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By Svetlana Kononova, Special to Russia Profile
April 12, 2010
A few days before two deadly suicide bombings took place on the Moscow metro, killing 40 and injuring dozens more, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov announced that due to the threat of terrorism, Russia doesn’t plan to ratify the sixth protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans the death penalty. “Well-known circumstances do not allow us to do this. The issue has to do with terrorist activity in Russia,” he said. Following the tragedies at the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations, the idea of introducing capital punishment for terrorists became the subject of a heated debate.
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By Tom Balmforth, Russia Profile
April 7, 2010
Imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky finally took to the stand Tuesday to open his defense against allegations of embezzlement and money laundering, after a year of hearings for the prosecution. The former Yukos manager’s eight year prison sentence is in its sixth year, but if he is found guilty in this second trial he faces another 22 and a half on the inside. And after a Khodorkovsky article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta was taken to task for “extremism,” a third case could be opened against Russia’s once richest man.
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By Roland Oliphant, Russia Profile
April 6, 2010
Ever since Mikhail Lermontov penned the line “the evil Chechen crawls on the bank and sharpens his knife,” Chechens have struggled with what is today rather clinically called “negative stereotyping.” Now Chechnya’s Human Rights Ombudsman Nurdi Nukhazhiev claims that he has found a modern, supposedly respectable publication propagating just those 19th century prejudices. And he wants it banned.
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By Graham Stack, Special to Russia Profile
April 6, 2010
The screening on April 2 on Russia’s state-owned Kultura television channel of legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s new film “Katyn,” which describes the mass execution of over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, together with the upcoming April 7 joint commemoration of the Polish dead by Russia’s and Poland’s respective prime ministers, show that the Kremlin is picking up the 1990s anti-Stalinist baton again – but ensuring that no shadows fall on the validity of the victory in World War II 65 years ago.
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By Svetlana Kononova, Special to Russia Profile
April 5, 2010
Russia has recently banned Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical work “Mein Kampf,” joining a number of countries where the “Nazi Bible” is already forbidden. State prosecutors said that a book that describes the concept of “Lebensraum” and paints the Slavic people as inferior beings has “a militaristic outlook and justifies discrimination and destruction of non-Aryan races, reflecting ideas which, when implemented, started World War II.” Experts suggest that the decision to add the book to the federal list of extremist materials signifies the Russian government’s wish to illustrate the war it is waging against the far-right movements. But can this war be won, especially after the Moscow metro bombings?
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By Tom Balmforth, Russia Profile
April 1, 2010
Dozens of opposition demonstrators were arrested in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the “Strategy 31” demonstrations yesterday, but many of the event’s usual mainstays boycotted it, instead laying flowers in memory of the victims of Monday’s suicide bombings. But violence even marred that solemn event when a bystander cuffed an 82-year old veteran human rights activist around the head. Tensions remain high after the bombings, and they have also exposed a division in the opposition. The opposition argues that post-March 29 Russia will be a tough environment for it to operate in.
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By Roland Oliphant, Russia Profile
April 1, 2010
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Dagestan on Thursday to meet with regional leaders and reiterate the Kremlin’s hard-man line with comments about “ripping the heads off” terrorists. But ten years after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to “kill them in the outhouse,” the insurgency is still going strong and still able to kill in the Russian capital. Is it time for a change of strategy? And is Medvedev man enough to lead it?
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By Roland Oliphant , Russia Profile
March 31, 2010
Doku Umarov, the Chechen rebel leader who in February had threatened to bring “the war to Russian homes,” appeared to have claimed responsibility for Monday’s double suicide bombing of Moscow’s Metro system late Wednesday. In a video released on Youtube and the rebel KavkazCenter Website he said the attacks had been carried out on his orders in revenge for an FSB operation on February 11. That will probably put to rest the wilder speculation circulating about the attacks, but it won’t assuage growing criticism of the authorities’ response.
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By Roland Oliphant, Russia Profile
March 31, 2010
In language and custom, Kaliningraders are as Russian as their countrymen. But the locals have produced the largest grassroots demonstrations against the government.
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By Graham Stack, Special to Russia Profile
March 30, 2010
On March 19 Anton Ivanov, the chairman of Russia’s top commercial court, the Supreme Arbitration Court, and a close associate of President Dmitry Medvedev, proposed in a speech at the Constitutional Court in St. Petersburg that Russia introduce the principle of precedent to its legal system, making rulings on selected cases by top judges into binding examples for lower instances to follow. Russia’s legal system is based on Roman law, which in its purest form only recognizes the authority of legislation and not previous court decisions. Precedent law, a substitution for legislation, is traditionally the preserve of Anglo-Saxon common law.
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