150-720: Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky ( Russian : Сергeй Леонидович Магнитский , pronounced [sʲɪrˈɡʲej lʲɪɐˈnʲidəvʲɪtɕ mɐɡˈnʲitskʲɪj] ; Ukrainian : Сергій Леонідович Магнітський ; 8 April 1972 – 16 November 2009) was a Russian lawyer and tax advisor responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials while representing client Hermitage Capital Management . His arrest in 2008 and subsequent death after eleven months in police custody generated international attention and triggered both official and unofficial inquiries into allegations of fraud, theft and human rights violations in Russia. His posthumous trial
300-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
450-559: A made man in the Sicilian and Italian-American mafia. The honor of becoming a Vor is given only when the recruit shows considerable leadership skills, personal ability, intellect, and charisma. A Pakhan or another high-ranking member of an organization can decide if the recruit will receive such title. When you become a member of the Vor -world you have to accept the code of the Vor v Zakone (' thief in law '). Groups based in and around
600-466: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
750-486: A submarine for cocaine smuggling. Unfortunately for the two of them, federal agents had been keeping a close eye on Fainberg for months. Alexander Yasevich, an associate of the Russian military contact and an undercover DEA agent, was sent to verify the illegal dealing, and in 1997, Fainberg was finally arrested in Miami. Facing the possibility of life imprisonment, the latter agreed to testify against Almeida in exchange for
900-1056: A "good relationship" with Vladimir Putin since the 1990s. On 7 June 2017, 33 Russian mafia affiliates and members were arrested and charged by the FBI, US Customs and Border Protection and NYPD for extortion, racketeering, illegal gambling, firearm offenses, narcotics trafficking, wire fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft , fraud on casino slot machines using electronic hacking devices; based in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, murder-for-hire conspiracy and cigarette trafficking. They were also accused of operating secret and underground gambling dens based in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn , and using violence against those who owed gambling debts, establishing nightclubs to sell drugs, plotting to force women associates to rob male strangers by seducing and drugging them with chloroform , and trafficking over 10,000 pounds of stolen chocolate confectionery ;
1050-462: A "rupture to the abdominal membrane" and later to a heart attack . Reporters learned that Magnitsky had complained of worsening stomach pain for five days prior to his death and that by the 15th, he was vomiting every three hours, and had a visibly swollen stomach. On the day of his death, the prison physician, believing Magnitsky had a chronic disease, sent him by ambulance to and later transferred him to Matrosskaya Tishina prison's medical unit, which
1200-593: A blocked gall bladder, and was denied medical care. A human rights council set up by the Kremlin found that he had been physically assaulted shortly before his death. His case became an international cause célèbre . The United States Congress and President Barack Obama enacted the Magnitsky Act at the end of 2012, barring those Russian officials believed to be involved in Magnitsky's death from entering
1350-471: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Russian mafia The Russian mafia ( Russian : ру́сская ма́фия rússkaya máfiya [ˈruskəjə ˈmafʲɪjə] or росси́йская ма́фия rossíyskaya máfiya [rɐˈsʲijskəjə ˈmafʲɪjə] ), otherwise referred to as bratva ( братва́ bratvá [brɐtˈva] ; lit. ' brothers' clique ' ),
1500-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
1650-484: A large amount of Russian taxes, including documents and seals for many of Hermitage's Russian companies. In October 2007, Browder received word that one of the firms maintained in Moscow had a trial against it for an alleged unpaid debt of hundreds of millions of dollars. According to Browder, this was the first time he had heard of this court case and he did not know the lawyers who represented his company in court. Magnitsky
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#17327972644951800-881: A law forbidding the jailing of individuals who are suspected of tax crimes. Magnitsky's death is also believed to be linked to the firing of Major-General Anatoli Mikhalkin, formerly the head of the Moscow division of the tax crimes department of the Interior Ministry. Mikhalkin was among those accused by Magnitsky of taking part in fraud. Opalesque TV released a video on 8 February 2010, in which Hermitage Capital Management founder Bill Browder revealed details of Sergei Magnitsky's ordeal during his 11 months in detention. On 25 June 2010 radio-station Echo of Moscow announced that Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Department for Own Security started investigations against Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov, who has been accused of improper imprisonment of Magnitsky. The investigation
1950-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
2100-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
2250-489: A paid protection racket). Contract killings were common. It was the period of internationalization of Russian organized crime. It was agreed that Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov would be sent to Brighton Beach in 1992, allegedly because he was killing too many people in Russia and also to take control of Russian organized crime in North America. Within a year, he built an international operation that included but
2400-438: A popular hangout for underworld criminals. Fainberg himself gained a reputation as an ambassador among international crime groups, becoming especially close to Juan Almeida, a Colombian cocaine dealer. Planning to expand his cocaine business, Fainberg acted as an intermediary between Almeida and the corrupt Russian military . He helped him get six Russian military helicopters in 1993, and in the following year, helped arrange to buy
2550-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
2700-562: A rather large stronghold in the city of Atlanta where members are distinguished by their tattoos. Russian organized crime was reported to have a stronger grip in the French Riviera region and Spain in 2010; and Russia was branded as a virtual "mafia state" according to the WikiLeaks cables . According to recordings released in 2015, Alexander Litvinenko , shortly before he was assassinated, claimed that Semion Mogilevich has had
2850-404: A refund of $ 230 million in tax that the companies had paid when they had been under Hermitage's control. The refund was issued on Christmas Eve 2007 and was the largest tax rebate in Russian history. Hermitage contacted the Russian government with the findings of its investigation. The money, which was not Hermitage's, belonged to the Russian state. Rather than opening a case against the police and
3000-534: A scheme in which the Camorra would bleach out US$ 1 bills and reprint them as $ 100s. These bills would then be transported to the Russian mafia for distribution in 29 post- Eastern Bloc countries and former Soviet republics. In return, the Russian mafia paid the Camorra with property (including a Russian bank) and firearms, smuggled into Eastern Europe and Italy. A report by the United Nations in 1995 placed
3150-444: A search warrant alleging that Kamaya, a company administered by Hermitage, had underpaid its taxes. This was highly irregular, as the Russian tax authorities had just confirmed in writing that this company had overpaid its tax. In both cases, the search warrants permitted the seizure of materials related only to Kamaya. But, in both cases the officers illegally seized all the corporate, tax documents and seals for any company that had paid
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#17327972644953300-460: A second trial. As pointed out in the press, this was the first posthumous trial in Russia. Browder , who lives in London , was a co-defendant tried in absentia. On 11 July 2013, a court in Moscow found Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion in the posthumous trial. The court also found Browder, Magnitsky's onetime client and a US-born British investor, guilty of evading some $ 17 million in taxes. In 2012,
3450-405: A shorter sentence, which ended up being 33 months. The FreeLance Bureau (FLB.ru) [ ru ] published a website in 2000 containing Philipp Bobkov 's MOST Group Security Database along with files from RUOP and other departments and special services. Vanuatu was a preferred location for Russian mafia laundering money. As the 21st century dawned, the Russian mafia remained after
3600-595: A six-year prison sentence in Israel, returned to America and set up a rival heroin business, culminating in a mafia turf war. When the USSR collapsed and a free market economy emerged, organized criminal groups began to take over Russia's economy, with many ex- KGB agents and veterans of the Afghan war offering their skills to the crime bosses. Gangster summit meetings had taken place in hotels and restaurants shortly before
3750-583: A ten-year maximum security prison sentence. Before his arrest and besides his operations in America, Ivankov regularly flew around Europe and Asia to maintain ties with his fellow mobsters (like members of the Solntsevskaya Bratva ), as well as reinforce ties with others. This did not stop other people from denying his growing power. In one instance, Ivankov attempted to buy out Georgian boss Valeri "Globus" Glugech's drug importation business. When
3900-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
4050-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
4200-479: Is a collective of various organized crime related elements originating in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Any of the mafia's groups may be referred to as an "Organized Criminal Group" (OPG, from Russian "организованная преступная группа" ). This is sometimes modified to include a specific name, such as the Orekhovskaya OPG . Sometimes, the Russian word is dropped in favour of a full translation, and OCG
4350-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
4500-557: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
4650-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
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4800-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
4950-575: Is crime involving our former compatriots abroad, but there is no data suggesting that an organized structure of criminal groups comprising former Russians exists abroad" on the topic of international Russian criminal gangs. In August 2010, Alain Bauer , a criminologist from France , said that the Russian mafia "is one of the best structured criminal organizations in Europe , with a quasi-military operation" in their international activities. The Russian mafia
5100-510: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
5250-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
5400-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
5550-464: Is similar to the Italian crime groups in many ways, in that the groups' organizations and structures follow a similar model. The two groups also share a similar portfolio of criminal activity. The highly publicized Sicilian Mafia is believed to have inspired early criminal groups in Russia to form mafia-like organizations, eventually spawning their own version. The Russian mafia, however, differed from
5700-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
5850-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
6000-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
6150-570: Is to say, a premeditated murder." An official investigation was ordered in November 2009 by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev . Russian authorities had not concluded their own investigation as of December 2009, but 20 senior prison officials had already been fired as a result of the case. In December 2009, in two separate decrees, Medvedev fired Alexander Piskunov, deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, and signed
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6300-597: Is used instead of OPG. In 2012, there were as many as 6,000 groups, with more than 200 of them having a global reach. Criminals of these various groups are either former prison members, corrupt officials and business leaders, people with ethnic ties, or people from the same region with shared criminal experiences and leaders. In December 2009, Timur Lakhonin , the head of the National Central Bureau of Interpol within Russia , stated that "Certainly, there
6450-470: Is where Russian organized crime began in the US. The earliest known case of Russian crime in the area was in the mid-1970s by the " Potato Bag Gang ", a group of con artists disguised as merchants that told customers that they were selling antique gold rubles for cheap, but in fact, gave them bags of potatoes when bought in thousands. By 1983, the head of Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach
6600-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
6750-461: The Allard Prize for International Integrity ceremony. The Magnitsky family attended the ceremony and responded, "Sergei would have been so proud and humbled by this nomination. He always strived to live his life in the best possible way, with honesty and integrity. Six years after his untimely and heartbreaking death, it is awards such as this that keep Sergei's memory alive. Being nominated for
6900-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
7050-645: The Camorra , in particular with Salvatore DeFalco, a lower-echelon member of the Giuliano clan . Mogilevich and DeFalco would have held meetings in Prague in 1993. Semion Mogilevich's net worth is estimated to be 10 billion dollars. Ivankov's reign also ended in June 1995 when a $ 3.5 million extortion attempt on two Russian businessmen, Alexander Volkov and Vladimir Voloshin, ended in an FBI arrest that resulted in
7200-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
7350-570: The Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of
7500-528: The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project , a Sarajevo -based network of investigative centers, successfully traced some of the missing Russian funds to a company owned by Denis Katsyv , the son of Pyotr Katsyv. The money had been invested in a real estate firm that was buying Wall Street apartments in New York City . The U.S. Department of Justice filed a seizure order to recover
7650-530: The Russian Empire , in the form of banditry and thievery, but it was not until after the establishment of the Soviet Union that certain vory v zakone ( lit. ' thieves in law ' ) emerged as the leaders of prison groups throughout forced labour camps with a generally well-defined code of honour. In the aftermath of World War II in 1945, the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and
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#17327972644957800-690: The Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as
7950-584: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
8100-811: The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture , Juan E. Méndez , opened an investigation into Magnitsky's treatment and death. In November 2011 a permanent exhibition with the title "Sergei Magnitsky – witness for justice and democracy in Russia" was opened in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. In December 2012, the United States passed Magnitsky Act , a law called "Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012" which, among other things, authorized
8250-658: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
8400-715: The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, more gangs emerged in a flourishing black market that exploited the unstable governments of the FSU. American attorney Louis Freeh , who headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 1993 and 2001, said that the Russian mafia posed the greatest threat to the United States in the mid-1990s. When the Bolshevik Revolution came around in 1917,
8550-409: The " krysha " because the laws and the court system were not functioning properly in Russia. The only way for them to enforce a contract was to turn to a criminal " krysha ". They also used it to intimidate competitors, enforce contracts, collect debts, or take over new markets. It was also becoming increasingly common for Russian businesses to turn to the "red krysha " (the corrupt police who doubled as
8700-556: The " presumption of innocence " principle and should await the resolution of the Russian court. Bloomberg reported in December that, according to an Interfax story, "identical measures" would be taken by Russia if a European Union ban was put into place. In mid-December, the European Parliament passed the resolution allowing the officials to be banned by member states and their assets to be seized. In January 2011,
8850-430: The "hierarchy". Outcasts, the suki separated from the others and formed their own groups and power bases by collaborating with prison officials, eventually gaining the luxury of comfortable positions. Bitterness between the groups erupted into a series of Bitch Wars from 1945 to 1953, with many killed every day. The prison officials encouraged the violence, seeing it as a way to rid the prisons of criminals. Then, in
9000-408: The 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev loosened restrictions on private businesses , allowing them to grow legally, but by then, the Soviet Union was already beginning to collapse. Also during the 1970s and 1980s, the United States expanded its immigration policies, allowing Soviet Jews , with most settling in a southern Brooklyn area known as Brighton Beach (sometimes nicknamed "Little Odessa "). Here
9150-513: The 2013 meetings of the World Economic Forum , the issue surfaced at the highest level, with Reuters reporting that before Medvedev gave his opening speech, some 78 percent of respondents voting in an audience packed with hundreds of Western executives and politicians agreed that Russia's biggest problem was weak government and corporate governance. On 1 October 2015, Sergei Magnitsky was posthumously awarded 'Honourable Mention' at
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#17327972644959300-468: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
9450-530: The Allard Prize gives his whole family a huge sense of pride and once again asserts that his life was not sacrificed in vain. Our whole family is immensely grateful for the attention this award will give to the global Magnitsky justice campaign which emerged from our tragedy." Magnitsky was born in Odessa , Ukrainian SSR in 1972, and emigrated to Southern Russia with his family at age 9. A studious child, he
9600-527: The American Congress and British, Canadian, German, Polish, and European parliaments. In July 2011, Russia's Investigate Committee initially acknowledged that Magnitsky died because prison authorities restricted medical care for him. Russian authorities also opened criminal cases against the two doctors who treated him; Dr. Dmitri Kratov, the chief medical officer at Butyrskaya Prison, and Dr. Larisa Litvinova, who managed Magnitsky's treatment towards
9750-412: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
9900-408: The Canadian assets of allegedly involved officials. The EU Parliament also urged members to freeze assets of officials, while similar measures were under consideration in the United States . In October 2010, US Senator John McCain co-sponsored the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act , which would forbid entry to the US to 60 individuals named in court documents related to the Magnitsky case. McCain said
10050-414: The Czech police got wind of an anonymous tip-off that claimed that the Solntsevskaya were planning to assassinate Mogilevich at the location (it was rumored that Mogilevich and Solntsevskaya leader Sergei Mikhailov had a dispute over $ 5 million), and the police successfully raided the meeting. 200 guests were arrested, but no charges were put against them; only key Russian mafia members were banned from
10200-409: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
10350-468: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
10500-411: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
10650-471: The Musical . [REDACTED] Media related to Sergei Magnitsky at Wikimedia Commons Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of
10800-484: The Public Oversight Commission that she was trying to get approval for Magnitsky's treatment. However, investigators looking into the death of Magnitsky cleared Oleg F. Silchenko, who oversaw the investigation of Magnitsky, of any wrongdoing. Charges of professional negligence against Dr. Litvinova were dropped due to statute of limitations issues. On 23 December 2012, as the trial neared its end,
10950-540: The Russian Ministry of Interior. The official death certificate stated "closed cerebral cranial injury" as the cause of death (in addition to the other conditions mentioned above), and the post-mortem examination showed numerous bruises and wounds on Magnitsky's legs and hands. Another post-mortem from 2011 summarized the death as being caused by " traumatic application of the blunt hard object (objects) " as confirmed by "abrasions, ecchymomas , blood effusions into
11100-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
11250-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
11400-560: The Sicilians due to their environment. The level of political corruption and arms sales in post-Soviet Russia allowed for their massive expansion, as well as the incorporation of many government officials into the crime syndicates. Russian mafia groups have also been involved in uranium trading, stolen from the Soviet nuclear program , and human trafficking, among other serious activities. Today's Russian organized crime can be traced back to
11550-460: The Soviet Union during World War II , Stalin recruited more men to fight for the nation, offering prisoners freedom if they joined the army. Many flocked to help out in the war, but this act betrayed the codes of the Thieves' World that one must not ally with the government. Those who chose not to fight in the war referred to the traitors as suka ('bitch'), and the traitors landed at the bottom of
11700-458: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
11850-613: The Soviet's dissolution, so that top vory v zakone could agree on who would rule what, and set plans on how to take over the post-communist states. In the 1990s, in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, vast deposits of natural resources and businesses that the state had owned for decades were privatized . Former Soviet bureaucrats, factory directors, aggressive businessmen, and criminal organizations used insider deals, bribery, and simple brute force to grab lucrative assets. Businesses began building their own private armies of security agents, bodyguards, and commercial spies. They often bought
12000-470: The Thieves' World was alive and active. Vladimir Lenin attempted to wipe them out, but it failed, and the criminals survived into Joseph Stalin's reign. During Stalin's reign as ruler, millions of people were sent to Gulag labor camps , where powerful criminals worked their way up to become thieves in law . These criminal elites often conveyed their status through complicated tattoos, symbols still used by Russian mobsters. After Hitler 's invasion of
12150-403: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
12300-541: The United States due to their involvement in the death of Magnitsky. The Russian Foreign Ministry described the Canadian resolution as "an attempt to pressure the investigators and interfere in the internal affairs of another state", while in a November statement the head of the lower house's international committee Konstantin Kosachyov criticized the European Parliament's conclusions, indicating that sanctions violated
12450-606: The United States or using its banking system. In response, Russia condemned the Act and claimed Magnitsky was guilty of crimes. Nearly a dozen other nations, as well as the European Union , have subsequently implemented or considered Magnitsky legislation . In early January 2013, the Financial Times wrote that "the Magnitsky case is egregious, well documented and encapsulates the darker side of Putinism ". Magnitsky
12600-584: The apartments in September 2013. In 2013, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a Washington, D.C. -based nonprofit news organization, obtained records of companies and trusts created by two offshore companies. These included information on at least 23 companies linked to an alleged $ 230 million tax fraud in Russia, a case that was being investigated by Sergei Magnitsky. The ICIJ investigation also revealed that
12750-522: The arrests of 11 members and associates of the Solntsevskaya and Izmailovskaya clans. Money, firearms and 23 high-end vehicles were also seized. The owner of Marbella FC , Alexander Grinberg, and manager of AFK Sistema, a Spanish football club in Málaga, were among those arrested. On 19 February 2018, 18 defendants were accused of laundering over $ 62 million through real estate, including with
12900-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
13050-468: The chocolate was stolen from shipment containers. It is believed that 27 of the arrested are connected to the Russian mafia Shulaya clan which are largely based in New York. On 26 September 2017, as part of a 4-year investigation, 100 Spanish Civil Guard officers carried out 18 searches in different areas of Málaga , Spain, related to Russian mafia large scale money laundering. The raids resulted in
13200-456: The company's behalf and agreed to the claims, thereby obtaining penalties for debts that did not exist; all while Hermitage officials were unaware of these court proceedings. The new owner, based in Tatarstan , turned out to be Viktor Markelov, a convicted murderer released two years into his sentence. The company's fake debt was used to make the companies look unprofitable in order to justify
13350-417: The consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
13500-515: The country, most of whom moved to Hungary. One person who was not there was Mogilevich himself. He claimed that, "[b]y the time I arrived at U Holubu, everything was already in full swing, so I went into a neighboring hotel and sat in the bar there until about five or six in the morning." Mikhailov would later be arrested in Switzerland in October 1996 on numerous charges, including that he
13650-519: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
13800-406: The death of Aslan Usoyan. New mafia bosses sprang up, while imprisoned ones were released. Among the released were Marat Balagula and Vyacheslav Ivankov , both in 2004. The latter was extradited to Russia, but was jailed once more for his alleged murders of two Turks in a Moscow restaurant in 1992; he was cleared of all charges and released in 2005. Four years later, he was assassinated by a shot in
13950-406: The documents that had been taken by the Russian police in June 2007 were used to forge a change in ownership of Hermitage. The thieves used the forged contracts to claim Hermitage owed $ 1 billion (~$ 1.42 billion in 2023) to shell companies. Unknown to Hermitage, those claims were later authenticated by judges. In every instance, lawyers hired by the thieves to represent Hermitage pleaded guilty on
14100-432: The end. Dr. Kratov was demoted soon after Magnitsky's death and was charged with involuntary manslaughter from negligence and was facing five years in prison. Dr. Litvinova was facing up to three years in prison if convicted of causing death through professional negligence. An independent prison watchdog commission reported that the prison doctors were pressured by investigators to deny treatment, and Dr. Litvinova disclosed to
14250-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
14400-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
14550-568: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
14700-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
14850-457: The help of Vladislav Reznik , former chairman of Rosgosstrakh , one of Russia's largest insurance companies. The accused stood trial in Spain. The Tambov and Malyshev Russian mafia organisations were involved. Alexander Torshin is allegedly a high ranking Russian mafia boss. In the Russian mafia, " Vor " ( pl. : Vory ) ( lit. ' thief ' ) is an honorary title analogous to
15000-403: The husband of one of the Russian tax officials deposited millions in a Swiss bank account set up by one of the offshore companies. In 2016 a large criminal investigation was completed in Russia that implicated public officers from tax, security, and customs agencies in large-scale VAT carousel fraud schemes, very similar to the one that was used in the fraud against Hermitage Capital, and with
15150-574: The latter refused the offer, he and his top associates were shot dead. A summit held in May 1994 in Vienna rewarded him with what was left of Glugech's business. Two months later, Ivankov got into another altercation with drug kingpin and head of the Orekhovskaya gang , Segei "Sylvester" Timofeyev, ending with the latter murdered a month later. In 1995, the Camorra cooperated with the Russian mafia in
15300-483: The law would help to "identify those responsible for the death of this Russian patriot, to make their names famous for the whole world to know, and then to hold them accountable for their crimes." The law is considered analogous to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 in the precedent it hopes to create. In July 2011, the US stated that dozens of Russian officials were barred from entering
15450-540: The main beneficiary of the tax fraud, filed a libel suit in London. Karpov lost the case and was ordered to pay over £800,000 to Hermitage Capital Management. In 2016 Karpov was additionally sentenced to three months in prison for "contempt of court" for non-payment of costs of the libel action. As of September 2016, over £660,000 of that amount remained unpaid. In February 2012, the Russian police announced their intention to resubmit charges of tax evasion against Magnitsky for
15600-424: The matter to "fraud by prior collusion", though the foreman would maintain that police were not part of the plan. Before then, however, Magnitsky became the subject of investigation by one of the policemen against whom he had testified as involved in the fraud. According to Browder, Magnitsky was "the 'go-to guy' in Moscow on courts, taxes, fines, anything to do with civil law." According to Magnitsky's investigation,
15750-608: The medical treatment which could have saved his life. An independent investigatory body, the Moscow Public Oversight Commission, indicated in December 2009 that "psychological and physical pressure was exerted upon" Magnitsky. One of the Commissioners said that while she had first believed his death was due to medical negligence, she had developed "the frightening feeling that it was not negligence but that it was, to some extent, as terrible as it
15900-409: The most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on
16050-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
16200-569: The number of individuals involved in organized crime in Russia at 3 million, employed in about 5,700 gangs. Back in Eastern Europe in May 1995, Semion Mogilevich held a summit meeting of Russian mafia bosses in his U Holubu restaurant in Anděl , a neighborhood of Prague . The excuse to bring them together was that it was a birthday party for Victor Averin, the second-in-command of the Solntsevskaya Bratva. However, Major Tomas Machacek of
16350-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
16500-493: The other is Konstantin "Gizya" Ginzburg, who was reportedly the current "big boss" of Russian organized crime in America before his reported assassination in 2009, it being suspected that Ivankov handed over control to him. In the same year, Semion Mogilevich was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for his involvement in a complex multimillion-dollar scheme that defrauded investors in
16650-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
16800-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
16950-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
17100-594: The people and weapons of the former Soviet state or even those of the current Russian police . Russia's new capitalists spent millions of dollars for protection, buying armor-plated cars, bomb sensors, hidden cameras, bulletproof vests, anti-wiretapping gear, and weapons, recruiting veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars as their bodyguards. However, almost every business in Russia, from curbside vendors to huge oil and gas companies, made payments to organized crime for protection (" krysha "). Businessmen said that they needed
17250-494: The police raids, so they could take the materials needed to hijack the Hermitage companies and effect the tax refund fraud. Magnitsky's testimony implicated police, the judiciary, tax officials, bankers, and the Russian mafia . In spite of the initial dismissal of his claims, Magnitsky's core allegation that Hermitage had not committed fraud—but had been victimized by it—was eventually validated. A sawmill foreman pleaded guilty in
17400-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
17550-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
17700-528: The president to sanction people responsible for violations of human rights in Russia. Similar acts are being considered in the UK parliament and Irish Dáil . In December 2012, the Russian parliament passed a Dima Yakovlev Law which was widely regarded by media outlets, including Russian media, as retaliation for the Magnitsky bill. Russia's bill signed into law by Putin on 28 December 2012, banned, among other things, Americans from adopting Russian children . In
17850-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
18000-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
18150-436: The prosecutor conducting the trial against Dr. Kratov suddenly reversed course and sought acquittal, citing no direct connection between Kratov's actions and Magnitsky's death. On 28 December 2012, a Tverskoy court found Kratov not guilty of negligence causing Magnitsky's death, thus complying with the prosecution's request. In 2012 Pavel Karpov, former Russian Interior Ministry officer accused by Magnitsky and Browder of being
18300-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
18450-492: The same high-ranking officers providing krysha ( Russian : Крыша , "protection") in both cases. A few low-ranking officers were convicted in the case, but no mid- or high-ranking officers were even indicted, despite total losses to the budget exceeding 20 billion rubles. Since worsening of relations with the European Union after 2014 , the version officially promoted in Russia is that Bill Browder's Hermitage Capital
18600-419: The soft tissues". Journalist Owen Matthews described Magnitsky's suffering in Moscow's Butyrka prison: According to [Magnitsky's] heartbreaking prison diary, investigators repeatedly tried to persuade him to give testimony against Hermitage and drop the accusations against the police and tax authorities. When Magnitsky refused, he was moved to more and more horrible sections of the prison, and ultimately denied
18750-466: The stock of his company YBM Magnex International, swindling them out of $ 150 million. He was indicted in 2003 and arrested in 2008 in Russia on tax fraud charges, but because the US does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, he was released on bail. Monya Elson said, in 1998, that Mogilevich is the most powerful mobster in the world. Around the world, Russian mafia groups have popped up as dominating particular areas. Russian organized crime has
18900-430: The stomach from a sniper. Meanwhile, Monya Elson and Leonid Roytman were arrested in March 2006 for an unsuccessful murder plot against two Kyiv -based businessmen. In 2009, FBI agents in Moscow targeted two suspected mafia leaders and two other corrupt businessmen. One of the leaders is Yevgeny Dvoskin, a criminal who had been in prison with Ivankov in 1995 and was deported in 2001 for breaking immigration regulations;
19050-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
19200-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
19350-513: The thieves, the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against Magnitsky. Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned at the Butyrka prison in Moscow in November 2008 after being accused of colluding with Hermitage. Held for 11 months without trial, he was, as reported by The Telegraph , "denied visits from his family" and "forced into increasingly squalid cells." He developed gall stones , pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis , for which he
19500-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
19650-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
19800-431: Was Evsei Agron . Pauol Mirzoyan was a prime target among other mobsters, including rival Boris Goldberg and his organization, and in May 1985, Agron was assassinated. Boris "Biba" Nayfeld , his bodyguard, moved on to employ under Marat Balagula , who was believed to have succeeded Agron's authority. In the following year, Balagula fled the country after he was convicted in a fraud scheme of Merrill Lynch customers and
19950-664: Was an auditor at the Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan, working for its owner, Jamison Firestone . He worked with Firestone Duncan client Hermitage Capital Management , an investment advisory firm accused of tax evasion and tax fraud by the Russian Interior Ministry . Over the years of its operation Hermitage had, on several occasions, supplied to the press information about corporate and governmental misconduct and corruption in state-owned Russian enterprises. Hermitage's company co-founder, American Bill Browder ,
20100-729: Was an operative of the "K" Directorate of the SEB of the FSB, addressed his findings in a report to Voronin recommending the prosecution of the Sergey Magnitsky of the Hermitage Capital fund, Voronin added his resolution about the report and sent it to the Moscow police department who initiated a criminal case against Magnitsky. On 4 June 2007, Hermitage's Moscow office was raided by about 20 Ministry of Interior officers. The offices of Firestone Duncan were also raided. The officers had
20250-421: Was assigned to investigate the case. In his investigation, auditor Magnitsky came to believe that the police had given the materials taken during the police raids to organized criminals, who used them to take over three of Hermitage's Russian companies and who fraudulently reclaimed $ 230m (£140m) of the taxes previously paid by Hermitage. He also claimed police had accused Hermitage of tax evasion solely to justify
20400-524: Was equipped to help him. But the surgeon there—who described Magnitsky as "agitated, trying to hide behind a bag and saying people were trying to kill him"—prescribed only a painkiller, and left him to receive a psychiatric evaluation. Magnitsky was found dead in his cell a little over two hours later. According to Ludmila Alekseeva , leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group , Magnitsky had died from being beaten and tortured by several officers of
20550-455: Was expelled from Russia in November 2005 as a purported national threat; Browder arrived in Moscow, was told his visa had been annulled, and was deported the next day. Browder has said that he represented a threat only "to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats" in Russia, and believed that he was removed to leave his company open for exploitation. Instigated by FSB General Viktor Voronin after Alexander Kuvaldin ( Russian : Александр Кувалдин ), who
20700-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
20850-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
21000-480: Was found in Frankfurt , West Germany, in 1989, where he was extradited back to the US and sentenced to eight years in prison. Balagula would later be convicted on a separate $ 360,000 credit card fraud in 1992. Nayfield took Balagula's place, partnering with the "Polish Al Capone", Ricardo Fanchiniin, in an import-export business and setting up a heroin business. In 1990, his former friend, Monya Elson, back from
21150-474: Was given inadequate medical treatment during his incarceration. Surgery was ordered in June, but never performed; detention center chief Ivan P. Prokopenko later said that he "...did not consider Magnitsky sick... Prisoners often try to pass themselves off as sick, in order to get better conditions." On 16 November 2009, eight days before he would have had to be released if he was not brought to trial, Magnitsky died. Prison officials at first attributed his death to
21300-544: Was in a feud with Boris Nayfeld, with bodies dropping on both sides. Ivankov's arrival virtually ended the feud, although Elson would later challenge his power as well, and a number of attempts were made to end the former's life. Nayfield and Elson would eventually be arrested in January 1994 (released in 1998) and in Italy in 1995, respectively. According to FBI reports, the crime boss Semion Mogilevich had alliances with
21450-586: Was in response to an appeal by the Hermitage Capital Management and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton . In February 2011, the investigation, which had not yet identified any suspects, was extended to May. In November 2010, Magnitsky was given a posthumous award from Transparency International for integrity. Magnitsky, according to the awards committee, "believed in the rule of law and died for his belief." A film produced to highlight Magnitsky's persecution has been shown to
21600-472: Was not limited to narcotics , money laundering , and prostitution and made ties with the American Mafia and Colombian drug cartels , eventually extending to Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston . Prior to Ivankov's arrival, Balagula's downfall left a void for America's next vory v zakone . Monya Elson, leader of Monya's Brigada (a gang that similarly operated from Russia to Los Angeles to New York),
21750-603: Was recognized for his academic abilities at a young age, winning the Republican Physics and Mathematics Olympiad at age 15. At 18, he moved to Moscow and attended Plekhanov Russian University of Economics . He later married Natalya Zharikova, a lawyer, whom he met in high school. Together they had two sons. He is buried in Preobrazhenskoye Cemetery in Moscow. In 2022, the BBC premiered Magnitsky
21900-420: Was responsible for tax fraud and that Magnitsky died as a result of his conspiracy involving Alexey Navalny , which was highlighted in a 2016 "investigative" film by Andrei Nekrasov . Both Magnitsky's wife and mother, whose manipulated citations were used in the film, wrote a protest letter criticizing the film for bias and manipulations. On 21 March 2017, the Magnitsky family's lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov fell, or
22050-435: Was the first in the Russian Federation . Magnitsky alleged there had been large-scale theft from the Russian state, sanctioned and carried out by Russian officials. He was arrested and eventually died in prison seven days before the expiration of the one-year term during which he could be legally held without trial. In total, Magnitsky served 358 days in Moscow's Butyrka prison . He developed gall stones , pancreatitis , and
22200-418: Was the head of a powerful Russian mafia group, but was exonerated and released two years later after evidence was not enough to prove much. The global extent of Russian organized crime was not realized until Ludwig "Tarzan" Fainberg was arrested in January 1997, primarily because of arms dealing. In 1990, Fainberg moved from Brighton Beach to Miami and opened up a strip club called Porky's, which soon became
22350-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
22500-544: Was thrown , from the 4th floor of his apartment building in Moscow. Seriously injured, he was taken to hospital by helicopter . In late 2010, international attention to the matter intensified, with the European Parliament calling for 60 officials believed to be connected to Magnitsky's death to be banned from entering the European Union , and the Parliament of Canada resolving to deny visas to and freeze
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