Dilip Simeon's blog

After a 37-year old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky testified against Russian Interior Ministry officers for their role in embezzling $230 million from the state, he was arrested in 2008 and placed in pre-trial detention by those same officers he accused of crimes. In an attempt to force Magnitsky to withdraw his testimony, these officers intentionally tortured and ultimately murdered him. Held for 11 months without trial, he was, as reported by  The Telegraph , "denied visits from his family" and "forced into increasingly squalid cells." He developed gall stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis, for which he was given inadequate medical treatment during his incarceration. Surgery was ordered in June, but never performed; detention center chief Ivan P. Prokopenko later indicated that he "...did not consider Magnitsky sick... Prisoners often try to pass themselves off as sick, in order to get better conditions." On 16 November 2009, ei...

The former banker claims Vladimir Putin runs Russia like a crime syndicate. He should know: corrupt officials seized his assets and stole $230m. His lawyer was beaten to death in jail. And now sinister text messages warn he might be next Putin’s ruling system unviable, Browder thinks. “It’s based on 90% bribery and 10% repression. He has now run out of money for bribery, so he has to flip it over to 90% repression. I don’t think he [Putin] has got the infrastructure to be a proper repressive dictator.”.. Interestingly, Browder says he opposes western sanctions on ordinary Russians, regarding them as an imprecise tool that punishes the wrong people. Rather, he would like to see the top 1,000 Russian government officials banned from  Europe  and the US . Of London , he says: “Every Russian wants to come here. It’s their bolthole, their escape valve.” ********** I’m due to meet Bill Browder at Mari Vanna, a favourite hangout for rich Russians in Knightsbridge. But when...

Some years back, Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor for a Russian law firm,  uncovered a tax fraud scheme  in his country so vast as to beggar historical precedent. The perpetrators were stealing whole corporations, looting them, and then using the stolen corporations to launder vast sums of dirty money. In some cases, Russian security forces were involved in these crimes. Other instances of money laundering involved "Manhattan real estate" entities, according to the  criminal complaint  filed by former US Attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump not long after the inauguration. That Bharara complaint, by the way, was filed against a man named Denis Katsyv, who was the alleged mastermind of the scheme uncovered by Magnitsky. The story did not end well for Sergei Magnitsky. He was arrested for tax evasion and jailed at the behest of the very oligarchs he was investigating, and later died in prison under very suspicious circumstances. In retaliation for his deat...

MOSCOW — From a certain perspective, certainly the Kremlin’s, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s behavior in Washington could be seen as treasonous, a brazen betrayal of his homeland. In a series of public meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Kara-Murza, a leader in the Russian opposition, urged American lawmakers to expand economic sanctions against the Russian government under a law known as the Magnitsky Act. That would hasten political change in  Russia , he argued. Back in Moscow a month later, in May 2015, the changes Mr. Kara-Murza detected were going on in his own body. Midway through a meeting with fellow dissidents, beads of sweat inexplicably dotted his forehead. His stomach churned. “It all went so fast,” he recalled. “In the space of about 20 minutes, I went from feeling completely normal to having a rapid heart rate, really high blood pressure, to sweating and vomiting all over the place, and then I lost consciousness.” He had ingested a poison, doctors told him after he emerged f...

When Mikhail Ugarov and Yelina Gremina died only 45 days apart after producing a play about Sergei Magnitsky, conspiracy theories were rife. But the truth is simpler, and sadder. MOSCOW—Mikhail Ugarov and Yelina Gremina, husband and wife, created the only independent documentary theater company in Moscow. Teatr.doc took on  contemporary Russia  and its most acute issues with anthropological rigor. Every performance gave clear evidence, hard proof of injustice. There is a sort of bitter irony in the narrative that developed about the couple’s passing, as people on the other side of the world tried to fit them into a narrative of mysterious deaths that might be linked to vindictive conspiracies by the Kremlin. But that simply was not the case. The couple’s love for the theater and for each other was bigger than life, and they died within less than two months of each other, not least, because their hearts were broken. Ugarov died age 62 on April Fool’s Day this year. P...

The official conclusion that Vladimir Putin “probably approved” the murder of the former spy  Alexander Litvinenko  in London in 2006 has again raised uncomfortable questions about Russian exceptionalism – and how best to handle relations with what many conservative western politicians regard as a rogue regime in Moscow. Russia's Litvinenko Is Just One Of Many Silenced Kremlin Critics Russia’s sense of detachment from the European mainstream, or to put it another way, its self-created isolationism and separateness, is nothing new. It dates back to the 1917 revolution and the communist era, or even further, to the days of Tolstoy, Turgenev and the tsars.  But there are particular doubts about Putin, his strange brand of paranoid nationalism, and the state that has formed around the president. A key issue for Putin’s western interlocutors is that  Litvinenko’s death  is not an isolated case, though the manner of his death was exceptional. Prominent op...

By Bill Browder:  I have my family history to blame for the fact that I ended up working in Moscow. My grandmother was from Russia and my grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party between 1932 and 1945 (he was subsequently persecuted in the 1950’s). So when I was growing up as a teenager and going through my teenage rebellion, I thought the best way of rebelling against a family of communists was to become a capitalist. I ended up studying economics at the University of Chicago, probably the most right-wing institution in America, and then I enrolled at the Stanford Business School. I graduated business school the year the Berlin Wall came down and as I started contemplating the next stage of my life, I had a personal epiphany: ‘if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, I should become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe’. So I set off to do just that. After a spell working on the Russian privatisation programme at Salomon Brothers in London, ...

NB : A lesson in bravery for some of our journalists - who, honourable exceptions aside - have chosen to keep silent in the face of the threats and blandishments of the ruling dispensation. Shamelessness   has plumbed new depths. The other day when I asked an economic journalist why, in his regular rantings about corruption, he always avoided mention of the Vyapam   scam, or was silent about the failure of the government to investigate the Kalikho Pul suicide note, he loudly declared that he was a BJP supporter, and hence was not going to raise issues that might undermine its prestige. When I said this was a case of partisan deceitfulness, "everyone does it" was his justification. Tanya's example shows that everyone does not. There remains such a thing as journalistic ethics.  DS Journalist Tanya Felgenhauer was known for her lively morning show on Echo of Moscow. Then she was stabbed. Then, her scars still visible, she went to Putin’s big press conference. ...

The current confrontation between Russia and the west is fuelled by many grievances, but the greatest is the belief in Moscow that the west tricked the former Soviet Union by breaking promises made at the end of the cold war in 1989-1990 that Nato would not expand to the east. In his now famous  2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference , Vladimir Putin accused the west of forgetting and breaking assurances, leaving international law in ruins. Does the betrayal claim matter?  It matters desperately to  Russia  since it fuels distrust, feeds Russia’s cynicism about international law and is the central motive behind Russia’s draft security treaties calling for a reversal of Nato’s extension, due to be discussed on Wednesday at the Nato-Russia Council. The betrayal theory is not confined to Putin, but was supported by Boris Yeltsin, and from mid-1995 right across the Russian political elite. A new book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold W...

Locked out of forthcoming city council elections,  Moscow ’s  opposition  politicians have called upon their supporters to force a rare U-turn from the  Kremlin . By Tuesday afternoon, almost all of the independent candidates standing for election had been told they would not be allowed to run. In contrast, the vast majority of the 216 given the green light were supporters of Vladimir Putin.  Russian Justice: Sergei Magnitsky’s Torture and Murder in Pre-Trial Detention Solidarity with Memorial: Russia’s most prominent civil rights group in danger Further rulings by local electoral committees tomorrow are not expected to change the overall picture.  Russian authorities have introduced demanding new rules in the run-up to the 8 September vote. For the first time, those not running on party lists have been made to collect signatures from 3 per cent of their electorate. The new regulations automatically exclude candidates if 10 per cen...

Earlier this year the Russian ministry of culture  banned  the satirical film  The Death of Stalin , supposedly because it contained “information whose dissemination is prohibited by law”. On Russian-language social media, the withdrawal of the film’s screening licence was met with widespread laughter and scorn: what sort of secrets could this movie possibly have disclosed? Could it be that Stalin is indeed dead? – so went the irony. It looked ridiculous. But back in December, there had been an ominous precursor: Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence services, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta government newspaper that Stalin-era repressions had been justified. He mentioned the need to counter Trotsky’s networks, and plots that had “ties with foreign secret services”.  He also claimed  that “mass-scale political repression” had ended by 1938 – a blatant rewriting of history. EVGENIA LEZINA - The revival of ideology in Russia As Vladimir...

Earlier this year, opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s return to Russia provoked a political crisis and mass unsanctioned rallies. It seemed that Russia’s protest movement had reached a new level: a large number of new protesters, mass participation in cities and towns across the country, and, finally, new slogans, themes and emotions – all this pointed to a new development in the country’s democratic movement. But the latest unsanctioned protests, held in Russian cities on 21 April, seemed to blur the novelty and scale of the new protest wave. This protest took on a new, angrier mood – anger against Russian law enforcement responsible for violently dispersing protesters and the elite’s luxury lifestyle mixed into a blend of class hatred. For many, it felt if the protest’s new ideas and emotions, which a few months ago had appeared a guarantee of the movement’s further development, had disappeared somewhere. Many, it seems, experienced a feeling of disappointment in the aftermath of spr...

NB : The Russian people have fought for freedom and democracy for over a century, in 1915-21 ; in the deadly struggle against Nazi invasion ; and again in the aftermath of glasnost. Putin is the inheritor of the Russian autocratic tradition, he moved easily from the KGB and membership of the Communist Party to becoming a Russian nationalist, making the post-Soviet reality just as corrupt and tyrannical as the one it superseded. This is the kind of patriotism he uses to crush the people's demand for democracy. (We are familiar with it in India). Freedom loving people the world over should support the Russian people in this new wave of struggle and repression. DS For more than a decade, the Kremlin has used every tool at its disposal to keep Russians off the streets, wielding fear and boredom to make protesting against  Vladimir Putin  seem pointless. And yet in defiant scenes on Saturday in cities across Russia, from St Petersburg to Vladivostok and even in Yakutsk, where pro...