The Kremlin and its opponents

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

This week, as the leading opposition figure in Russia, Alexei Navalny, lies comatose in Berlin’s Charité hospital, Sarah Rainsford in Moscow considers the Kremlin’s peculiar hate and fear of its critics and the methods it is widely thought to have employed in dealing with them.

Gabriel Gatehouse in Beirut observes the sharp generational divide that characterises post-civil war Lebanon – and wonders what it might portend for the country's future.

North America Correspondent, Jane O’Brien, checks in to the “virtual” Republican party convention centred on the White House and detects a new confidence and a different style in the Trump – and Republican – campaigns for November’s US elections. What explains the shift?

Sebastien Ash in the Swabian town of Heidenheim, southern Germany, reveals the significance of a face-off of statues linked to the so-called “Desert Fox” – Erwin Rommel, the well-known general of the Nazi era, noted for his role in World War Two’s North Africa campaign.

And Christine Finn takes the plunge on the Paris-plages – and discovers that the fellow-bathers at the pools at and near the river Seine whom she encounters give a contemporary twist to the national motto of liberty, equality and fraternity – although not perhaps in quite the way we might expect.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.0	Good morning.
0:07.0	Today many people would wonder how, in a street protest, you might confront the forces of authority with that tear gas and rubber bullets, but how
0:15.8	about a tennis racket, wielded by a young Lebanese activist?
0:21.1	What to make of Donald Trump's Republican supporters, desiring four more years of the Donald in charge,
0:28.0	but campaigning as if they're the underdogs? Statues are coming in for cold scrutiny, but a row about one of a Nazi general has been sorted
0:38.2	rather unconventionally by one German town, and what to wear on the beaches of Paris this summer proper
0:45.4	etiquette requires the mask off. First to Russia and it has to be said that it's no surprise to hear that the authorities
0:55.4	in Moscow deny any involvement in the alleged poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the leading
1:01.4	Kremlin critic.
1:03.3	The Russians have form in using extreme measures to discredit opposition figures, and Sarah
1:09.2	Rainsford has seen the methods they use. Alexei Naval Nervarnis groans were horrendous.
1:15.0	He'd collapsed on board his flight out of Siberia and another passenger captured the sound of
1:20.4	Nervalna's pain and distress on his phone. By the time Russia's most prominent
1:25.1	opposition politician was stretched off the plane, he was unconscious. A man I've grown
1:30.0	used to seeing command attention in every room or crowd he walks into suddenly prone
1:35.3	and powerless. I got the early morning call about his collapse a few hours earlier and
1:40.6	the first image that flashed through my mind was of Boris Nemtsoff, encased in a black body bag.
1:47.0	It was late one night in 2015 and the opposition politician had been shot in the back right
1:52.3	beneath the red brick towers of the
1:54.2	Kremlin. Then I remembered Vladimir Karamazamuzan, a friend and ally of
1:59.0	Nemsoph who was taken suddenly seriously sick a few months after that. His organs failing one by one.
	...

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