mumbling in a neighbouring room; when I looked in, I saw the baby with plaster over his mouth; he could not cry or do anything, was just mumbling," she told Reuters television.

She approached the nurse in the ward and was initially told to mind her own business. Children were crying too loudly, and distracting nurses from their work, she was told.

She eventually persuaded the nurse to remove the plaster, but she says that afterwards the nurse did it again.

The nurse has been suspended and on Wednesday the head doctor at the hospital was reprimanded.

Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation, and say they have discovered that sticking plaster was used more than once.

"Children in the first year of life were systematically gagged with sticking plaster to make children behave quietly," the prosecutors' press service said.

It is alleged the babies were silenced because there were too few staff to deal with them.

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Mobile phone footage

Russia probes new reporter death

Russian authorities are investigating the mysterious death of a prominent journalist who covered military space technology for the Kommersant daily.

Ivan Safronov, 51, fell from a fifth-floor window on Friday at the Moscow apartment block where he lived.

Prosecutors quoted by Russian media say they are investigating the possibility that he was "driven to suicide".

But friends and relatives of Safronov told Kommersant that they knew of no reason why he would commit suicide.

"I don't want to fuel speculation, but I can say for sure that I knew him well and he showed absolutely no sign of being suicidal," said Kommersant's chief editor Andrei Vasilyev.

Safronov had irked some officials with his critical reporting and had been questioned by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Associated Press reports.

Kommersant says the results of medical tests on his body are expected on Wednesday and that prosecutors will then decide whether to open a criminal case under the article of suspected murder or induced suicide.

Kommersant says its own analysis of his last telephone calls gives no grounds to suspect that he could have been provoked into committing suicide.

Russian investigators are still trying to find out who killed Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed serious human rights abuses in Chechnya. She was shot dead in Moscow last October.

Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin, a career K.G.B. officer, was, in effect, anointed as President by Boris Yeltsin, thirteen journalists have been murdered in Russia. Nearly all the deaths took place in strange circumstances, and none of them have been successfully investigated or prosecuted. In July, 2003, the investigative reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, a well-known colleague of Politkovskaya's at Novaya Gazeta, died of what doctors described as an "allergic reaction.'' Shchekochikhin, who became famous in the Gorbachev era with his reports on the rise of a new mafia, had been investigating allegations of tax evasion against people with links to the F.S.B., the post-Soviet K.G.B. Nobody ever explained what Shchekochikhin was allergic to, and his family is convinced that he was poisoned. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the founding editor of the Russian edition of Forbes?-who had made powerful enemies by investigating corruption among Russian business tycoons?-was shot dead as he left his Moscow office.

The attacks have not been limited to journalists. In September of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, a candidate for President of Ukraine who helped lead the Orange Revolution, and who was vigorously opposed by Putin, barely survived a poisoning. Doctors determined that he had been given the deadly chemical dioxin, which left his face disfigured and his health severely impaired. Since then, two members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, have been assassinated, and last September Andrei Kozlov, the deputy chief of Russia's central bank, was shot outside a Moscow stadium following a company soccer match. Kozlov had initiated a highly visible effort to rid the country of banks that were little more than fronts for organized crime. And just a few weeks ago, in an execution that could have been planned by Al Capone, Movladi Baisarov, a former Chechen special-forces officer who had come to be seen by Kadyrov as a rival, was gunned down on Leninsky Prospekt, one of Moscow's busiest thoroughfares. A series of control shots were administered in front of scores of witnesses, including high-ranking members of the police force. No arrests have been made.

Four weeks after Politkovskaya died, Alexander Litvinenko, a little-known former K.G.B. agent who had been imprisoned by Putin and had then defected to England, fell gravely ill in London. Like many others, including Politkovskaya, Litvinenko had accused the Russian President of creating a pretext for the Second Chechen War in 1999 by blowing up buildings in Moscow and then blaming Chechen separatists for the attacks. Putin's decisive response to those acts of terrorism propelled him toward immense and lasting popularity [..].

The manner of Litvinenko's poisoning was obscure almost until the moment he died. At first, doctors thought that he had an unusual bacterial infection; then they said that his symptoms pointed toward rat poison. When his immune system started to fail, they thought it more likely that the poison was a radioactive form of thallium, which had been used by the K.G.B. nearly fifty years earlier in a failed attempt to assassinate Nikolai Khokhlov, an agent who had refused to comply with an order to kill a prominent Russian dissident. Finally, just hours before Litvinenko died, the doctors provided a definitive and even more improbable diagnosis: he had been poisoned with polonium 210, a rare radioactive isotope; a millionth of a gram is enough to destroy a person's bodily organs. Litvinenko's murder was the first known case of nuclear terrorism perpetrated against an individual.

RBC, 28.03.2007, Moscow 10:49:12.The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center has polled 1,600 people in 153 locations of Russia's regions and republics about what associations they had with such word symbols as 'order', 'property', 'socialism', 'business' etc.
Such notions as 'order' (58 percent) and 'justice' (49 percent) aroused the most positive emotions, followed by 'stability' (38 percent), 'welfare' (37 percent), 'freedom' (37 percent), 'patriotism' (35 percent), 'Russians' (34 percent), 'human rights' (33 percent), 'labor' (31 percent) and 'success' (31 percent). These words were found to cause negative emotions with no more than 3 percent of poll participants.
Most negatively Russians perceive such notions as 'elite' (41 percent) 'non-Russians' (29 percent), 'capitalism' (26 percent), 'revolution' (22 percent), and 'the West' (23 percent). Most controversial proved such words as 'socialism' (12 percent of positive and 11 percent of negative responses), 'wealth' (12 against 12 percent), 'democracy' (15 against 9 percent), 'market' (10 against 15 percent), and 'power' (9 against 11 percent).

Russian police detain gays as punches fly

Reuters
Sun May 27, 2007 12:38PM EDT

MOSCOW - Russian nationalists shouting "death to homosexuals" punched and kicked demonstrators calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow on Sunday while riot police detained dozens of gay protesters.

Two European parliamentarians were among those held as they tried to present a petition asking Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has called gay marches satanic acts, to lift a ban on the parade.

Nationalists and extreme Russian Orthodox believers held icons and denounced homosexuality as "evil" while a group of thick-set young men turned up with surgeon's masks, which they said would protect them from the "gay disease".

"We are defending our rights," said a young gay man named Alexey, with blood pouring from his nose after he was beaten up by a man screaming "homosexuals are perverts" opposite the mayor's office. His attacker was detained.

"This is terrible but I am not scared. This is a pretty scary place, a pretty scary country if you are gay. But we won't give up until they allow us our rights," he said.

Hundreds of riot police lined Tverskaya street in central Moscow and plain-clothes police mingled with a large number of foreign and Russian journalists.

Parade organiser Nikolai Alexeyev said by telephone from a police station that about 30 gay activists had been detained. A police spokesman said 31 people were detained.

"We are sitting in the police station right now. We were detained outside the mayor's office when we tried to present the petition," said Alexeyev. "They are keeping us in the cells overnight and we will be in court tomorrow."

Marco Cappato, an Italian member of the EU parliament, was also detained at the protest but later released.

Russia decriminalised homosexuality in 1993 but tolerance is not widespread. When asked about gay parades, President Vladimir Putin quipped in February that his approach to sexual minorities is guided by Russia demographic problems.

"We believe these perverts should not be allowed to march on the streets of Moscow, the third Rome, a holy city for all Russians," said Igor Miroshnichenko, who said he was an Orthodox believer who had come to support the riot police.

"It (homosexuality) is satanic," he said. One man holding a crucifix threatened to beat up any gay person he saw.

Richard Fairbrass, a gay singer with the British pop group Right Said Fred, was punched in the face and kicked by anti-gay activists while speaking to Reuters in an interview.

"We understand this is a gay event and so we came down here today," Fairbrass said before being hit. Blood dripped from his face after the attack.

British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell was knocked to the ground and kicked twice. When he got up he was punched in the face again and taken away by two riot policemen.

"The attitude of President Putin and Mayor Luzhkov is that they will grudgingly tolerate gay people providing they remain in the closet and underground," Tatchell said by telephone.

"There is no serious action taken against queer bashing."

Volker Beck, a German Green Party politician, was hit in the face with eggs before being detained by riot police. "We didn't do anything," he told Reuters as he was led away.

Germany's Green Party Chairwoman Claudia Roth called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise the issue of rights with Putin at next month's Group of Eight summit.

"It has been shown once again today that human rights are systematically abused in Putin's Russia," she said in a statement. Beck was later released.

"It is very conspicuous when people are arrested in front of the mayor's office when they were doing nothing other than trying to present a peaceful petition," said Scott Long, a rights activist with Human Rights Watch who observed the events.

"There was no real attempt to separate the two sides and that led to people being beaten up," he said. "I would call on the Russian authorities to protect freedom of assembly, protect freedom of expression and protect demonstrators."

Such seemingly state-sponsored actions have some precedents -- albeit circumstantial.

In summer 2005, Polish citizens, including diplomats and journalists, in Moscow were harassed by "unknown attackers." The attacks followed an attack in Warsaw on the family of a Russian diplomat, and Moscow expressed its displeasure at the way the Polish investigation proceeded. But when Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski called on Putin to stop the attacks, the assaults on Poles in Moscow abruptly ended.

Senior UK diplomat beaten up after campaign of Russian harassment

· Siberian assault follows bid to intimidate envoy
· Livingstone plea to mayor of Moscow on gay parades

Tuesday May 29, 2007
The Guardian

A senior British diplomat has been beaten by two unidentified assailants while on an official trip in provincial Russia. Nigel Gould-Davies, first secretary at the British embassy in Moscow, was attacked at 1am on Saturday as he walked across the theatre square in the Siberian city of Chita, police said.

Mr Gould-Davies needed hospital treatment for bruises to his face. His glasses were broken in the attack and he was unable to see his assailants, police said.

The beating is the second assault on Britons in Russia in two days, and follows an attack on Sunday by anti-homosexual protesters on the British human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. [..] Yesterday embassy officials described the attack on Mr Gould-Davies as a random assault carried out by drunken teenagers celebrating the end of the school year.

But the assault follows sustained state-sponsored harassment by the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi against Anthony Brenton, Britain's ambassador in Moscow. Activists have picketed the British embassy, disrupted meetings and jumped in front of the ambassador's car. The campaign started last summer after Mr Brenton attended a human rights conference.

Mr Gould-Davies was at the end of a two-week lecture tour in Siberia. The diplomat had given lectures to university students on globalisation, and had also met with regional officials. [..] An embassy spokesman said: "We can confirm that an assault took place against a British diplomat in Chita. We are in close contact with him. We look to the authorities to ensure that the perpetrators are caught." [..]

In Moscow, three Russian gay activists appeared in court yesterday following Sunday's demonstrations, which saw the arrest of 25 campaigners, including the German Green MP Volker Beck and the Italian MEP Marco Cappato.

The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, yesterday wrote to Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, urging him to lift the ban on gay parades in the city that prompted Sunday's protest. He also called for all charges against the gay rights demonstrators to be dropped. "I am writing to convey my deep concern at the reported physical violence against and arrest of Peter Tatchell," Mr Livingstone wrote, adding that gay parades were now "the practice in most cities around the world".

Yesterday Mr Tatchell said he was still recovering. He said the Moscow police had "stood and watched" while far-right skinheads kicked him to the ground and punched him. "Even today I'm woozy. My eyesight is pretty poor. It's difficult to see clearly," he told the Guardian.

"It's almost on a par with the beating I received at the hands of Robert Mugabe's thugs in 2001. This time I wasn't knocked unconscious and left in the gutter. But I ended up with a much bloodier face and severe bruising and swelling."

Mr Tatchell yesterday registered a complaint about his treatment with Moscow police. Officials, however, defended the actions of riot police. "The city authorities did the right thing by prohibiting the parade and thus preventing clashes between opponents who are numerous in this country and advocates of sexual minorities," said Mikhail Solomentsev, a spokesman for Moscow's mayor.

One wonders how Russians view the American Primaries?

... P.S. I seem unable to do without long posts
It apparently becomes a tradition. Even in a foreign language. Still hope they are not too boring or incomprehensible to read.