Izvestia
Industrial Development to Replace Georgian Villages in South Ossetia
Some Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, were abandoned during the 2008 war. The President of the republic Leonid Tibilov plans to demolish them to clear the area for industrial and agricultural development. Not even the names of the former villages will remain.
“We’ll build some new residential buildings here, too. But the former villages will be completely removed, therefore there is no need to keep the names,” Tibilov said.
Following the Ossetian-Georgian conflict in 1989 to 1992, Ossetian residents were pushed out of those villages. During the time Georgia controlled certain areas in South Ossetia, several Georgian enclaves appeared. The Leningor District was almost 100 percent Georgian.
The enclave to the north of Tskhinvali cut the Ossetians off from Russia, forcing residents of the unrecognized republic to use an alternative route.
The enclave had money. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili spent a lot of money there to taunt Ossetians and to illustrate the advantages of living under Georgian jurisdiction. With a shopping mall, a bank and a movie theater, the enclave was quite alluring.
They built a district for the Ossetians who switched camps. Dmitry Sanakoyev headed an alternative pro-Georgian opposition “government” in South Ossetia.
Just before the attack in August 2008, the enclave was partially evacuated to the gorge leading to Georgia. The Georgian army was mortaring Tskhinvali from the enclave on the night of the siege. As Russia’s 58th army forced the Georgians out, the Ossetians rushed to destroy and ransack the northern villages. This was allegedly done to prevent the Georgians from coming back should the officials come to a peaceful resolution.
“We need to settle the formalities first. We don’t want any claims or legal issues to emerge as the ruins get cleared away,” Tibilov says.
The makeover should be finished in about four years. But even now, there is not much to clear away. Most of the buildings are roofless and have only a few walls still standing, revealing an unobstructed view of the mountains.
This was probably the picture Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev got as he visited South Ossetia on August 8. His motorcade passed through the former Georgian enclave twice.
Komsomolskaya Pravda
Russian French Priest Accuses Troubled Lawmaker of Abuse
Gennady Gudkov, whose parliamentary immunity could be canceled after the lower house gets returns from vacation and who has recently faced a string of corruption allegations, is in for a fresh dose of trouble. He is now being accused of persecuting the church as a KGB employee.
Father Vladimir, a Russian Orthodox priest who heads the St. Nicholas Church in the French town of Saint-Louis and who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1986 for anti-Soviet propaganda suddenly recalled who his worst persecutor was. Gennady Gudkov was evidently in charge of his case. He allegedly searched the priest’s home and behaved aggressively.
“I had letters and papers that were not to be surrendered to the KGB under any circumstances,” Father Vladimir was quoted by Pravda.ru as saying. “I grabbed them and went into the bathroom to burn them. I destroyed the documents as they rang the doorbell. I ruined my toilet seat, too. They came in and had a locksmith with them. Gudkov sniffed the air and said, ‘So, have you burned it all?’ I said I did. Then he rushed to the bathroom, plunged his arm into the toilet and began fishing out the burned scraps of paper.”
The priest has also accused Gudkov of stealing a rifle dating back to the rule of Tsar Alexander II.
“After they finished searching the apartment and left with sacks of my books, he returned, removed that rifle from a wall display and took it. He just took it, the dirty little thief,” he said.
Gudkov said bluntly that the priest's words were delusional nonsense and that he wished he’d voted for a defamation bill. In Gudkov’s words, the priest must have confused things, assuming he’s not simply lying. He said he was never involved in this activity and, moreover, has received a Russian Orthodox Church Order for his long time support of the church.
The strange thing about the story is that it is only coming out now. The priest has actually had two decades to express his grudge against Gudkov and to do something about it.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
United Russia Deputies Attack Independent TV Project
Vladimir Burmatov, United Russia Party member and first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Education, has criticized a project for an independent TV network promoted by Russia’s political opposition. The opposition has been able to air its views primarily via the Internet, but the party of power has not had a smooth ride online. For example, bloggers have accused Burmatov and his party colleague, Senator Ruslan Gattarov, of using Twitter-bots to crank up their rankings.
The independent TV project has made United Russia Party officials uneasy. Gattarov did not criticize the process of creating the channel itself, but rather the approach to funding it: “If they raise funds for it in the West, how is it independent?”
The idea for establishing an independent public television network is the brainchild of Ilya Ponomaryov and Dmitry Gudkov, State Duma deputies from the Just Russia Party. It has something in common with the public television project supported by former President Dmitry Medvedev. Some media reported that exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky is ready to fund the network, which Gudkov immediately denied.
In turn, Burmatov announced on the United Russia Web site that the opposition is merely upset that their sponsor has been ousted. He holds that there is no demand in Russian society for a TV network that specifically promotes the opposition, since the popularity of the representatives of opposition protesters itself is basically nil.
“This is not an allegation, these are statistics,” he said.
While the opposition is nearly absent from national television, it has outlets in print and online media. Twitter plays a significant role, and the opposition uses it as an expeditious method to convey information. Two of the most popular twitter accounts among the dissenters are those of Ksenia Sobchak, with half a million followers, and blogger Alexei Navalny, who has almost 300,000 subscribers.
Burmatov and Gattarov are playing catch-up in terms of popularity. Bloggers analyzing the activity of pro-government Twitter accounts found that the number of readers has increased by tens of thousands over the past few weeks. Now Gattarov is followed by more than 100 thousand people and Burmatov by more than 300,000. This immediately raised suspicions that some of these followers are not real.
According to social media specialist Alexander Zimarin, Burmatov has almost 320,000 bots among his 330,000 loyal readers. Burmatov explained that what is happening is very simple – they used the bots in order to write an exposé about the use of bots. Gattarov said that he never looks at the number of his followers.
Zimarin said that Burmatov and Gattarov had previously achieved notoriety during Russia’s wildfires in 2010. “They and a group of brave young guns went into the woods, photographed themselves against a backdrop of burning wood and heroically began to post about it in blogs. However, this was leaked to the press, and this instance does not seem to have taught them that every secret is eventually revealed.”
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