Grigory Pasko: Dispatch from a Show Trial

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 30, 2010

March 31 will mark the one year anniversary of the start of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. When a court trial drags on for more than a year, I need not listen to the hearsay, but rather I have had the “pleasure” of observing one from the inside. Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной […]

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Grigory Pasko: Fingerprinting and Russia’s Repressive Fantasies

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 23, 2010

Head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, recently came up with the brilliant idea of fingerprinting and DNA registering the entire population of the country, or at least that’s what is stated in his report the collegium of the Procuracy-General of the RF. Bastrykin declared: « …And on the whole it would be […]

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Grigory Pasko: Extremists Everywhere You Look

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 15, 2010

If the Russian police are doing something very ham-fistedly and very doggedly, that means another agency is looming behind their back. And we can guess just which one. No doubt many of us from the very beginning assumed that the story with the seizure of the computers in the office of the “Baikal ecological wave” […]

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Grigory Pasko: After Kaliningrad, FSB inside Opposition

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 9, 2010

Personal circumstances of an “overwhelming force” was how leader of the Kaliningrad oppositioneers Konstantin Doroshok recently explained his exit from the «Solidarity» movement. Certain political scientists decoded this exit in their own way: they’re saying the regional protest movements don’t have a political tinge, but are associated merely with corporative interests of a regional character. […]

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Grigory Pasko: Medvedev May Visit the Lourve, But Doesn’t Sign the Contracts

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 7, 2010

At the same time as the two presidential couples – the French and the Russian – were attending an exhibition in the Louvre with the pompous name «Rus’ the holy», another exhibition was opening in a private gallery not too far from the Louvre – one of drawings dedicated to the shameful trial in the […]

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Grigory Pasko: Budgeting the Russian Orthodox Church

By Grigory Pasko | Published: March 1, 2010

“..For they shall also pray unto the LORD, that he would prosper that, which they give for ease and remedy…” (Sirach [aka Ecclesiasticus] 38: 1-2,4,6-10,12-14) Glad and joyful tidings have reached our sinful land from the banks of the faraway Seine: on the threshold of the opening of the Year of Russia in France, the […]

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Grigory Pasko: Jackboot Forest Rangers

By Grigory Pasko | Published: February 25, 2010

“Official persons during execution of duties imposed upon them with respect to the implementation of state forestry control and oversight may apply in the capacity of special means: rubber truncheons, tear gas, handcuffs, means for the forced stopping of transport,” — from the newly published rules for the storage, bearing and application of special means […]

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Grigory Pasko: How Russia Spends its Corruption Proceeds

By Grigory Pasko | Published: February 16, 2010

It’s good to have a president. Even better – a blogger-president. A non-blogger wouldn’t have even noticed that agencies, in an attempt to complicate the search for information on a site, are changing Cyrillic letters to Latin ones in announcements of tenders. By the way, even before Mr. Medvedev, internet communities had initiated their own […]

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Grigory Pasko: The Conservationist Struggle for Lake Baikal

By Grigory Pasko | Published: February 12, 2010

The wonderful poet and writer Sasha Raduzhkevich, who left life early, once called everything taking place in Russia «the struggle of a struggle with a struggle». Indeed, in our country everything is a struggle: from evicting militants from the hideouts long inhabited by them to evicting the summer cottagers of the settlement of «Rechnik».  And […]

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Grigory Pasko: Russian Justice Needs More than Principles

By Grigory Pasko | Published: February 9, 2010

Thanks to the creative mind of the writer Rudyard Kipling ,once upon a time there lived the python Kaa. Somewhere in the jungles this was. Kaa was large and frightful. He could hypnotize the Bandar-log monkeys with just his hissing. The Bandar-logs rustled like leaves in the wind in response, lightly shaking and silently walking […]

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