Liliya Gremina, 70, found out about the planned protest from a wall poster, and didn’t realise that it had been banned. She walked to Gorky Square with a home-made placard wrapped up in a parcel, which caught the eye of police officers on duty nearby. From the results of a public report produced by the Committee against Torture organisation, which provided Gremina with legal support, she was asked to enter a police van after refusing to show her parcel to the cops. After a short argument, when Gremina sat down in the road in protest, they pulled her up off the ground, but she refused to comply, leaning on her hands and feet.
“The police then started to twist Liliya’s arms, but one of the cops sitting in a car grabbed her by the foot and shoved her into the vehicle, one of them hitting her hard in her back. She didn’t see what they used, but she felt a sharp pain in the small of her back,” was the response of the Committee against Torture’s report.
Gremina spent five hours in a police vehicle and police station, where she wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, sit down or go to the toilet. She became ill and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. Later, she photographed her injuries and spoke to human rights advocates. There was no attempt to start a case against the police. In May 2020, the European Human Rights Court (EHRC) awarded Liliya 5,000 euro compensation for moral damage, and the Russian Federation also owes her 2,950 euro compensation for court expenses.
The Staroverov case
Another scandal connected with police aggression took place in Nizhny Novgorod on 15 September 2012. On that day a rally took place on the city’s Freedom Square as part of the nationwide March of the Millions protest campaign. The city authorities refused to permit it, but protesters turned up all the same. And the police used violence against them. One person who was injured was Yekaterina Zaitseva, a member of the Other Russia unregistered political party and organiser of the protest. Riot police officer Igor Lebedev gave Zaitseva a backhand blow with a truncheon and she was whisked to hospital, where she was diagnosed with various serious head and brain injuries.
The Committee Against Torture, representing Zaitseva, didn’t succeed in raising a case against the police officer, although the moment he hit her was recorded on video in close-up.
Yury Staroverov, another member of Other Russia was, however, accused of using violence against a public official. He was standing next to Lebedev and, as the investigation showed, grabbed the police officer’s head and neck, “using physical violence”. The injured police officer, giving evidence in court, went still further. Staroverov supposedly choked him for an entire minute, after which he lost his helmet. However, he admitted to beating protesters standing around him. “These were arms to me, not people”, OVD-Info quoted Lebedev.
In court, the prosecution requested a four-year sentence in a colony-settlement, but Nizhny Novgorod district court gave him a three year suspended sentence.
The “Undesirable organisation” case
Irina Slavina died the day after a house search – at the same time, police visited five other opposition activists in the city, all of them witnesses in an investigation into business owner Mikhail Iosilevich, who is accused of links to an “undesirable organisation”.
In early September, Iosilevich offered a room for training sessions for election observers for Nizhny Novgorod city council. Investigators see these seminars, which are run by the Golos movement, as a project of the Open Russia opposition movement. The latter, created in 2001 on the initiative of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was recognised as an “undesirable organisation” in Russia in April 2017. The Russian General Prosecutor’s Office later explained that this ban concerned organisations with the same name that were registered outside Russia.
This, however, hasn’t saved activists from Open Russia regional offices from administrative and even criminal investigations. In March 2019, the movement took a decision to dissolve itself in the interests of its members, but a new public organisation appeared with the same name. It has no branch in Nizhny Novgorod, and Golos denies any connection with Khodorkovsky.
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Andrey Rykov | Radio Free (2020-10-16T11:19:22+00:00) After journalist’s death, this Russian city’s backstory of political pressure comes to light. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/16/after-journalists-death-this-russian-citys-backstory-of-political-pressure-comes-to-light/
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