» 11/19/2009 14:27 RUSSIA Dymovsky effect "against corruption of Putin’s police” Violence against innocents, abuses of power, killing of civilians: policemen denounce security forces using the Internet and YouTube and call into question Putin and Medvedev.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - They call it the "Dymovsky effect" after the first agent who had the courage to speak out. Russian newspapers speak of a "virus" that is affecting the police force pushing the police to report, for the first time publicly, the system. The "insurgents" use YouTube to spread their criticism of the unfair treatment of innocent people and the management of the police: low wages, no sick leave. The authorities react by firing policemen, accusing them of being “agents on the payroll of Western intelligence. " But President Medvedev has made fighting corruption one of the pillars of his presidency and does not want to lose face, many argue that he will soon have to act. Maybe pushing for the "resignation" of the Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, a loyalist of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The "Dymovsky virus” began on 9 November, when the young policeman Alexey Dimovsky was fired after he appealed to Putin in an online post pointing his finger at the corruption of his superiors. The police agent in Novorossiisk, a port city on the Black Sea, posted a video of seven minutes on YouTube in which he accused his superiors of forcing him to work weekends and solve inexistent crimes, in addition to blocking his claim for compensation from an accident at work. After the video was seen by at least 200 thousand people and the media took up the story, the Minister Nurgaliyev opened an investigation completed at a record time of two hours with no response to the allegations but only with the dismissal of Dymovsky "for slander and actions that stain the honour "of the police.
The policeman said he feared for his life and that of his family after being followed by an unmarked car for a whole day. In a press conference on 11 November in Moscow, the police official said he had evidence of abuses committed by police chiefs and urged his colleagues to emerge from silence. Since then, eight other videos have been posted on YouTube by officers and magistrates, addressed mainly to Medvedev and Putin. All of them have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
A public prosecutor in Komi, Grigory Chekalin in his YouTube post denounced the "fabricated charges" against two citizens convicted to life imprisonment, the initiative, however, cost him a forced relocation as well as the threat of a criminal investigation for “abuse of power” being opened against him. Chekalin decided to talk after a policeman from Komi, Mikhail Yevseyev, had reported the same case online. Their video reports were followed by others, including a former traffic policeman in Moscow, fired for demanding that his employment rights be respected, Tatyana Domracheva a policewoman in the Sverdlovsk region (she had spoken out about bribes within her district) and the agent Alexei Mumolin from Togliatti.
2009 has been a bad year for the Russian police force, hit by a series of scandals and incidents, the most famous example is the case of Major Denis Yevsyukov, who in April opened fire on a crowd killing at least three people. The incident led to the dismissal of the police chief of Moscow, sacrificed as a scapegoat, but no concrete measures followed.
Now exacerbated by rampant corruption in both the police force and the courts, it seems that Russian citizens are left with no other hope than relying on "cyber-justice" through tools like LiveJournal and the Russian version of Facebook "Vkontakte." Only one third of the population has regular access to the internet, but the number of users is growing rapidly. The Kremlin is aware of this and many now wonder (and fear), how it intends to react.
