Website Ingushetia.org has lost a second owner in just over a year to violence. Maria Eismont reports
(more…)
Influential businessman and activist Maksharip Aushev was shot dead in Kabardino-Balkaria on 25 October. Aushev had become a vocal critic of the Ingushetia administration, especially its ex-president Murat Zyazikov, after the kidnapping of his son and nephew in 2007. Aushev also ran the website Ingushetia.org, having offered to take on responsibility for it in 2008 following the murder of Magomed Yevloyev, who was killed in police custody.
Russia’s prosecutor general Yuri Chaika promised to personally oversee the murder investigation. This is the latest in a series of attacks on human rights workers and journalists in the North Caucusus region. In Chechnya, prominent human rights activist and journalist Natalya Estemirova was kidnapped and murdered in July, followed by the murder of aid worker Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband in August.
The Russian government announced the end of its military campaign in Chechnya in April, but the culture of violence in the region continues.
REN TV and St Petersburg’s Fifth Channel, the last semi-independent private TV stations, will come under state control next year. According Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, news bulletins on both channels’ news bulletins will be restructured next year. The state-owned, pro-Kremlin English language television station “Russia Today” will take over responsibility for their news broadcasts from 2010.
Campaigners accused the Kremlin of killing off the last vestiges of independent television in Russia.
“This means independent TV will be destroyed. It will disappear,” said Oleg Ptashkin, a former correspondent with Russia’s state-run Channel One TV who now runs an independent journalists’ union. (Guardian)
Read more
This is a guest post by Orlando Figes
It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons.
(more…)