On February 5, 2018, Valery Pshenichny, an entrepreneur who the Russian press calls the “Russian Elon Musk”, was found hanged in St. Petersburg’s pretrial detention facility SIZO-4. The official explanation was that he had committed suicide. But the autopsy showed that Pshenichny died of physical injuries. Forensic doctors found out that before his death Pshenichny was raped. Experts… Read More »
On June 8, 2018, Roman Romanov, Director of the Museum of the Gulag History (MGH) in Moscow, appealed to Mikhail Fedotov, Adviser to the Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chairman of the Human Rights Council (HRC). The appeal describes the destruction of registration cards of the prisoners of Stalin’s labor camps in the Russian archives in accordance with… Read More »
Reports from Russian pretrial prisons (SIZO) and corrective colonies, IK (labor camps) for convicts that are under responsibility of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), which is subordinated to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, show that due to the regime introduced in some of these incarceration facilities they have become places of constant torture. Very troubling… Read More »
On June 14, 2018, a citizen of Ukraine of Afghan origin, Kabir Mohammad, who was arrested in the annexed Crimea at the request of Iran instead of another person who is suspected of fraud, gave an interview. In February 2018, he fled to Ukraine after he spent a year in the pretrial detention facility SIZO-1 of the city… Read More »
On June 21, 2018 Russia’s Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor) announced that it has revoked the state accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, better known as “Shaninka,” after a planned inspection uncovered “multiple violations of education standards.” This School was founded in 1995 by Teodor Shanin (1930), Professor of Sociology at the… Read More »
On December 27, 2017, 397 Russian academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN), professors and doctors of sciences sent an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the “overwhelming majority of the academic corps” expressed dissatisfaction with the 2013 reform of the Academy. Scientists argued that “the style and methods of the… Read More »
On December 25, 2017, the Central Electoral Commission refused to register the nomination of Navalny as a candidate for the President of Russia. But, in fact, Navalny does challenge Vladimir Putin: “Putin is horribly afraid — he sees a threat in competing with me,” Alexei Navalny said in a video. The meeting with the Commission was broadcast on… Read More »
In December 1985, Professor Vladimir Efroimson, a prominent geneticist, gave a short and extremely emotional speech at Moscow Polytechnic Museum after the screening of a documentary about another famous geneticist, Academician Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), arrested in 1940 and sentenced to death as a “spy.” The death sentence was commuted to a 20-year imprisonment, and in August 1943 Vavilov… Read More »