Jailed Opposition Leader Focus of Protests, Pressure

By Sergey Chernov

Staff Writer

Published: March 18, 2008 (Issue # 1357)

As the leader of the Yabloko oppositional liberal party Maxim Reznik began a third week in custody in a case he calls “fabricated,” protests demanding his immediate release continued both in Moscow and St. Petersburg and political pressure from the authorities on the local branch of the party continued.

Meanwhile, it has been announced that a meeting in support of Reznik is planned for Sunday.

Last week, Reznik’s case was discussed during a closed-door meeting between Yabloko’s national leader Grigory Yavlinsky and President Vladimir Putin, their first such meeting since 2006.

The “necessity of [Reznik’s] immediate release” was discussed “in detail” according to a Yabloko news release.

After the talks Yavlinsky called Reznik’s mother, Galina Malinovskaya, to tell her that Putin promised to look into the case.

“As far as I know, Putin was in the city on Saturday but it’s difficult for me to say how he looked into the case,” said Malinovskaya by phone on Monday. “I’ll find out when I see results. I don’t have any personal, private information.”

“Yavlinsky said that Putin himself asked him questions about Maxim. Maxim has been a high-profile politician for a long time, for 14 years. He’s probably well-known to them,” Malinovskaya added.

After earlier being told repeatedly she was not allowed to see her son, Malinovskaya was given permission to visit Reznik, who is held in a pretrial detention center close to the Kresty Prison, on Monday.

“I got the permission today. They had denied it because he allegedly makes phone calls from [his cell]. I can’t even repeat that nonsense.

“The investigator [Mikhail Kalganov] [...] said, ‘I can’t permit the visit because we have information that Maxim calls from there and gives instructions [to his supporters],” said Malinovskaya, adding that if Reznik had an opportunity to make phone calls from his cell, he would have called her first.

Malinovskaya said that the permission was given after Natalya Yevdokimova, rights activist and advisor to Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, got in touch with Andrei Lavrenko, the head of the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s Office.

“It looks like [Lavrenko] gave an order, because [the head of the Central District's Investigative Department] Pavel Vymenets, the boss of the investigator, spoke to me in the sweetest way. I asked him if I might to go to the investigator for the permission and he said, ‘Yes, sure,’” she said.

Later Monday, Mironov called Reznik’s arrest “unfair.”

“It’s not a measure that should be used when such acute political issues are considered,” he was reported by Regnum news agency as saying at a news conference in St. Petersburg.

Malinovskaya said Monday she would visit Reznik on Tuesday. “Just imagine what a miracle. I can’t give any other comment but that,” she said.

Malinovskaya said that Reznik is in good form, citing Boris Gruzd, Reznik’s lawyer, who visited him earlier Monday.

“Maxim is OK, everything is alright, only it’s boring there, he says. Nobody plays chess, and cards are not permitted.”

Meanwhile on Monday, a date for Reznik’s appeal hearing in the City Court was set. The appeal, disputing the pretrial imprisonment as a preventive measure against Reznik’s possible attempts to “influence the course of the investigation,” will be heard in the court on Friday, Alexander Shurshev, the spokesman for Yabloko’s local branch, said.

Reznik’s defense team is appealing the March 6 decision of Judge Olga Andreyeva who had ordered that Reznik be detained for the duration of the police investigation or not more than two months.

On Friday, a group of about 20 authors and artists, including film director Alexei German, author Boris Strugatsky and poet Alexander Kushner published an open letter to Putin and president-elect Dmitry Medvedev calling for Reznik’s immediate release.

A sanctioned meeting in support of Reznik will be held at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Shurshev said. The protesters will gather on Pionerskaya Ploshchad in front of the Young Spectator’s Theater (TYuZ).

Shurshev said that the original location suggested for the rally was a garden opposite the Prosecutor’s Office on St. Isaac’s Square but it was moved to the second location after the city administration refused permission.

“We were told that maintenance works in preparation for spring will take place there at that time,” said Shurshev.

As pickets at the prosecutor’s offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg continued, several protestors were briefly detained in Moscow after suspected provocations last week, whereby a picketer would be joined by a stranger, thus turning a one-man picket, which does not require permission from the authorities, into an allegedly mass action.

An activist who was observing the picket in St. Petersburg was briefly detained on Saturday after asking the policemen who had asked for his passport to identify himself.

Meanwhile, the local branch of Yabloko received special attention from the authorities during the course of last week. On Tuesday, it received a letter asking it to leave its premises before June 1, while later in the week the party’s local offices were examined as part of investigation to determine whether Yabloko’s activities can be considered “extremist” under the law.

The office was visited by an officer of the Central District’s Prosecutor’s Office accompanied by a policeman, who examined the rooms occupied by Yabloko and picked up copies of the party’s documentation on Friday.

On Saturday, the local branch of Yabloko’s website, which publishes constant updates about Reznik’s case as well as news about actions in his defense, went down after it was hacked. The site was back up on Monday.

“That’s nothing new for us. It happened frequently during the [Duma] election campaign,” said Shurshev.

Reznik was detained outside Yabloko headquarters on March 3 and was subsequently charged with verbally abusing and physically assaulting three policemen after intervening in a street fight between unknown men who subsequently escaped.

Although criminal cases against members of the banned National Bolshevik Party are not news, Reznik is a member of an officially registered party whose activities have never gone beyond the law.

In the recent clampdown on the opposition, the harshest penalty for a local oppositional politician before Reznik had been a 10-day administrative arrest for Sergei Gulyayev, a leader of the Narod movement and former Yabloko deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Last month, Gulyayev was sentenced to 10 days in prison for failing to follow a policeman’s lawful orders during an attempted picket, an accusation he denied.