Ryzhkov, Recurring Data, and the Disappearing Blogger
This one is from Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former Duma deputy, who writes in today’s Moscow Times about the fallout from the report issued last week by the Institute of Contemporary Development, a think-tank closely affiliated with President Dmitry Medvedev.
There are a great many supporters of deep reforms in Russia. Political scientist Mikhail Afanasyev surveyed 12 groups representing Russia’s elite: regional and federal officials, military and law enforcement officials, judges, leading businessmen, officials working in health, science and education and journalists. It turned out that only two of those groups — Federal Security Service agents and federal officials — support Putin’s power-vertical and state-capitalism models.
Ryzhkov tells this as if it was news, but the research was conducted over a year ago – and yet, as documented by La Russophobe, Ryzhkov pulled out the same information not two weeks ago.
Is Mikhail Afanasyev the blogger whose personal effects were confiscated by police in August last year after he was accused of ‘slandering officials and rescuers‘ following the RusHydro dam blast in Siberia? As of September last year, Afanasyev was facing a three year prison sentence, and suffered a beating by ‘unidentified assailants‘. But his name has not surfaced in the press since – until this peculiar double citation from Ryzhkov. Curious?
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