October

In October, 2008, not less than 19 people, 4 of them dead, became victims or racially motivated attacks. Formally, it is much less than in the same period in 2007 when we registered 103 victims, including 6 fatalities. But firstly, on October 20, 2007, a neo-nazi raid took place in Moscow, resulting in not less than 30 victims, and secondly, it is absolutely obvious that we don't get reports about the crimes. Thus, after St. Petersburg Governor Matvienko said on August 19, 2008, that there were no hate crimes in the city, not a single crime of the sort has been reported there.

On October 20, 2008, a conference :Europe-Russia-Georgia: Peacekeeping; took place in Vienna, Austria. The SOVA Center doesn't monitor events in South Ossetia, but this conference falls into our field of interests, because it was organized by Russian Public Chamber and Free Academy of the Austrian Freedom Party. The Public Chamber of Russian Federation is a formally nongovernmental organization which is to represent civil society to the President of Russia. Its functions and status are not determined. One third of the Chamber members are appointed by the President.

Last week was marked by a new wave of neo-Nazi violence against young antifascists, with one murder in Irkutsk and one in Moscow. On November 27, 2008, one of the Irkutsk news-papers published the results of an investigation which showed that the high profile murder of 16 year-old Olga Rukosyla didn't take place. Moreover, there was no such a girl with such a name.

We have got messages from our readers, that some of them don't receive our news releases anymore, or receive it with a several days delay. The same problem appears with our e-mails sent from or received to the SOVA addresses (mail@sova-center.ru and the others).

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) published a study on the question of how opposition politics and independent initiatives are failing on the internet in Russia.

In September 2008, not less than 22 people were injured and 5 people died as a result of racially and neo-nazi motivated violence (in September 2007, there were 19 injured and 5 killed). Thus, we observe a slight increase of the number of victims in comparison to the previous year. Beside Moscow, there were attacks reported in Arkhangelsk, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, Kaluga region, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. Notably, in St. Petersburg, after Governor Matvienko had claimed the decrease of hate crimes, and :Novaya Gazeta; had received a warning for an indignant article about anti-Georgian declaration of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, not a single hate crime was reported.