The Moscow Times: Russia on Saturday confirmed 11,385 new coronavirus cases and 475 deaths. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin ended mandatory stay-at-home orders for over-65s and people with chronic illnesses Friday, lifting one of the Russian capital’s last remaining coronavirus restrictions. Russia recorded more than 55,000 excess deaths in January, data from the country’s official statistics agency (Rosstat) published Friday showed. Russia’s excess death toll since the start of the pandemic now stands at more than 394,000.
RFE/RL: Denis Karagodin has spent almost a decade compiling a meticulous record of evidence about the murder of his great-grandfather by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s secret police, running a website that lists, by name, every individual he deems complicit. The Siberia-based designer has been tipped for prestigious human rights prizes, and leading Western publications have spotlighted his work and the website he runs. The people he ties to the killing of Stepan Karagodin, a peasant swept up in Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, have passed away. But their relatives are now making sure Karagodin’s accusations don’t go unchallenged. Karagodin was interrogated this week by police in Tomsk, the city where he lives and where his great-grandfather’s murder took place on January 21, 1938. “Buckle your seatbelts, dear friends!” he wrote on Facebook after his questioning. “They’ve filed a police complaint against me.”
