Index relies entirely on the support of donors and readers to do its work.
Help us keep amplifying censored voices today.
A ruling to ban YouTube and three online libraries in the Russian city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur will be enforced on 3 August. The video-sharing website will be blocked because of a nationalist video “Russia for the Russians,” which has been listed as extremist content. The online libraries (Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru) have been blocked for carrying Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Two Russians accused of inciting hatred with an art exhibition in Moscow have been found guilty. Andrei Yerofeyev and Yuri Samodurov escaped prison sentences but were fined. Last week 13 prominent Russian artists wrote an open letter to Russian President Dimitry Medvedev asking him to call off the trial on the grounds of the impact it would have on the contemporary art scene. Oleg Kassin, from the ultra-nationalist group which filed the complaint against the “Forbidden Art” exhibition, was quoted as saying “If you like expressing yourself freely, do it at home, invite some close friends”.
Independent Radio station Ekho Moskvy is well known in Russia as a bastion of free speech. Editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov tells Maria Eismont about everyday dealing with death threats, censorship and the Kremlin
(more…)
Arkadi Lander, editor-in-chief of the Sochi-based newspaper ‘Mesnaya’, was brutally attacked at his apartment on 26 April by two unidentified men. “No doubt, the order has to do with my editorial and journalistic activities in the ‘Mestnaya’ newspaper, where we objectively covered the elections to the Sochi City Assembly,” Lander stated soon after the attack. He was hospitalised with a fractured skull and concussion.