After Beating Fractures His Skull, Russian Environmentalist Questioned 4 Hrs By Police, Threatened

[hatrack]

PERVOURALSK, Russia – After three men in this heavily polluted city beat Stepan Chernogubov unconscious, fracturing his skull and knocking out three teeth, criminal investigators took him, still bleeding, to a police station where they questioned him for four hours and then threatened to bring charges against him.

Chernogubov had been set upon as he was trying to document the pollution streaming from a chromium plant here, pollution that occasionally turns a marsh feeding the Chusovaya River dark red, next to a waste pond that’s bright green. At least two of those in the fracas turned out to be plain-clothes police officers, he said in recounting the May incident.

The 26-year-old student knew the risks. Environmental activism in Russia attracts serious trouble. A forest advocate in southern Russia, Suren Gazaryan, criticized a governor, was thrown in jail and has now fled the country. An editor who campaigned against a highway project through a forest near Moscow, Mikhail Beketov, suffered brain damage in a 2008 beating, and recently died from his injuries.

In the southern region of Voronezh, three activists organizing against the opening of a lead and nickel mine were hospitalized in May after private security guards set upon them.

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-pollution-activist-pays-high-price/2013/07/13/15d52864-d817-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. Please don't give our police any ideas.

[leveymg]

2. Sing after me: Hate Russia . . . hate Venezuela . . . hate Bolivia . . . hate, hate, bad, bad . . .

sounds like it could be Montana. Can we hate Montana, too?

[bananas]

4. wtf are you talking about? nt

[wandy]

3. If only Stepan Chernogubov had been toating four laptops......

just full of.

"Enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,"

None of this would ever have happened to him.
The Russians are such nice people you know.

[kristopher]

5. Off to the greatest with you...

'Hard Path' loving, centralized authoritarian regimes.

Blech.

Russia has lately emerged as probably the most aggressive nuclear merchant in the world.

...Perhaps the most profound difference between the soft and hard paths is their domestic sociopolitical impact. Both paths, like any 50- year energy path, entail significant social change. But the kinds of social change needed for a hard path are apt to be much less pleasant, less plau- sible, less compatible with social diversity and personal freedom of choice, and less consistent with traditional values than are the social changes that could make a soft path work.

...In contrast to the soft path's dependence on pluralistic consumer choice in deploying a myriad of small devices and refinements, the hard path depends on difficult, large-scale projects requiring a major social commitment under centralized management. We have noted in Section III the extraordinary capital intensity of centralized, electrified high technologies. Their similarly heavy demands on other scarce resources—skills, labor, materials, special sites—likewise cannot be met by market allocation, but require compulsory diversion from whatever priorities are backed by the weakest constituencies. Quasi-war powers legislation to this end has already been seriously proposed. The hard path, sometimes portrayed as the bastion of free enterprise and free markets, would instead be a world of subsidies, $100-billion bailouts, oligopolies, regulations, nationaliza- tion, eminent domain, corporate statism.

Such dirigiste autarchy is the first of many distortions of the political fabric...

In an electrical world, your lifeline comes not from an understandable neighborhood technology run by people you know who are at your own social level, but rather from an alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by a faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you. Decisions about who shall have how much energy at what price also become centralized—a politically dangerous trend because it divides those who use energy from those who supply and regulate it.

The scale and complexity of centralized grids not only make them politically inaccessible to the poor and weak, but also increase the likelihood and size of malfunctions, mistakes and deliberate disruptions....

...If the technology used, like nuclear power, is subject to technical surprises and unique psychological handicaps, prudence or public clamor may require generic shutdowns in case of an unexpected type of malfunction: one may have to choose between turning off a country and persisting in potentially unsafe operation. Indeed, though many in the $100-billion quasi-civilian nuclear industry agree that it could be politically destroyed if a major accident occurred soon, few have considered the economic or political implications of putting at risk such a large fraction of societal capital. How far would governments go to protect against a threat—even a purely political threat—a basket full of such delicate, costly and essential eggs? Already in individual nuclear plants, the cost of a shutdown—often many dollars a second—weighs heavily, perhaps too heavily, in operating and safety decisions.

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them. Moreover, the money and talent invested in an electrical program tend to give it disproportionate influence in the counsels of government, often directly through staff-swapping between policy- and mission-oriented agencies. This incestuous position, now well developed in most industrial countries, distorts both social, and energy priorities in a lasting way that resists political remedy.

For all these reasons, if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign per se, it would still be unat- tractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into. But fission technology also has unique sociopolitical side-effects arising from the impact of human fallibility and malice on the persistently toxic and explosive materials in the fuel cycle. For example, discouraging nuclear violence and coercion requires some abrogation of civil liberties34; guarding long-lived wastes against geological or social contingencies implies some form of hierarchical social rigidity or homogeneity to insulate the technological priesthood from social turbulence; and making political decisions about nuclear hazards which are compulsory, remote from social experience, disputed, unknown, or unknowable, may tempt governments to bypass democratic decision in favor of elitist technocracy....

Download full paper here: http://www.rmi.org/cms/Download.aspx?id=4951&file=Energy+Strategy+-+The+Road+Not+Taken+(Reprint+from+Foreign+Affairs%2c+1976).pdf&title=Energy+Strategy%3a+The+Road+Not+Taken

Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken
AUTHOR: Lovins, Amory
DOCUMENT ID: E77-01
YEAR: 1976

If you haven't read this paper, you should. Its significance is on a par with Tragedy of the Commons.

[limpyhobbler]

6. I don't envy anybody trying to work environmental activism in Russia.

It's got to be more dangerous there than here in the US.

We have our own fair share of police abuses and beatings of ordinary citizens and some political activists here in our own country.

Seems worse there though.