October 26:
Leftist leader Sergei Udaltsov faces up to ten years in prison, after the Russian Investigative Committee (SK) charged him with plotting mass disorder. The charges stemmed from a video released by the Kremlin-friendly NTV television channel, which purportedly depicts Udaltsov accepting money from Georgian officials in exchange for inciting riots in Russia. Udaltsov was quick to decry the charges on social media. “Put regime on trial here,” he posted on Twitter. “Come to SK to back me and other political prisoners!” The BBC reports that Udaltsov’s wife and children are staying in Ukraine, but Udaltsov insisted that he will not run. “If somebody expected me to run across the border like a scared dog, they will not see this,” he said. “I have not committed any crime.”
October 27:
The first meeting of the Russian opposition's newly elected Coordination Council ended with the arrest of three of the group’s leaders. Reuters reports that Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yahsin, and Sergei Udaltsov were arrested while taking part in a protest after the group's inaugural meeting, and now face fines and community service for “disrupting public order.” At the meeting, the organization announced plans to hold the next rally in December, to mark the anniversary of last year’s anti-Putin protests. The Kremlin scorned the Council's first session, as one official insisted that the plans for next month’s protest “show that they are looking into the past, not the future.”
October 29:
The Russian Orthodox Church came under fire once more after police uncovered a brothel on the grounds of the monastery run by a spiritual adviser to President Vladimir Putin, according to The Telegraph. The incident is the latest in a string of embarrassments for the church, after Patriarch Kirill was photographed wearing a $32,000 Bregeut watch in April, and in August a priest in Moscow crashed a BMW Z4 roadster with Maltese license plates. Church officials insisted that the premises were rented out “some time ago,” and that the bordello had no connection to the monastery. They maintained that the allegations are part of an ongoing smear campaign against the Orthodox Church.
October 30:
At least five Muslim leaders have been killed so far this year in Russia’s restive republic of Dagestan. In the latest assassination, several shooters opened fire on Karimulla Ibragimov in the town of Derbent, before escaping in a van. According to Reuters, Ibragimov was an imam at a local unregistered mosque popular among radical Muslims. Experts suggest that the attack was an attempt to spoil recent efforts to resolve the dispute between moderate and extremist Muslim followers. Another analyst added that the attacks on prominent figures are likely intended to provoke a more forceful approach from the Kremlin to combat such incidents, which could escalate the violence.
November 1:
Russia’s media and communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has officially launched the controversial Internet blacklist approved in July. The list, reports RIA-Novosti, will technically allow authorities to force web pages offline without the benefit of a trial. The ambiguity of the website’s authority sparked sharp criticism from opposition activists, who argued that the site will allow authorities to muzzle dissenters online. Roskomnadzor officials maintain that experts will review claims against websites, and provide warnings to sites to remove offensive or illegal content before the site is added to the blacklist. The list is purportedly intended to protect children against “harmful” web content, but resulted in a 24-hour blackout protest from the Russian version of Wikipedia, as well as from the search engine Yandex, which protested the list by crossing out the "everything" in the slogan on its page that normally reads "You can find everything."
November 2:
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev added to the continuing dispute over the fate of Pussy Riot’s arrested band members, by suggesting that the two women shouldn’t be in prison. In a meeting with students in Moscow, The Telegraph reports that the former president repeated his earlier statement that he “wouldn’t have sent them to prison... They’d already been in pre-trial detention, and that was enough.” Medvedev tempered the statement by adding that while he didn’t support the sentence that sent both young mothers to prison camps in Russia’s Far East, he will not lobby directly for their release. “This is not a question for me,” he concluded, “but for our court system and for their defense lawyers.”