Russia’s Economy in March 2013: Preliminary Data and Major Trends

Russia’s political background in March appeared to be calm enough. Over recent months, the opposition’s activity has been evidently on the decline; the trend displayed by Vladimir Putin’ approval ratings, although still downward, is moving at a very slow rate; the deterioration, last autumn, of the general outlook of the current situation as refl ected by opinion polls, early this year was no more visible. Meanwhile, the authorities stick to their policy of progressively ‘tightening the screws’ on political activists and civil organizations. In March, charges were brought against Yelena Kokhtareva, a pensioner, who became the 25th accused person in the so-called Bolotnaya square case. Besides, the police search the homes of political activists in Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg (while some of them had not even been in Moscow on 6 May 2012). And fi nally, in late March, the law enforcement agencies launched a series of checks of civil-society and human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Memorial. In this connection, officials in the USA, the UK and Germany expressed their concerns with the political pressure on independent civil-society organizations in Russia.