The Russian Totalitarianism. Freedom here and now. Dmitrii Shusharin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of compulsory work and confiscation of her Notebook along with the mouse. Scandalously famous also the case of the Roofers (urban climbers who scale buildings), accused of hanging out the flag of Ukraine and overpainting the star on the spire on the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment high-rise. One of the roofers was convicted of hatred-motivated vandalism.

      After the Crimea seizure, special attention is paid to the issues of the territorial integrity of the country. Now the opposition leaders of the Crimean-Tatar Majlis fall under anti-separatist articles.

      In November 2015 in Petrozavodsk under Part 1 of Article 280.1 of the Criminal Code (calls for violating the territorial integrity of Russia) the deputy of Karelian Suojärvi Town Council Vladimir Zavarkin was sentenced to a fine of 30 thousand rubles. At a meeting for the resignation of the governor in May 2015, he jokingly offered to hold a referendum on the secession of the region, unless Moscow hears out the opposition arguments.

      And in the summer of 2015 in Chelyabinsk, a criminal case was initiated under Part 1 of Article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (calls for separatism via the Internet) against Alexei Moroshkin, the administrator of the VKontakte group. He posted the slogans “Support the embattled Ukraine! Free Urals! Together against evil!”. The former volunteer of the Donbas battalion “Vostok” advocated the separation of the Urals from Russia and the creation of a Siberian federation. As a result of the proceedings, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Another well-known “separatist affair” happened in the summer of 2015, when three Kaliningradians were accused of hanging a German flag over the FSB building.

      The Russian concept of “extremism” does not have an unambiguous interpretation, which could be accepted at the international level. The PACE Resolution of 2003 defines extremism as

      “a form of political activity that explicitly or surreptitiously denies the principles of parliamentary democracy and is based on the ideology and practice of intolerance, alienation, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ultranationalism.”

      The authors of the report note that at the heart of the Russian interpretation of extremism, the emphasis is on change of the political regime. Russia signed the “Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism”, in which extremism is understood as an act “aimed at forcible seizure of power.” This convention is also signed by Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

      In recent years, the siloviki (law enforcement and security officials) have been increasingly monitoring the repots in social networks. The administrative part of the anti-extremist legislation is now regularly applied against publications and outposts in social networks (mainly in “VKontakte”). Siloviki are looking for texts, videos and audio recordings found on the pages of social networks, corresponding to art. 20.29 of the CoAO (Code of Administrative Offenses) (production and distribution of extremist materials). They base their judgment on the federal list of extremist materials.

      In the case of article 20.3 of the CoAO, extremist material is anything that fits the definition of “Nazi symbols” or is similar to it “to the degree of confusion”. What is meant by the degree of confusion, is a subject to court decision. In practice, for example, Celtic crosses can fall into this grey area of the Nazi symbolism.

      Usually the verdict under these articles is a fine of one to two thousand rubles or a few days of administrative arrest. However, the blocking of accounts by Rosfinmonitoring can be applied with much more damaging effect.

      At the same time, the extremism label can often be applied to, for example, the antifascist material. In September 2015, the anti-fascist Julia Usach was found guilty for the post of the Kukryniksy cartoon and a photo from the 1945 Victory Day parade. The representative of the prosecution, according to her, promised “if necessary, we will bring them (Kukryniksy) into this office for questioning”

      In April 2015 an activist of the Young Guard of United Russia Maria Burdukovskaya was sentenced to a fine for the use of Grammar Nazi symbols. In March of the same year the journalist Polina Danilevich from Smolensk was fined 1000 rubles for comparing the photo of her apartment building courtyard with a photo of the same place during the German occupation. The siloviki found there a swastika.

      In September 2014, a Perm resident Eugenia Vyshigina was fined for having been tagged by one of her VKontakte “friends” in the video with “seaside partisans”. The “E” Center accused her of not rejecting, but confirming the mark on herself in this video. In May 2014 Dmitry Semyonov, a Chuvash activist of PARNAS (Party of People’s Freedom) was found guilty for reposting photographs showing the former “People’s Mayor” of Donetsk Pavel Gubarev in the uniform of the banned “Russian National Unity”, member of which he really was. The same Dmitry Semyonov was sentenced to a fine in September 2015 for having shared an interview Matvei Ganapolsky in VKontakte. The charge was based on the fact that his repost was automatically loaded with an image of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his papakha fur hat with the inscription “Death to the Russian viper.”

      Under the notion of extremism because of he vague formulation of extremism laws and the lack of clear-cut interpretation of the term makes it easy to label any opposition activity of all possible ideological orientations as extremist and be prosecuted as such. People convicted on “extremist” articles cannot participate in elections, and restricted in organizing rallies.

      Such cases indicate several tendencies. First, until recently, the sentences handed down to nationalists were against little-known people. Secondly, most recent sentences against members of Islamist groups have been imposed not for participation in banned organizations, but for heavier articles such as preparing a coup, participating in terrorist activities, etc. The share of sentences on anti-extremist legislation based on Internet evidence has recently risen to 90%21.

      To some experts, the persecution of relatively obscure individuals living far from Moscow and St. Petersburg suggest selective randomness in choosing victims. This conclusion seems highly inaccurate. The repressions have their own logic, which is especially noticeable in the persecution of protesters over the results of the 2011 State Duma election, primarily in Bolotnaya Square rally. The authorities demonstrated a firm consistency in the prosecution of those who were seen in rallies and demonstrations. At the same time, repression had one important characteristic. All of the leaders of protest actions, that is, persons from the opposition elite, came out unscathed. It is the ordinary participants who are tracked, caught and sentenced (the present tense is appropriate here). The government spares the opposition elite, feeling comfortable with them; it helps in preventing their renewal and preserving their monopoly on opposition.

      All these repressions have an institutional nature. However, totalitarianism in the making also needs the most active use of extra-institutional violence, which was a subject of to the second CEPR report, made public in the summer of 2016.

      Assaults on activists who disagreed with the authorities became a characteristic feature of Russian political life after Crimea annexation into the Russian Federation. The center’s experts collected a database of 238 cases of aggression against oppositionists and public figures. The database covers the last four years and analyzes data from the media and other open sources. Conditionally, the term “oppositionists” applies to an extremely wide range of people dissatisfied with the actions of the authorities: from unsystematic politicians participating in elections to environmentalists or urban activists trying to save the children’s playground. According to these data, in 2012 there were 35 cases of attacks on the opposition in various forms, 38 cases in 2013, 60 in 2014 and 50 cases in 2015. СКАЧАТЬ