“Putin is a crook! Putin is a crook!” the protesters chanted half heartedly. Journalists caught up to Viktor Biryukov, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Department in Moscow for Interaction with Civil Society, by the base of the Karl Marx monument. Biryukov was busy trying to deflect a flood of criticism from civil society...

Елена Милашина

Blogging idol Alexei Navalny has joined the organising committee of Russian March, a nationalist demonstration. He also supported the March’s campaign and called on all his fans to take part in it. Among other things Navalny put up a campaign video on his blog, viewed by thousands daily, taken from the Russian March’s website with the chant “stop feeding the Caucasus”

When those low-down police took Semeiko, Aleksandr couldn’t take it anymore. He recalls, “I ran down the hall of the dormitory and knocked on all the doors: “Hey, everyone, get up”. All this injustice made me so livid that I decided that we are to barricade the entrance ways to the dormitory, declare a hunger strike and hold a siege until the city prosecutor arrives. Or until they kick out that local policeman…”

On 23 October it was nine years to the day of the Dubrovka terrorist attack. To be more exact, on Sunday evening it was nine years ago when the terrorists took more than 900 audience members and actors from Nord-Ost, Russia’s first musical, hostage...

At a meeting with members of the Mothers of Beslan organisation, Susanna Dudiyeva and Elvira Tuayeva, President Dmitry Medvedev admitted that “neither administrative, nor legal implications were made” after one of the world’s most terrible...

The murder of Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006 dealt a heavy blow to the law enforcement system that had taken shape during the Chechen wars and, in some ways, drew a line under the historical period of open confrontation between Russia...