RFE/RL RUSSIA REPORT
27.11.2012
A review of RFE/RL reporting and analysis about domestic and foreign-policy developments in Russia.For more stories on Russia, please visit and bookmark our Russia page . |
 Putin's China Syndrome The Russian punditocracy has a bad case of China envy. More  Russian Prime Minister's Road-Safety Video Sparks Ridicule, Criticism An effort by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to promote road safety in Russia has been widely mocked. This is despite growing public frustration with the bloody toll drunk driving takes on the country's roads. More  Avar Who Killed Russian Freed A Moscow court has released the defendant in a high-profile case that sparked ethnic tensions. More  Czech Director Finds 'A Kind Of Hidden Totalitarianism' In Transdniester The Czech documentary “Fortress” by Klara Tasovska and Lukas Kokes recently won one of the top awards at the Jihlava international film festival. "Fortress" follows last year’s (unrecognized) presidential election in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniester. More  Russian Inmates' Protest Spills Outside Prison Gates  An inmate protest against harsh prison conditions in Russia's Chelyabinsk region turned into a full-scale uprising over the weekend. Convicts accused prison authorities of extortion and torture, and families and other supporters of the inmates gathered outside Prison No. 6 in Kopeysk. Russian authorities said they eventually quelled the unrest, but not before bloody clashes between police and the crowd outside resulted in 38 arrests, local media said. More Fewer land mines are being laid down today than in recent decades -- but huge numbers of them remain in the ground in postconflict countries around the world. RFE/RL spoke with Guy Willoughby, co-founder of the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization clearing mines in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and other countries. More Russian Police Injured In Prison Riot At least eight members of the Russian Interior Ministry's special police force, OMON, have been injured trying to restore order at a prison in Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. More  Interview With Ariel Cohen: Russia's Agenda Creates Unnecessary Friction With U.S. RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson spoke recently with Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. More  'Chechenization' To 'Daghestanization' -- Curious Changes In Russia's Armed Forces Russia’s Interior Ministry has given the green light for the creation of a special experimental Daghestani battalion, which will be the destination for some of the young men drafted into the Russian armed forces from that republic this fall. More  Cops, Cars, And Videotape: Russians Embrace Dash-Cam Craze Video cameras mounted on car dashboards have become a hit in Russia as a means to evade booth corrupt cops and extortionists. They are also providing a plethora of offbeat videos on the Russian Internet. More Russian scientist Valentin Danilov has walked free after serving eight years of a long prison sentence on charges of spying for China. More  Fifty Years After 'Denisovich,' Traveling Back To Solzhenitsyn's Gulag A half-century after the publication of one of the most gripping accounts of the Soviet-era Gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich," we visit one of the labor camps that inspired it: Ekibastuz, in what is now northern Kazakhstan. More  Valentin Danilov's Prison Blog Russian physicist Valentin Danilov spent a decade in prison as a result of an espionage conviction before he was granted early release on parole. This is a translation of his last post for a blog that he wrote during his imprisonment for RFE/RL's Russian Service, dated November 9, 2012: More  Russian Scientist Danilov Walks Free After Decade In Jail For Espionage Russian physicist Valentin Danilov has walked free after a decade in jail for espionage that he and others claim was a politically motivated conviction at the height of Russian "spy-mania." More  Huge Russian Lawsuit Against Madonna For Homosexual Propaganda Tossed Highlights include a defense attorney questioning the legitimacy of open-source site Wikipedia as a source of evidence, an examination of statistics on how many divorces break up due to "homosexualism," and an assertion that same-sex marriage has pretty much ruined Europe. More  Tyumen's Wetland Tatars The wetlands of Russia's Tyumen region are the site of the oldest Russian settlement in Siberia. But they are also home to Russians of Tatar descent. They live in the remote villages cut off from "the mainland" from spring through winter. More  Some Russian Rights Groups Vow To Ignore 'Foreign Agent' Law A controversial new law requiring nongovernmental organizations to register themselves as "foreign agents" has prompted a campaign of civil disobedience by leading Russian human rights groups. More  Russia's Best Prison Food, Bar None For one day at least, inmates at Prison No. 18 in the Russian city of Novosibirsk went from behind bars to behind burners in the high-security jail's modest kitchen.More A special Russian-Kyrgyz agreement on a simplified procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship by Kyrgyz nationals has been annulled. More  Explosion Kills Man In Kazan Police in Kazan, capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, have launched an investigation into an explosion that killed a man on November 20. More |
