(In the photo — Zarifa Sautieva) The end of last week was marked by a new wave of repressive activities and rude treatment of Russian citizens by law enforcement officials, in different regions, moreover.
On Friday, for the first time in the entire period of repression against organizers and participants of Ingush protests, Zarifa Sautieva, an employee of the Museum of Repression of the Ingush People and organizer of the exhibition «Women in Deportation,» was detained and taken to a pre-trial detention center in Nalchik. Almost simultaneously, the author of the Ingush opposition publication Fortanga.ORG, Rashid Maisigov, was detained on the standard charge of drug possession. According to his lawyers, he was tortured in the usual manner.
The Fortanga.ORG website itself was blocked by Roskomnadzor, which claims to have bypassed the required procedure. Normally, when a website is notified that it contains material that violates a law (Golos Islama receives such notices almost every month, sometimes several times a month), the website’s administration is required to remove the material within 48 hours, and the website is blocked only if this is not done. However, Fortanga claims that it was blocked without being given the opportunity to remove the offending material from the site, which is why its administration is now planning to sue Roskomnadzor.
All this is happening against the backdrop of the dismissal of the previous Kremlin governor of Ingushetia, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, who managed to win an overwhelming anti-rating, and the appointment of a new governor, Mahmoud-Ali Kalimatov, whom naive people had hoped for. But the new governor does not react in any way to the lawlessness of his power over his (?) people, which clearly illustrates the correctness of mathematical logic concerning the Kremlin system: changing the order of terms does not change and cannot change their sum.
But if anyone thinks that the lawlessness of the authorities and law enforcement agencies exists only in the «regions», he is mistaken. Moscow has already become a world symbol of Russian neo-imperialism, but ordinary residents of this city are just as powerless as residents of other regions of the Russian Federation. This was vividly demonstrated in the run-up to the Moscow City Duma elections, where almost all of the major (only 15 in total) opposition candidates were simply not allowed to run, disqualifying their signatures.
Yesterday the residents came to the building of the Moscow City Election Commission and demanded an explanation from its head, Valentin Gorbunov. They received the rude answer that he was on his own territory. People began to gather for a spontaneous protest, which was supported by opposition politicians of different views, from Alexei Navalny to the deputy of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Vladislav Zhukovsky, who was allowed to participate in the elections but demanded that other candidates be allowed as well. The Moscow police responded by brutally beating the detainees, one of whom was caught on camera.
In other words, any civil protest activity is punished not only in the Caucasus, but throughout Russia. By the way, yesterday it became known how much the participants of the protest in Moscow in defense of Ivan Golunov, who was arrested on drug charges, were fined. Under the pressure of the protests, he was forced to be released, but those who came to his defense were forced to pay not only administrative detentions, but also fines totaling 1,385,000 rubles. Thus, the tactic of the authorities and law enforcement officials in the face of protests is to wait for people to disperse. In rare cases, they make concessions and then take repressive measures against the organizers and participants of these actions. Maybe they want to encourage people to come out one day and not disperse?