Vladimir Putin’s Newest Target: Children

[Blue_Tires]

Russia’s transparency is gone. Pro-Putin radicals now attack independent journalists, famous intellectuals, politicians, and civil society activists, and the violence remains unpunished.

On Thursday, dozens of nationalists wearing ribbons of Saint George poured a bottle of green disinfectant over the face of internationally acclaimed novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The well-organized attackers cursed high school children and their teachers—visitors to Moscow who arrived from Russia’s regions to participate in a history contest devoted to memories of Stalin’s political repression.

One of the contest’s jury members, Irina Yasina, witnessed the attacks. The wheelchair-bound Yasina said that the radical activists scared her and the students she was working with. “Police did not stop the criminals, that means the state approves of this shameful, ugly attacks on children and women,” Yasina told The Daily Beast. “Russia is closing, withdrawing into some brutal self-isolated world, where young people do not want to remember their own history,” she said.

One part of the country, the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya, has already closed its doors for outside observers. Moscow reporters described the republic as “hell,” where locals suffer constant abductions and arrests but can find no sympathy or support from the Russian authorities. A dark new trend is the abduction of Chechen intellectuals who have a different opinion from the republic’s authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. The most recent cases include a university professor, a well-known poet, and two book publishers.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/03/vladimir-putin-s-newest-target-children.html

Can't wait to read Snowden's next hot take about this in the Guardian... Yeah, right...

Have at it, Snowdenistas...

[Igel]

1. Don't know what to say about this.

Partly because I can't get to the link because of a filter where I work.

However, I'll add a bit. The People's Liberation Front is not a friend to Putin. They want a bit of an overthrow of the government to establish a "pure" government not ruled by the usual suspects.

At the same time, Pamyat' "Memorial" is further from being a FOP or "friend of Putin," memorializing, as they do, the victims of some people that Putin may say bad things about for the camera but tends to defend 9/10 of the time.

Why didn't the militsiya show up to protect somebody like Ulitskaya, who's pretty much famous around the world amongst a certain set of people? Dunno. I suspect that there was a brief overlap: Pamyat' is not regarded highly, Ulitskaya happened to be there (and may or may not be highly regarded, but probably she's just useful), and what the Liberation Front was doing was also useful. Sort of like having the police stand back if one gang attacks another. Plausible deniability and all that.

As for Chechnya ... Nothing to say. Same old, same old.