Chess Champ Garry Kasparov: ‘They Were Trying to Break My Leg’
Aug 17, 2012 6:32 PM EDT
The chess champion and Russian opposition leader was beaten and arrested Friday after showing up at the sentencing of anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot. He tells Eli Lake about the horrific ordeal.
When chess grand champion and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov showed up Friday at the sentencing of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, he didn’t expect to spend the next five hours in the custody of the Moscow police, recovering from a severe beating.
Now, he says, after being punched in the genitals, thrown in a van and beaten by several police, Kasparov says the police have accused him of biting one of them—an allegation he denies. “They act like animals and they accuse me of biting them,” Kasparov told the Daily Beast in his first interview since being arrested. “Can you imagine what it means to bite someone when you are being beaten? There should be blood on my face. It is beyond any common sense.”
Kasparov was one of several Russian opposition leaders to rally in support of the female punk band known as Pussy Riot. The three members of the band were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism” after performing a song at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in which they asked the Virgin Mary to expel President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Their trial has attracted worldwide attention, with stars like Paul McCartney and Madonna appealing to the Kremlin to drop the charges.
Kasparov said he went to the trial to show his support for Pussy Riot. While he was waiting for the trial to start, he said, he was giving interviews in the area outside the court cordoned off for reporters and activists. At one point, he said, one of the reporters motioned him to come with him into the courtroom. He said as soon as he walked outside the cordoned-off area, he was rushed by seven or eight police officers.
Andrey Smirnov, AFP / Getty Images
“At first I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Kasparov said. “Then I became annoyed. I said I want to get out of here.” He said that’s when the police started beating him. “I remember one strong hit between the legs, then they tried to bring me in the bus, and they started carrying me and beating me. When that happens, you resist,” Kasparov said. “They were trying to break my leg.”
The police officers, Kasparov said, began to carry his limp body into a van with others whom they had arrested. The former chess champion said he remembered screaming in agony. “I remember inside the van they threw me to the floor,” he said. “Then they took my right leg, they push the leg to the ceiling. I now have problems with the right side of the back.” Kasparov said when he was in the van, the police officers continued to beat him. He says the only witnesses were other people the police had arrested.
“We’ve been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn’t care about the law. Today, he proved it.”
At the station, Kasparov said, he was confronted by officers who told him he wouldn’t be charged. But he said he later saw a police report accusing him of instigating the violence and organizing a riot outside the courtroom. “Why the hell did you say I was shouting or trying to organize this, you saw what happened?” he said he asked the police officers. “They wouldn’t look in my eyes.”
After nearly five hours in the police station, Kasparov was taken to a nearby hospital, where staff said the x-ray machine was broken. Speaking late Friday from his home in Moscow, Kasparov said he intended to press charges against the police and was collecting video of how he was beaten before being dragged into the police van.
Since news of his arrest, Kasparov said he had received warm messages of solidarity from his friends and supporters. He also said he received word from U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul who told him the U.S. embassy in Moscow was monitoring his case and the incident. McFaul couldn’t be reached late Friday for comment, and a spokeswoman for the State Department declined to comment on the incident.
For Kasparov, his arrest and the trial of Pussy Riot “just shows that Russia has nothing to do with the rule of law.” He added, “We’ve been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn’t care about the law. Today, he proved it.”
Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
(Reuters) - Three women from the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail on Friday for staging a protest against President Vladimir Putin in a church, a ruling supporters described as his "personal revenge".
The group's backers burst into chants of "Shame" outside the Moscow courthouse and said the case showed Putin was cracking down on dissent in his new six-year term as president. Dozens were detained by police when scuffles broke out.
The United States and the European Union condemned the sentence as disproportionate and asked for it to be reviewed, although state prosecutors had demanded a three-year jail term and the maximum sentence possible was seven years.
But while the women have support abroad, where their case has been taken up by a long list of celebrities including Madonna, Paul McCartney and Sting, opinion polls show few Russians sympathize with them.
"The girls' actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church's rules," Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.
She declared all three guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had deliberately offended Russian Orthodox believers by storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral in February to belt out a "punk prayer" deriding Putin.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Marina Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, giggled as the judge read out the sentences one by one, but portrayed themselves as victims of Soviet-style persecution during the trial that began on July 30.
They have already been in jail for about five months, meaning they will serve another 19, and could be released if Putin were to pardon them. The Orthodox Church hinted it would not oppose such a move by appealing, belatedly, for mercy.
Pussy Riot took on two powerful state institutions at once when they burst into Moscow's golden-domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral wearing bright ski masks, tights and short skirts to protest against Putin's close ties with the Church.
The judge said the three women had "committed an act of hooliganism, a gross violation of public order showing obvious disrespect for society." She rejected their argument that they had no intention of offending Russian Orthodox believers.
It became one of Russia's most high-profile trials since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Putin's critics said it put the 59-year-old Kremlin leader's policies in the dock.
Opponents depicted it as part of a crackdown by the ex-KGB spy against a protest movement that took off over the winter, attracting what witnesses said were crowds of up to 100,000 people in Moscow to oppose his return to power.
"They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," Alexei Navalny, one of the organizers of the protests, said outside the court. "This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin."
A police source told Itar-Tass news agency 50 people had been detained near the court when scuffles broke out. Among them were Sergei Udaltsov, a leftist opposition leader, and Garry Kasparov, a Putin critic and former world chess champion.
But there was no sign of the opposition taking to the streets in anger. Opposition leaders plan a small gathering in Moscow on Sunday, the anniversary of a failed coup shortly before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, but the next big anti-Putin rally is not planned until September 15.
Putin's spokesman did not immediately comment on the verdict but the president's supporters said before the trial that he would have no influence on the court's decision.
Although Pussy Riot have never made a record or had a hit song, foreign singers have led the campaign for the trio's release. Madonna performed in Moscow with "PUSSY RIOT" painted on her back and wearing a ski mask in solidarity.
But a poll of Russians released by the independent Levada research group showed only 6 percent sympathized with the women and 51 percent found nothing good about them or felt irritation or hostility. The rest could not say or were indifferent.
Valentina Ivanova, 60, a retired doctor, said outside the courtroom: "What they did showed disrespect towards everything, and towards believers first of all."
CHURCH CALLS FOR MERCY
Putin, who returned to the presidency for a third term on May 7 after a four-year spell as prime minister, had said the women did "nothing good" but should not be judged too harshly.
The trio's defense lawyers said they would appeal. The Church issued a statement condemning the women's actions but urged the state to show mercy "within the framework of the law".
That appeared to signal that the Church would back a pardon or reduced sentence, although the women would be expected to admit guilt if they sought a pardon.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Washington was concerned about the "disproportionate sentences ... and the negative impact on freedom of expression in Russia", and urged Russian authorities "to review this case".
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the sentence called into question Russia's respect for the "obligations of fair, transparent, and independent legal process".
In protests outside Russia in support of Pussy Riot, a bare-chested feminist activist took a chainsaw to a wooden cross bearing a figure of Christ in Kiev. In Bulgaria, sympathizers put Pussy Riot-style masks on statues at a Soviet Army monument.
Opposition leaders say Putin will not ease up on opponents in his new term. Parliament has already rushed through laws increasing fines for protesters, tightening controls on the Internet, and imposing stricter rules on defamation.
Gay rights suffered a blow in Moscow when an appeals court upheld a ruling rejecting applications from activists to hold a gay rights march each year for the next 100 years. Anti-gay activists later sued Madonna for $10 million in St Petersburg, saying she insulted their feelings by speaking out for gay rights there last week.
(Additional reporting by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, Alissa de Carbonnel, Thomas Grove and Steve Gutterman in Moscow and Olzhas Auyezov in Kiev; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Will Waterman and Giles Elgood)
(Reuters) - European nations and the United States, as well as some celebrities, voiced sharp criticism of Russia on Friday over jail sentences handed to three members of the punk band Pussy Riot who protested against President Vladimir Putin in a church.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said the two-year sentences give to the women were "disproportionate" to the crime and added to the intimidation of opposition activists in Russia.
The United States expressed disappointment over the verdict and also called the sentences disproportionate.
The three women were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral in which they called on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of President Vladimir Putin.
"Together with the reports of the band members' mistreatment during pre-trial detention and the reported irregularities of the trial, it (the verdict) puts a serious question mark over Russia's respect for international obligations of fair, transparent and independent legal process," Ashton said.
"This case adds to the recent upsurge in politically motivated intimidation and prosecution of opposition activists in the Russian Federation, a trend that is of growing concern to the European Union," she said in a statement.
Human rights groups urged Russian authorities to overturn the verdict and free the three women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30.
In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement: "While we understand the group's behavior was offensive to some, we have serious concerns about the way that these young women have been treated by the Russian judicial system."
The Pussy Riot case, seen as a test of the extent of Putin's tolerance of dissent, has added to the strain already placed on relations between Moscow and European governments by their opposed positions on the crisis in Syria.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the sentence was "excessively harsh" and "not compatible with the European values of the rule of law and democracy to which Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, has committed itself."
"A dynamic civil society and politically active citizens are a necessary precondition for Russia's modernization, not a threat," she said.
British Foreign Minister Alistair Burt said in a statement that the verdict "calls into question Russia's commitment to protect fundamental rights and freedoms."
'OUTRAGEOUS'
Although celebrities such as Madonna, who had spoken out against the charges previously, did not comment on Friday, others took to Twitter to voice their concern.
Rocker Bryan Adams tweeted "Outrageous ... Russian singers jailed just for speaking their mind?"
On his Twitter account, "Lord of the Rings" actor Elijah Wood posted "a shame to hear the Pussy Riot were found guilty, but not surprised."
Amnesty International said the trial was politically motivated and the women were wrongfully prosecuted for a legitimate, if potentially offensive, protest action, adding that the verdict was "a bitter blow to freedom of expression" in Russia.
Amnesty "considers all three activists to be prisoners of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs," it said in a statement.
"The Russian authorities should overturn the court ruling and release the members of Pussy Riot immediately and unconditionally," said John Dalhuisen, director of Amnesty International's Europe and Central Asia Programme.
Europe's main security and rights body, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the verdict was part of a growing tendency towards curbing freedom of expression.
"I see a trend in various countries where the authorities, social and religious groups and courts are taking a more restrictive stance on content considered to be offensive, morally questionable or dangerous for children," said Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE in Europe's Representative on Freedom of the Media.
"Most of the time it is a pretext for censoring content that is simply not mainstream and critical," Mijatovic said.
Replies
Chess Champ Garry Kasparov: ‘They Were Trying to Break My Leg’
Aug 17, 2012 6:32 PM EDT
The chess champion and Russian opposition leader was beaten and arrested Friday after showing up at the sentencing of anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot. He tells Eli Lake about the horrific ordeal.
When chess grand champion and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov showed up Friday at the sentencing of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, he didn’t expect to spend the next five hours in the custody of the Moscow police, recovering from a severe beating.
Now, he says, after being punched in the genitals, thrown in a van and beaten by several police, Kasparov says the police have accused him of biting one of them—an allegation he denies. “They act like animals and they accuse me of biting them,” Kasparov told the Daily Beast in his first interview since being arrested. “Can you imagine what it means to bite someone when you are being beaten? There should be blood on my face. It is beyond any common sense.”
Kasparov was one of several Russian opposition leaders to rally in support of the female punk band known as Pussy Riot. The three members of the band were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism” after performing a song at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in which they asked the Virgin Mary to expel President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. Their trial has attracted worldwide attention, with stars like Paul McCartney and Madonna appealing to the Kremlin to drop the charges.
Kasparov said he went to the trial to show his support for Pussy Riot. While he was waiting for the trial to start, he said, he was giving interviews in the area outside the court cordoned off for reporters and activists. At one point, he said, one of the reporters motioned him to come with him into the courtroom. He said as soon as he walked outside the cordoned-off area, he was rushed by seven or eight police officers.
Andrey Smirnov, AFP / Getty Images
“At first I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Kasparov said. “Then I became annoyed. I said I want to get out of here.” He said that’s when the police started beating him. “I remember one strong hit between the legs, then they tried to bring me in the bus, and they started carrying me and beating me. When that happens, you resist,” Kasparov said. “They were trying to break my leg.”
The police officers, Kasparov said, began to carry his limp body into a van with others whom they had arrested. The former chess champion said he remembered screaming in agony. “I remember inside the van they threw me to the floor,” he said. “Then they took my right leg, they push the leg to the ceiling. I now have problems with the right side of the back.” Kasparov said when he was in the van, the police officers continued to beat him. He says the only witnesses were other people the police had arrested.
At the station, Kasparov said, he was confronted by officers who told him he wouldn’t be charged. But he said he later saw a police report accusing him of instigating the violence and organizing a riot outside the courtroom. “Why the hell did you say I was shouting or trying to organize this, you saw what happened?” he said he asked the police officers. “They wouldn’t look in my eyes.”
After nearly five hours in the police station, Kasparov was taken to a nearby hospital, where staff said the x-ray machine was broken. Speaking late Friday from his home in Moscow, Kasparov said he intended to press charges against the police and was collecting video of how he was beaten before being dragged into the police van.
Since news of his arrest, Kasparov said he had received warm messages of solidarity from his friends and supporters. He also said he received word from U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul who told him the U.S. embassy in Moscow was monitoring his case and the incident. McFaul couldn’t be reached late Friday for comment, and a spokeswoman for the State Department declined to comment on the incident.
For Kasparov, his arrest and the trial of Pussy Riot “just shows that Russia has nothing to do with the rule of law.” He added, “We’ve been saying Putin is a dictator for years who doesn’t care about the law. Today, he proved it.”
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast
By Timothy Heritage and Maria Tsvetkova
MOSCOW | Fri Aug 17, 2012 4:22pm EDT
(Reuters) - Three women from the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail on Friday for staging a protest against President Vladimir Putin in a church, a ruling supporters described as his "personal revenge".
The group's backers burst into chants of "Shame" outside the Moscow courthouse and said the case showed Putin was cracking down on dissent in his new six-year term as president. Dozens were detained by police when scuffles broke out.
The United States and the European Union condemned the sentence as disproportionate and asked for it to be reviewed, although state prosecutors had demanded a three-year jail term and the maximum sentence possible was seven years.
But while the women have support abroad, where their case has been taken up by a long list of celebrities including Madonna, Paul McCartney and Sting, opinion polls show few Russians sympathize with them.
"The girls' actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church's rules," Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.
She declared all three guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had deliberately offended Russian Orthodox believers by storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral in February to belt out a "punk prayer" deriding Putin.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Marina Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, giggled as the judge read out the sentences one by one, but portrayed themselves as victims of Soviet-style persecution during the trial that began on July 30.
They have already been in jail for about five months, meaning they will serve another 19, and could be released if Putin were to pardon them. The Orthodox Church hinted it would not oppose such a move by appealing, belatedly, for mercy.
Pussy Riot took on two powerful state institutions at once when they burst into Moscow's golden-domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral wearing bright ski masks, tights and short skirts to protest against Putin's close ties with the Church.
The judge said the three women had "committed an act of hooliganism, a gross violation of public order showing obvious disrespect for society." She rejected their argument that they had no intention of offending Russian Orthodox believers.
It became one of Russia's most high-profile trials since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Putin's critics said it put the 59-year-old Kremlin leader's policies in the dock.
Opponents depicted it as part of a crackdown by the ex-KGB spy against a protest movement that took off over the winter, attracting what witnesses said were crowds of up to 100,000 people in Moscow to oppose his return to power.
"They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," Alexei Navalny, one of the organizers of the protests, said outside the court. "This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin."
A police source told Itar-Tass news agency 50 people had been detained near the court when scuffles broke out. Among them were Sergei Udaltsov, a leftist opposition leader, and Garry Kasparov, a Putin critic and former world chess champion.
But there was no sign of the opposition taking to the streets in anger. Opposition leaders plan a small gathering in Moscow on Sunday, the anniversary of a failed coup shortly before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, but the next big anti-Putin rally is not planned until September 15.
Putin's spokesman did not immediately comment on the verdict but the president's supporters said before the trial that he would have no influence on the court's decision.
Although Pussy Riot have never made a record or had a hit song, foreign singers have led the campaign for the trio's release. Madonna performed in Moscow with "PUSSY RIOT" painted on her back and wearing a ski mask in solidarity.
But a poll of Russians released by the independent Levada research group showed only 6 percent sympathized with the women and 51 percent found nothing good about them or felt irritation or hostility. The rest could not say or were indifferent.
Valentina Ivanova, 60, a retired doctor, said outside the courtroom: "What they did showed disrespect towards everything, and towards believers first of all."
CHURCH CALLS FOR MERCY
Putin, who returned to the presidency for a third term on May 7 after a four-year spell as prime minister, had said the women did "nothing good" but should not be judged too harshly.
The trio's defense lawyers said they would appeal. The Church issued a statement condemning the women's actions but urged the state to show mercy "within the framework of the law".
That appeared to signal that the Church would back a pardon or reduced sentence, although the women would be expected to admit guilt if they sought a pardon.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Washington was concerned about the "disproportionate sentences ... and the negative impact on freedom of expression in Russia", and urged Russian authorities "to review this case".
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the sentence called into question Russia's respect for the "obligations of fair, transparent, and independent legal process".
In protests outside Russia in support of Pussy Riot, a bare-chested feminist activist took a chainsaw to a wooden cross bearing a figure of Christ in Kiev. In Bulgaria, sympathizers put Pussy Riot-style masks on statues at a Soviet Army monument.
Opposition leaders say Putin will not ease up on opponents in his new term. Parliament has already rushed through laws increasing fines for protesters, tightening controls on the Internet, and imposing stricter rules on defamation.
Gay rights suffered a blow in Moscow when an appeals court upheld a ruling rejecting applications from activists to hold a gay rights march each year for the next 100 years. Anti-gay activists later sued Madonna for $10 million in St Petersburg, saying she insulted their feelings by speaking out for gay rights there last week.
(Additional reporting by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, Alissa de Carbonnel, Thomas Grove and Steve Gutterman in Moscow and Olzhas Auyezov in Kiev; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Will Waterman and Giles Elgood)
(Reuters) - European nations and the United States, as well as some celebrities, voiced sharp criticism of Russia on Friday over jail sentences handed to three members of the punk band Pussy Riot who protested against President Vladimir Putin in a church.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said the two-year sentences give to the women were "disproportionate" to the crime and added to the intimidation of opposition activists in Russia.
The United States expressed disappointment over the verdict and also called the sentences disproportionate.
The three women were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral in which they called on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of President Vladimir Putin.
"Together with the reports of the band members' mistreatment during pre-trial detention and the reported irregularities of the trial, it (the verdict) puts a serious question mark over Russia's respect for international obligations of fair, transparent and independent legal process," Ashton said.
"This case adds to the recent upsurge in politically motivated intimidation and prosecution of opposition activists in the Russian Federation, a trend that is of growing concern to the European Union," she said in a statement.
Human rights groups urged Russian authorities to overturn the verdict and free the three women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30.
In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement: "While we understand the group's behavior was offensive to some, we have serious concerns about the way that these young women have been treated by the Russian judicial system."
The Pussy Riot case, seen as a test of the extent of Putin's tolerance of dissent, has added to the strain already placed on relations between Moscow and European governments by their opposed positions on the crisis in Syria.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the sentence was "excessively harsh" and "not compatible with the European values of the rule of law and democracy to which Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, has committed itself."
"A dynamic civil society and politically active citizens are a necessary precondition for Russia's modernization, not a threat," she said.
British Foreign Minister Alistair Burt said in a statement that the verdict "calls into question Russia's commitment to protect fundamental rights and freedoms."
'OUTRAGEOUS'
Although celebrities such as Madonna, who had spoken out against the charges previously, did not comment on Friday, others took to Twitter to voice their concern.
Rocker Bryan Adams tweeted "Outrageous ... Russian singers jailed just for speaking their mind?"
On his Twitter account, "Lord of the Rings" actor Elijah Wood posted "a shame to hear the Pussy Riot were found guilty, but not surprised."
Amnesty International said the trial was politically motivated and the women were wrongfully prosecuted for a legitimate, if potentially offensive, protest action, adding that the verdict was "a bitter blow to freedom of expression" in Russia.
Amnesty "considers all three activists to be prisoners of conscience, detained solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs," it said in a statement.
"The Russian authorities should overturn the court ruling and release the members of Pussy Riot immediately and unconditionally," said John Dalhuisen, director of Amnesty International's Europe and Central Asia Programme.
Europe's main security and rights body, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the verdict was part of a growing tendency towards curbing freedom of expression.
"I see a trend in various countries where the authorities, social and religious groups and courts are taking a more restrictive stance on content considered to be offensive, morally questionable or dangerous for children," said Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE in Europe's Representative on Freedom of the Media.
"Most of the time it is a pretext for censoring content that is simply not mainstream and critical," Mijatovic said.
(Reporting By Will Dunham)