MEDUZA/EN/VHF

On Friday, September 10, a Moscow court sentenced prominent Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina to one year of "restrictions on freedom" (a parole-like sentence). As part of the "Sanitary Case," the court found her guilty of inciting violations of pandemic-related restrictions and, consequently, creating the threat of a mass coronavirus outbreak. State prosecutors sought two years of restricted freedom for Alyokhina, who has been shuffled from house arrest to pre-trial detention since the launch of the "Sanitary Case" in late January. Meduza shares a full English-language translation of Maria Alyokhina's final courtroom remarks here.

Russian national Irina Wickholm was last heard from in late May. Around that time, she phoned a friend to tell him that a police officer had visited her home in Brest, Belarus. Prior to her disappearance, Wickholm was actively tweeting to her handful of Twitter followers about the "crimes" of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Three months later, the Belarusian Attorney General's Office sent out a press release about a felony defamation case opened against a "58-year-old foreign citizen" identified only by the initial "V." Shortly afterward, human rights activists identified the defendant in the trial as Irina Wickholm. Now, she faces up to five years in prison in Belarus for what her friends describe as "strictly" armchair activism.

The Russian Olympic Committee's medalists from the Tokyo Games are being quarantined for seven days ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. While some athletes have embraced the self-isolation period as a "holiday," others fear their inability to train properly during this time may affect their performance in upcoming competitions. What's more, the meeting with Putin has already been postponed by a day. Putin met with the Russian Olympic Committee's athletes on the eve of the games at the end of June; apparently, the Olympians didn't quarantine beforehand.

In recent months, the remnants of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny's team have endured police pressure that has no precedent in Russia's post-Soviet history. The authorities have devoted special attention to "Smart Vote," the Navalny movement's strategic initiative (first introduced in 2019 and 2020 for local elections in Moscow, Tomsk, and Novosibirsk) that directs opposition voters to the candidates Team Navalny deems likeliest to defeat nominees from United Russia, the country's ruling political party. In its war against Smart Vote, Russia's federal censor, RKN, has even started threatening some of the world's biggest Internet companies. Here is a chronology of the last three months in this confrontation between the Russian state and Alexey Navalny's last-standing national campaign.

On September 6, a search party in Kiselyovsk, outside Kemerovo, found the bodies of two 10-year-old girls. Their names were Nastya Fesler and Ulyana Degtyar. Forty-one-year-old Viktor Pesternikov, who served 10 years in a prison colony for "violent actions of a sexual nature against a minor" until he was released in 2019, confessed to raping and murdering the girls. After his release from prison, Pesternikov was banned from leaving the city of Myski, where he lived, and was required to check in regularly with police. But this didn't prevent him from traveling to nearby Kiselyovsk -- or even from working and living there. On the day of the murders, Pesternikov sat with the girls at the playground, took them shopping, and bought them food and alcohol. Meduza special correspondent Irina Kravtsova traveled to Kiselyovsk to find out how this kind of crime was possible, and why two 10-year-olds would willingly follow a strange man just because he promised them food.

The Crimean city of Simferopol and the Russian city of Krasnodar both unveiled monuments to Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky on September 11, the 144th anniversary of his birth. Both monuments drew criticism from representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, who condemned memorializing one of the architects of the Red Terror as an insult to its victims. The monument in Krasnodar was erected outside of a secondary school that was named after Dzerzhinsky in 2017, at the request of the school's staff and the local FSB. In total, there are more than 40 monuments to Dzerzhinsky located across Russia.

Standup comedian Idrak Mirzalizade is suing Russia's Interior Ministry, demanding that the agency rescind its decision to prohibit his residence in Russia. Last month, the agency designated Mirzalizade as a threat to Russia's public order and declared him "undesirable for life."

St. Petersburg's Municipal Election Council has dismissed two complaints filed by city councilman Boris Vishnevsky, who will face two rivals in elections later this month who changed their first and last names to match his. To avoid confusion with voters, Vishnevsky demanded that ballots display these other candidates' previous names, but election officials ruled that such disclosures are only necessary when candidates' full names (middle names, or patronymics, included) are the same.

Ivan Pavlov, the human rights lawyer charged with leaking classified trial data from a treason case against a former journalist, has fled Russia. On Telegram, Pavlov announced that he's now in Georgia and hopes to return home, one day. The various restrictions he faced because of the charges against him, Pavlov explained, "gradually made [his] work impossible." Courts prohibited him from using the Internet and speaking to his own clients and many of his own colleagues.

Across the city of Moscow, there are 954 electronic parking meters where motorists can purchase temporary permit slips to display on their dashboards. These meters are not popular; officials in the city's Transportation Department told Meduza that just 1.3 percent of drivers bother with the electronic meters, while 89 percent prefer to use the dedicated mobile app "Parking in Moscow." Unloved as they may be, the physical network of meters still needs maintenance, which means the city must spend money to keep these devices working. Meduza has learned that the latest multimillion-dollar contract went to a company run by Alexey Rakov, the younger brother of Moscow's deputy mayor.