ACTING UP – RUSSIA’S CIVIL SOCIETY – Photographs by Platon for Human Rights Watch – Noize MC, 26, is a superstar Russian rapper whose breakaway hit, “Restore Justice (Mercedes S-666)” stoked public outrage over a corrupt official responsible for a fatal hit-and-run accident. “A good rapper, I think, should know about the world,” he says, “to read books and to know something about humanistic ideals.” His political lyrics have landed Noize in administrative detention before — a brush with the police that only enhanced his popularity. “Advanced technology, rich culture/ And now only red sand, steep mountains and craters,” he raps in “It’s Awesome on Mars.” “…To die was just as scary for them as for you or me.”
ACTING UP – RUSSIA’S CIVIL SOCIETY – Photographs by Platon for Human Rights Watch – Nadira Isaeva was chief editor of a leading independent newspaper “Chernovik” in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region of southern Russia. In August 2008, Isaeva and several other staff of the newspaper were prosecuted under Russia’s anti-extremist legislation for having published a series of articles exposing law enforcement officials as perpetrators of torture, abductions, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. The prosecutor argued that the publications were aimed at perpetuating a negative image of law enforcement officers, thus inciting hostility against police. After almost three years of legal struggle, Isaeva and her colleagues won the case this past summer. Isaeva eventually became the victim of a slander campaign that many people believe was launched by the authorities, and was forced to resign from the paper. She is now a freelance journalist, planning to write a book on the role of media and social networking in the Northern Caucasus. In 2010, she received the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
ACTING UP – RUSSIA’S CIVIL SOCIETY – Photographs by Platon for Human Rights Watch – Artyom Loskutov of Novosibirsk is a performance artist who started a new kind of political protest dubbed a “monstration”; Yulia Bashinova is an activist who held the first “monstration” in Moscow in 2011. Since anti-Putin gatherings rarely receive permission from the authorities and the participants risk arrest, those who join in “monstrations” often don’t say or do anything overtly political. Instead, they carry nonsense signs such as “Wear a mustache!” and “If it weren’t for legs, I wouldn’t be here,” and not-so-subtle plays on old Soviet slogans, such as “Work! Peace! Amoeba!” “Monstrations” have caught on across the country — leaving local authorities bewildered, but sensing that somehow, they’re being made fun of. “Everything around us is just as absurd,” says Loskutov. “We have a president and prime minister who live in a completely absurd world,” agrees Bashinova.
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