casualmuscovite

Joined 12 years ago

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Mar 14

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This sub-thread here is the reason "why we can't have nice things" :) There's a lack of balanced opinion or incentive for agreement. We have "radical libertarians" on one hand and "radical Putinists" on the other. You listen to both camps and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

As for myself, I do not see a viable (European-grade) democratic movement in Russia that I'd be willing to give my support (I think Yabloko was/is the closest). At the same time, I do not feel oppressed or living under tyranny here :)

Fun fact: Navalny, originally a member of Yabloko, was expelled from the party for nationalist rhetoric back in 00s.

Comment · 12 years ago

Reporting from the trenches. Here in Moscow all 4 sites from the list [1] are being banned as of this morning.

* ej.ru (assortment of articles by opposition writers)

* kasparov.ru (chess grandmaster and one of the opposition leaders)

* navalny.livejournal.com (possibly most prominent opposition leader as of late; mayor of Moscow candidate in 2013 mayoral election)

* grani.ru (opposition newspaper)

I'd have to agree with said elsewhere in the comments that an average Russian will likely not notice those sites virtual demise. They're not much known or popular outside of a tight opposition camp.

Echo of Moscow is, however, a very popular radio station. Banning their site is likely to cause a little shit storm. It is not banned though and working just fine. What happened is they hosted their own Navalny's blog [2] and this particular URL was banned. However, the banning system is IP based, so along with it all the site would have been blocked. The site admins quickly took down the blog and the ban was lifted.

[1] http://rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news24447.htm

[2] http://www.echo.msk.ru/blog/navalny/