By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

January 18, 2012

The city authorities have refused to authorize an annual anti-fascist march and rally in memory of the slain anti-fascists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova due to be held on Thursday, Jan. 19, allowing only a “picket” on the largely deserted Ploshchad Sakharova on Vasilyevsky Island.

Human rights lawyer Markelov and journalist Baburova were shot dead in downtown Moscow on Jan. 19, 2009, and the date has been marked with vigils and rallies across Russia since then. Other anti-fascists, such as Nikolai Girenko, Timur Kacharava, Ivan Khutorskoi and Alexander Ryukhin, who were also killed by neo-Nazis, are commemorated as well.Read more...

On 21 February 2011, the proceedings against Nikita Tikhonov and his common-law wife Evgenia Khasis began in the Moscow City Court. Tikhonov and Khasis are the chief suspects in the murders of civil rights attorney Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova in January 2009 in Moscow.

The case highlights the problems presented by a nationalist movement in Russia that has grown increasingly violent in recent years. Roughly one month after the murders of Markelov and Baburova, the militant nationalist organization BORN (whose existence beyond the Internet is questioned by observers and the media) released a statement calling the victims "enemies" of the "Russian nation." It went on to call the murders the "final warning to anti-Russian human rights activists, journalists and anti-fascists," and warned that if opposition to the Russian ultra-right movement did not cease, "more heads" would "fly." BORN has made a name for itself by claiming responsibility for various high-profile murders in the past.Read more...

Rallies were held in several Russian cities on December 19, 2011 in memory of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova. Markelov – a lawyer and civil rights advocate, and Baburova – a left-leaning journalist and activist, were shot and killed in Moscow as they left a press conference on that date in 2009. It has since become a day of protest in Russia not only to oppose racism and discrimination, but also to draw attention to the inadequate response from the authorities in addressing racially motivated violence.Read more...

January 19, 2011 will mark the second anniversary of the murders of two antifascists, lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. They were murdered in Moscow in broad daylight, shot in the head by a gunman.

The murders were brazen and demonstrative. Although from the outset various explanations were given for the murders (as a lawyer, Markelov had handled cases in Chechnya, both against the federal forces who tortured and murdered Chechen civilians, and the Chechen leadership, who are suspected of kidnapping and murdering people; he had also represented journalist Mikhail Beketov, who was nearly beaten to death in autumn 2008, in his court battle with Khimki mayor Vladimir Strelchenko), Stas and Nastya’s comrades in the antifascist movement assumed that neo-Nazis had been involved. For it had been Stanislav Markelov who had pressured law enforcement authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the murder, in the spring of 2006, of the young antifascist Alexander Riukhin. Read more...