Posts Tagged ‘kasparov’
When Putin’s Thugs Came for Me
The only surprise to come out of Friday’s guilty verdict in the trial here of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot was how many people acted surprised. Three young women were sentenced to two years in prison for the prank of singing an anti-Putin “prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Their jailing was the next logical step for Vladimir Putin’s steady crackdown on “acts against the social order,” the Kremlin’s expansive term for any public display of resistance.
In the 100 days since Mr. Putin’s re-election as president, severe new laws against public protest have been passed and the homes of opposition leaders have been raided. These are not the actions of a regime prepared to grant leniency to anyone who offends Mr. Putin’s latest ally, the Orthodox Church and its patriarch.
Unfortunately, I was not there to hear the judge’s decision, which she took hours to read. The crowds outside the court building made entry nearly impossible, so I stood in a doorway and took questions from journalists. Suddenly, I was dragged away by a group of police—in fact carried away with one policeman on each arm and leg.
The men refused to tell me why I was being arrested and shoved me into a police van. When I got up to again ask why I had been detained, things turned violent. I was restrained, choked and struck several times by a group of officers before being driven to the police station with dozens of other protesters. After several hours I was released, but not before they told me I was being criminally investigated for assaulting a police officer who claimed I had bitten him.
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The Case of Sergei Magnitsky: A Lawyer’s Death Threatens the U.S.-Russian Reset
On November 16, 2009, after 355 days of pre-trial detention, Sergei Magnitsky passed away in a Russian prison—his ailing body untreated and cruelly bound by straitjacket—as medical staff idled just outside his door. In the year since his arrest, Magnitsky had endured incarceration in a below-freezing open-air cell, living amidst sleep deprivation, isolation, raw sewage, and psychological torture. It was an unthinkable position to be in for Sergei Magnitsky, a studious and timid tax lawyer. Magnitsky’s apparent crime? Uncovering one of the largest tax frauds in Russia’s history—estimated at $230 million—and implicating a cabal of corrupt Russian Interior Ministry officers, judges, tax service officials, and known criminals.
In Putin’s Russia today, the Magnitsky case may have passed unnoticed. Here, even the most powerful voices can be silenced—no better example of this exists than the continued imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But due to meticulous documentation, the heinousness of the crime, and a well-organized network of advocates, the Magnitsky case has struck a rare chord of outrage in both Russia and the international community. Thanks to the campaigning of U.S. Congress members, Magnitsky’s former client, and an organization called Russian Untouchables, the Magnitsky case may yet force the Russian government to address human rights abuse allegations.
As William Browder, former client of Magnitsky and founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management—a global investment advisory firm—outlined in a 2009 article titled “They Killed My Lawyer,” the complicated machination that resulted in the defrauding of $230 million and Sergei Magnitsky’s death started in 2007. In June of that year, dozens of police officers raided the offices of Hermitage Capital Management and law firm Firestone Duncan—where Magnitsky worked—under the premise of tax investigation. In the months that followed, Interior Ministry officers used the confiscated and illegally obtained seals, documents, and charters of Hermitage Capital to secretly re-register Hermitage’s various investment companies in the name of a third party.
At the behest of his clients, Sergei Magnitsky uncovered the scheme: The stolen companies were being used to claim overpaid taxes—to the tune of $230 million. In turn, crooked tax authorities processed the claims and wired money to obscure shell banks. As research into the case continued and complaints by Hermitage mounted, the Interior Ministry struck back by opening criminal cases against the Hermitage lawyers investigating the fraud. As a result of harassment or threat, all but one Hermitage lawyer either left the country or went into hiding. That lawyer was Sergei Magnitsky.
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A Conversation with Garry Kasparov
World Policy Institute
For nearly three decades, since he first exploded onto the world scene, Garry Kasparov ruled the chessboard. A product of the Soviet system that elevated chess and its greatest champions to a pantheon reserved only for the most revered members of the elite, this grandmaster from the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan was at once worshipped and feared. Millions played this de facto national game in small, crowded, smoky rooms and vest-pocket parks across the Soviet Union. Those at the pinnacle of political power feared him as they watched, helplessly, the arrival of a popular outlander into their most hallowed precincts. At age 13, he won the Soviet junior championship, and within three years was rated number 15 in the world, becoming a grandmaster a year later.
It was in the final decade of the Soviet era that Kasparov rose to international fame. In January 1984, with just five years left until the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was the number 1 ranked chess player in the world. But ahead of him lay one last hurdle for the world title—Anatoly Karpov, darling of the nomenklatura, embraced by President Leonid Brezhnev and each of his successors as an example of the finest product of the Soviet system. To take on the Soviet chess establishment, Kasparov joined the Communist Party and just months later played Karpov in a marathon 48-game match, which concluded a year later with 24 more games, leaving Kasparov triumphant. By 1987, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Komsomol—the union of Soviet youth. But in November 1989, the wall came down, and the Soviet Union began its rapid disintegration. While Kasparov continued to play chess—brilliantly—he had begun to look beyond the chessboard to the new, open society that held so much promise, he hoped, for new beginnings.
Today, Kasparov has transcended his circumscribed beginnings and has sought to build a bridge from the game of chess to the transformation of the Russian government, a political game where the stakes are so much higher. A leader of Moscow’s liberal opposition, he is confident that the end is near for the system that for so long curbed his aspirations for a free Russia. And, even more broadly, there are profound lessons to be learned from the link between his game and the societies where its most accomplished players flourish, as he explained to World Policy Journal editor David A. Andelman and managing editor Christopher Shay.
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Khodorkovsky supports the supplemented «Magnitsky list»
The imprisoned former CEO of Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky has approved the list of Russian officials who are suggested being banned to enter Western countries by the opponent Garry Kasparov.
As reported earlier, Khodorkovsky suggested the British Prime Minister David Cameron banning many high Russian officials to enter United Kingdom. The list, which includes 308 people, was originally initiated by the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, Sunday Telegraph reported.
Khodorkovsky’s lawyars said he had not discussed such suggestions with them and had not made a list of officials who, in his opinion, are blamable for violations of human rights. However, later the press secretary of Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev published a full answer of the imprisoned oligarch.
“The British government with the Olympic games can do something to raise importance of human rights. In June 2011 one of the Russian opposition leaders Garry Kasparov presented a list of persons who are involved in violations of human rights to the US House of Representatives. I would like the United Kingdom to read carefully this list and compare it to the list of the Russian delegation planning to arrive in London in 2012,” the answer said.
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The Myth of a U.S.-Russia Strategic Partnership
After four years of Dmitry Medvedev keeping the czar’s throne warm, Vladimir Putin is once again Russia’s president. There were no public celebrations to accompany Mr. Putin’s inauguration on May 7. Quite the opposite. Moscow’s streets had been cleared by a huge security presence; the city turned into a ghost town. This scene came the day after massive protests showed that the Russian middle class rejects Mr. Putin’s bid to become their president for life. With no independent legislature or judiciary at our disposal, Mr. Putin’s impeachment will have to take place in the streets.
Meanwhile, this modern czar is using the full power of the state to stamp out Russia’s growing democracy movement. Two young movement leaders, Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov, were arrested on May 6 and are still in jail on 15-day sentences. They’ve been charged with “violently resisting arrest,” even though several videos of the arrest show Mr. Navalny with his hands in the air shouting, “Don’t resist! Don’t resist!”
Naturally, the court has forbidden the admission of any video evidence in the case. It is possible that a criminal case will be added against them for “inciting mass violence”—Kremlin code for a political trial.
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President Obama must stand up for Russia’s dissidents
A network of student presidents from universities around the world, College-100 (or C-100), has done a sterling job of exposing corruption in Russia, producing the video below about the case of Sergei Magnitsky.
To get you up to speed, Mr Magnitsky was a Russian tax attorney who uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by corrupt bureaucrats working in league with the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency). Instead of thanking him for his spadework, which might have recompensed the Russian taxpayer, the state allowed the very criminals Mr Magnitsky had exposed to arrest and torture him to death in a gruesome year-long pre-trial detention. Russia is now trying Mr Magnitsky posthumously for the crime no one -not even his jailers – believe he committed.
European parliaments, the House of Commons, the European Union and the United States Congress are all mulling separate forms of legislation to issue travel bans and asset freezes to the 60 known conspirators in Mr Magnitsky’s persecution (the logic being that criminals in Russia like to go abroad to spend their stolen fortunes).
The US Senate bill, sponsored by two-thirds of the Senate, actually threatens to impose sanctions and visa restrictions against anyone from any foreign country credibly accused of “gross human rights violations.” In other words, it’s a universal proscription that might come in handy the next time a lawyer tries to do his job – or smuggles himself into a US embassy.
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Kasparov & Nemtsov: Sanction Putin’s Criminals
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate will hold a hearing to discuss the accession of Russia to the World Trade Organization and the repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment that impedes American trade relations with Russia. The Obama administration has portrayed it as little more than overdue Cold War housekeeping while touting the imagined economic benefits for American farmers that could result from freer trade with Russia.
But the reality on the ground in today’s authoritarian Russia is far more complex. We support the repeal, both as leaders of the pro-democracy opposition in Russia and as Russian citizens who want our nation to join the modern global economy. It is essential, however, to see the bigger picture of which Jackson-Vanik is a part.
The “election” of Vladimir Putin to the presidency is over, but the fight for democracy in Russia is just beginning. At both major opposition meetings following the fraudulent March 4 election, we publicly resolved that Mr. Putin is not the legitimate leader of Russia. The protests will not cease and we will continue to organize and prepare for a near future without Mr. Putin in the presidency. Getting rid of him and his cronies is a job for Russians, and we do not ask for foreign intervention. We do, however, ask that the U.S. and other leading nations of the Free World cease to provide democratic credentials to Mr. Putin. This is why symbols matter, and why Jackson-Vanik still matters.
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Stealing the Future in Russia
The Other Russia
The adjective “Orwellian” has become cheap currency in modern political discourse. Liberals and conservatives alike in open democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States enjoy using the term to describe nearly any infringement on civil liberties by the state. Video cameras to deter crime, wiretaps of suspected terrorists, security checks at airports – all have been deemed worthy reference to George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984. As much as I share these concerns, those of us who live in actual police states would prefer to preserve the power of the vocabulary required to describe our circumstances.
The most powerful theme in Orwell’s book is not that of the all-seeing Big Brother, but that of the control and distortion of language, especially in the form of newspeak. Words take on inverted meanings, terms expressing unapproved ideas are eliminated, and human thought itself is curtailed through the reduction and simplification of vocabulary. This attempt to warp reality via information control is not science fiction to anyone brought up on Pravda in the Soviet Union – or anyone living in Putin’s Russia today.
And so, the presidential election of March 4 — the most fraudulent in Russian history — is proclaimed “fair and clean” by the state-controlled media. Peaceful civilian protests are dubbed “extremist provocations” and the riot police who brutally suppress the protestors are “maintaining order.” The public outcry over fraud in the December 4 parliamentary elections was followed by even greater corruption and the preordained reinstallation of a KGB lieutenant colonel who clearly aims to install himself as dictator-for-life.
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Kasparov, Nemtsov call McFaul’s Bluff
On Tuesday, I wrote about U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul’s objection to tying America’s economic interaction with Russia to the promotion of human rights. McFaul was in Washington for a conference and also to push for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a piece of Cold War-era legislation that sanctioned Moscow’s trade status for restricting Jewish emigration. Now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization, Jackson-Vanik disadvantages American businesses, and so it’s time to repeal it.
But I argued that McFaul’s emphasis on repealing Jackson-Vanik was a dodge, since its repeal is uncontroversial. The real issue is whether it should be replaced by legislation that would hold Vladimir Putin’s administration accountable for its atrocious human rights record. Were McFaul not representing the Obama administration, I added, he might very well support such action–McFaul is the author of several books on promoting democracy in the post-Soviet space. Today, Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov, two outspoken Russian opposition figures, take to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make those points, and a few others.
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