[Nicihntm]

A liberal-leaning newspaper claimed Wednesday that the Investigative Committee's chairman threatened one of its reporters, who has since fled the country for fear of his safety.

Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, in an open letter published on the newspaper's website, accused Alexander Bastrykin of making the threats on a roadside bordering a Moscow region forest after the reporter had been driven there by Bastrykin's security guards.

Muratov later told Radio Liberty that the reporter, deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, had fled the country. Muratov has not disclosed the actual threats.

Sokolov was alone with Bastrykin when the threats were made, the letter said. Bastrykin is one of the nation's most senior law enforcement officials.

Recently, Sokolov wrote that he was outraged by the relatively soft sentencing of Sergei Tsepovyaz, a reputed member of the notorious Kushchyovskaya gang, which murdered 12 people, including small children, in 2011.

Tsepovyaz was fined 150,000 rubles ($4,600) for covering up the crime. The court ruled that he did not participate in the murder. Two other men who share Tsepovyaz's last name were found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.


In the article on the crime, Sokolov calls Bastrykin, as well as President Vladimir Putin and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, "servants of countless Russian 'Tsapoks.'" The Kushchyovskaya gang's reputed mastermind, Sergei Tsapok, is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/a...#ixzz1xqHDVB3M
The Moscow Times

[Nicihntm]

On April 20, the Russian newspaper Kommersant revealed [ru] an ongoing legislative project to create a state company to oversee the economic development of Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. Working on orders from Vladimir Putin, the Ministry of Economic Development has drafted a law to establish this entity, and has already distributed the document to four other ministries for approval. If created, the state company would be responsible for developing 16 sub-federal units in Russia's east that collectively make up 60% of the country's entire territory. The legislation would suspend many current laws on subsoil extraction, foresting, land ownership, urban planning, labor, and citizenship. Most contentiously, the state company would be under the direct control of the Russian President, effectively granting the Kremlin carte blanche over fundamental elements of local governance across Siberia.

News about Putin's plan for Siberia has provoked a variety of reactions in the RuNet blogosphere. The prospect of a ‘grand national project' (the end-all panacea to the country's woes, according to Russian ‘patriots') has predictably met with approval from Putin's supporters and opprobrium from his critics. Study some of the individual responses, however, and the schism at the heart of any such dichotomy quickly reveals that Russian bloggers harbor certain apprehensions that shape their political perceptions. While a trend emerges that ostensibly demonstrates a divide in popular opinion, a closer reading can identify fundamental shared assumptions that are vital to understanding the landscape of RuNet civil society.


The Anti-Putin Bloggers
Yuri Krugovykh represents one of the most peculiar groups of bloggers: anti-liberal, anti-Kremlin Russian nationalists. Twenty-years-old, Krugovykh is convinced that Putin's plan for a new state company in Siberia is an American plot to colonize Russia's eastern regions through Moscow. Attacking the groups that assembled earlier this year to defend Putin against liberal democrat protests, Krugovykh writes [ru]:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/04/27/russia-bloggers-respond-to-putins-proposed-siberian-state-company/

http://www.agoodtreaty.com/2012/05/1...l-may-updates/