Sobchak Denounces Stalin

Journalist and presidential candidate Ksenya Sobchak has released a video to mark the 65th anniversary of the death of Josef Stalin in which she expresses bewilderment that six of the eight people running for president in Russia this year praise the dictator.

The clip is slickly produced and filmed in Moscow's GULAG museum, where Sobchak walks among torture devices and ominous portraits of Stalin as she denounces him. Sobchak says Stalin is a "dark stain" on Russian history and the only way to "get rid of him is by speaking the truth."

She calls for the removal of Stalin's grave from Red Square and for a law equating glorifying him with justifying Nazism. She says that politicians who praise Stalin as an "excellent manager" should be forced to work as tour guides in the GULAG museum rather than leading the country into the future.

Our Current Time TV colleagues have an extended profile of Zhirinovsky supporters in St. Petersburg.

Death And Voting

Polling station No. 2176 in the Moscow Oblast village of Kurovskoye will be located in the local funeral home, which at least one commentator on social media described as "highly symbolic."

Not A Crime

Several youths in St. Petersburg reportedly wrote the words "Against Putin" in the snow overnight this weekend on top of one of the city's frozen waterways.

An alert and obedient passerby summoned the police, and in less than five minutes a patrol car had rolled up to the scene of crime, according to blogger Andrei Shipilov. The alert officers were apparently so quick to the scene that they managed to nab the miscreants on the spot, snapping the cuffs on them and hauling them down to police precinct No. 78.

In the meantime, a firetruck rushed to the scene and used hoses to wash the offending words away. "In all, [the words] were only there for 15 minutes," Shipilov wrote.

But at the police station, a problem arose.

A representative of the Federal Security Service (FSB) was summoned. Someone came from the Interior Ministry's antiterrorism center. But it turns out, they couldn't think of anything with which to charge the youths; walking around in the snow is not illegal yet in Russia. It turns out that saying "against Putin" is not a crime -- it isn't even an insult.

Law enforcement reportedly kept the perps in handcuffs at the station through the entire night while they mulled the poser, but in the end they were released without any charges filed.

"It will be interesting to see how quickly they update the Criminal Code with this missing statute," Shipilov mused on his blog.

Russian Opposition Demonstration Planned For Day After Election

Prominent Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov says his Left Front group has applied for permission to hold a demonstration just up the street from the Kremlin one day after the March 18 presidential election.

Udaltsov said on his Facebook page that the planned March 19 rally would be called "We need honest elections! A Discussion Of The Results Of the Russian Presidential Election." He said that planned rally would be coordinated with the Communist Party and opposition groups. Udaltsov is supporting Communist candidate Pavel Grudinin in the election that President Putin is set to win in a landslide. Udaltsov was released from prison in August after serving a 4 1/2-year prison sentence over his role in organizing a May 2012 protest against Putin and his government on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square.

'Putin' Dissertation Back In The News

The estranged and exiled daughter of a fabulously wealthy rector of one of Russia's oldest technical universities -- and Vladimir Putin's alma mater -- has come out with further details to bolster her claim that her father, St. Petersburg Mining Institute rector Vladimir Litvinenko, played a particularly crucial role in assuring Putin's academic success back in the 1990s.

Olga Litvinenko has alleged in the past that Putin did not write his dissertation himself (and the Brookings Institution has documented extensive plagiarism in it). But she provided a more detailed account of those assertions to our Russian Service, explaining how her father "personally wrote this thesis for Putin." She describes how the elder Litvinenko had a copy machine at their dacha that he used to "cut and paste" the 218-page dissertation together in the summer of 1997.

"I saw all of this with my very own eyes," Litvinenko, who now lives in Poland and is fighting for custody of her daughter, who she says has been kidnapped by her grandfather, told RFE/RL.

'Apologies' For Attack On Candidate Sobchak

The head of the Moscow Duma has expressed "sincere apologies" to candidate Ksenia Sobchak for an attack by an "intern" in which the perpetrator pushed her and doused her with water, reportedly shouting, "For Zhirinovsky!"

Sobchak last week in one of the candidates' televised debates threw a glassful of water at ultranational candidate and provocateur-excellence Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Zhirinovsky called her a "whore" in the same exchange, for which Sobchak's campaign has reportedly filed a complaint with prosecutors.

Duma chairman Aleksei Shaposhnikov described alleged attacker Alan Dutsev's actions toward Sobchak, at an event marking Mikhail Gorbachev's 87th birthday, as a "provocation and hooliganism." Some reports had suggested Dutsev was an aide to Shaposhnikov, but the United Russia member said the man was in fact a "Moscow City Duma intern" and "not a [Duma] staff member nor my assistant."

The debates have veered toward spectacle, with the clear front-runner, incumbent Vladimir Putin, saying from the start that he would not participate. Communist candidate Pavel Grudinin participated initially but vowed to drop out, saying the debates were "a circus."

Putin Promises Russian 'Victories' At Campaign Rally At Moscow Stadium

By RFE/RL

Incumbent President Vladimir Putin has held a campaign rally at a major Moscow sports arena, promising “victories” for Russia in remarks to a supportive audience 15 days before an election that seems certain to hand him a new six-year term.

"We want our country to be bright and looking to the future, for our children and grandchildren...we will do everything we can for them to be happy," Putin told the cheering crowd at Moscow's Luzhniki stadium on March 3.

"Nobody else will do this for us,” said Putin, who has frequently portrayed Russia as a country that is facing severe pressure from abroad and can rely only on itself. “And if we do this, the coming decade and the whole 21st century will be marked by our bright victories."

Ahead of the rally, media reports provided evidence that some people, including state workers, students, and private company employees, were forced, pressured, or paid to attend.

The event, given ample coverage by state media, was one of the closest things to a traditional campaign rally Putin has held since he announced in December that he would seek a fourth Kremlin term in the March 18 vote.

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Moscow To Offer Free Cancer Screening At Polling Stations

Among the initiatives put forward in his state-of-the-nation address on March 1, President Putin called for the creation of a national anticancer campaign.

The same day, Moscow health authorities announced that free cancer screening would be offered at some city polling stations on election day.

"We decided to take advantage of the fact that Muscovites will come out to vote on the 18th and so are setting up in several school nurses offices places where we can conduct such testing," Moscow Health Department head Aleksei Khripun told journalists.

Under the plan, Muscovites can have blood drawn for free at city clinics on March 17 and receive screening at their polling station the next day.

The Kremlin reportedly is concerned that low voter turnout could tarnish the vote and has launched many initiatives designed to encourage voters to come to the polls.