I crossed the threshold, there was a huge number of children under 6 years. In small cotton jackets, in small cotton trousers. And the numbers were on the back and on the chest. Like prisoners. These were the numbers of their mothers. They are used to seeing only women around them, but they heard that there are dads,… Read More »
“We [NKVD] never make mistakes, our work doesn’t have defects… If the [arrested] person is honest, but has been beaten, we can’t release him […] since he will discredit the organs [i.e., NKVD].” —Ye. I. Abramovich, NKVD Interrogator, the city of Odessa, 1938 “You should understand, FSB officers always achieve their goals! In any way, it will be… Read More »
Why do Swedish officials stall the Raoul Wallenberg investigation? Russian authorities apparently know much more about the full circumstances of Raoul Wallenberg’s fate than they have admitted, yet Swedish officials do not push for answers Susanne Berger Vadim Birstein This year marks the 75th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian mission to Budapest, to save the close to 200,000… Read More »
Angus Roxburgh is a British distinguished foreign correspondent. He knows Russia well: in the 1980s, he was the Sunday Times Moscow correspondent until he was expelled from the Soviet Union accused of espionage; in the 1990s, he was back to Moscow as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent. Later he worked as an advisor and speechwriter for Putin’s communications team. His knowledge… Read More »
On July 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that expands the Federal Security Service (FSO) powers. The draft of the law was introduced in February of 2017 to the State Duma by Putin himself. Now the FSO is able to classify information about the property of the highest state officials. The text of the law is… Read More »
On March 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed two more laws restricting human rights. The first was the law banning “undesirable” foreign and international NGOs from creating legal entities in Russia and Russians from participating in them. The draft law was submitted to the State Duma (lower house of the Russian Parliament) by the government on October 10, 2016. The… Read More »
In 2001, during the Second Chechen War in Russia (1999-2009), I was finishing my book The Perversion of Knowledge. That war started on August 26, 1999, ten days after Vladimir Putin, at the time FSB (State Security Service, a successor of the KGB) Director, became Russian President, and after a series of mysterious apartment building bombings in Russia. The… Read More »
On February 2, 2016, the Team29, an informal association of lawyers and journalists based in Russia that supports the Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative-RW70 and defended historian Boris Sokolov in the court, distributed its weekly newsletter. Here are main points, compiled by Katya Alalykina, and translated by Vadim Birstein: On February 1, 2017, a regular court session on the… Read More »