Posts Tagged ‘Nashi’

31
October 2011

Unreported World: Vlad’s Army – Putin’s brave new world

The Telegraph

Every Wednesday night, in a smoky basement restaurant in Moscow, some 20 well-dressed and, in some cases, extremely beautiful, women, meet for dinner. They have one thing in common. Their husbands are in jail. Many are serving long terms in degrading conditions. The grief on the faces of these wives, as they meet together for mutual support at the Rosso&Bianco wine bar, is distressing to see. All insist that their spouses are innocent. Each of the wives has a painful story to tell, and many have lost everything: their homes, businesses and family life.

Take Tatiana, an elegant blond woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a mauve shawl and a herringbone suit. She is visibly in shock, because it is only 24 hours since a Moscow court sent her husband, Vladimir, to jail for 13 years. He has been found guilty of raping their seven-year-old daughter. Tatiana knows the story cannot be true – medical tests showed the girl was physically unharmed.

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21
February 2011

Bugs, bribes and burglary: Tony Brenton discovered how far Russia’s rulers would go to keep power…

Daily Mail / Mail Online

Should you get home to find the door to your flat unlocked from the inside, that’s just the FSB (the KGB’s successor) letting you know they called. If you pick up the phone to hear your voice played back, as I have, someone is recording your conversations.

Such was my life in Russia during my time as a senior official and then as British Ambassador from 2004 to 2008.

Occasionally the surveillance and harassment were merely funny, such as when a female colleague spotted a handsome man three times in the course of the same day before realising this was the FSB trailing her.

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