In Chechnya there is official support for attacks on women when they are considered to have ‘flouted’ Islamic rules by not wearing a headscarf or covering up enough. Tanya Lokshina listened to some of the women’s despairing accounts.
The struggle between Moscow’s mayor Luzhkov and President Medvedev has gripped Russia. What are those’ bulldogs under the carpet’ really fighting about? There are bigger battles going on, explains Vladimir Pastukhov.
Since Abkhazia declared its independence from Georgia in 2008, Russian money has been pouring in. But when it comes to doing business there, Russians can find themselves coming badly unstuck, as one investor from the Urals found. Anton Katin reports
A recent Kommersant newspaper interview with Putin revealed the extent of his isolation from reality and inability to see things in any way other than his own. This is potentially dangerous, explains Vladimir Pastukhov
The plan to construct a section of the new Moscow-St.Petersburg motorway through the legally-protected Khimki Forest Park will destroy a rare eco-system. Dogged local resistance has turned this into a national, even international issue. But it has not derailed the plan The article was first publis
Lack of personnel and organizational incompetence have seriously hampered the Russian response to forest fires, writes Greenpeace's Alexei Yaroshenko. Worryingly, fires have reached some Chernobyl-affected regions, and many other villages have been essentially abandoned to their fate.
On 15 July 2009 Natasha Estemirova was kidnapped outside her flat in Grozny, bundled into a car, driven away and shot. One year later Tanya Lokshina still grieves for her, reflecting how difficult it is to come to terms with her death
On 12 July, the judge found Andrei Erofeev and Yurii Samodurov, organisers of the exhibition Forbidden Art – 2006, guilty of inciting hatred and enmity, and insulting human dignity. Samodurov was fined 200,000 roubles, and Erofeev 150,000 (some $12,000 in all). But they have not been sent to priso
Three years ago an exhibition at Moscow’s Sakharov Centre of previously banned work entitled Forbidden Art led to the trial of its curator Andrei Erofeev and the director of the Centre, Yuri Samodurov. The prosecutors want them sentenced to three years in prison for ‘debasing the religious beliefs
On April 9 2010, after explosions in the Moscow metro killed 39 people, rumours were circulated of 1,000 ‘black widows’ who had been recruited by the militants. When the press published the names of 22, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch found that she knew some of these dangerous women : a seam
Russia’s Duma has been trying to draft a ‘memory law’, in order to protect the Soviet version of the events of World War II from revisionist interpretations. The historian Nikolai Koposov deconstructs the attempts so far. His view is that the proposed law is not only misconceived, but would be unw
On 19 May, at a meeting with the main human rights organizations working in the republics of the North Caucasus, President Medvedev enjoined the local authorities to work with the NGOs to enforce the rule of law and tackle abuses of power by the security forces. Tanya Lokshina, of Human Rights Wat
