The battle to save an old growth forest outside of Moscow has come to a head. Environmental activists have been fighting for years to stop the construction of a highway that would cut through the once protected green belt. But in recent days clashes between peaceful protesters and Khimki police and state security services have escalated. On Thursday at least two activists were beaten by armed thugs. “We were able to stop the logging, but some thugs beat two of our activists,” Yevgenia Chirikova, the leader of the Defend Khimki movement, told the Moscow Times. On Sunday a peaceful demonstration was broken up by law enforcement officials and some 30 activists, including Chirikova, were detained.

The crackdown comes just days after Chirikova returned from Paris where she delivered a petition to the French construction company, Vinci, which has signed the contract to build the highway and operate the toll road for at least the next thirty years. Since its inception the project, known as the Moscow St. Petersburg Motorway, has been marred by brutal attacks against journalists investigating the issue and activists calling for greater transparency.

Last year, after unusually large public protests, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for a review of the planned route. There was some hope that the forest might be spared. A few months later, however, the government announced that the development would commence sometime this year.

Fearing that they had exhausted their options within Russia environmental activists turned their attention to Vinci, one of Europe’s largest corporations. Vinci is the only remaining European player involved in the controversial project: the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank have withdrawn their support.

A report released last week by Bankwatch Network and the Defend Khimki Movement reveals that the North West Concession Company (NWCC)—a joint venture between Vinci and several Russian construction and engineering firms—includes a long-time friend of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and a number of offshore investment firms whose shareholders are largely unknown (in 2009 Putin signed a decree that effectively altered the forest’s protected status to allow for “transport and infrastructure”).

“The Russian public deserves answers to the questions raised by the research before it considers going any further with the project,” said Mikhail Matveev of the Movement to Defend Khimki Forest. “The government must re-examine its choice of concessionaire, and disclose the concession agreement and whole ownership structure of the company, if this project is to bring benefits to anyone other than the company owners.”

Vinci has shown no interest in reconsidering its involvement in the project and, at its annual shareholders meeting last week, CEO Xavier Huillard said that the company bears no responsibility for the route selection or land acquisition.

Russian activists have held off construction of a major highway through an old growth forest outside of Moscow much longer than most would have imagined. What began as a seemingly provincial standoff between an embattled newspaper editor and journalist—Mikhail Beketov—and the Khimki political elite has turned into a much larger struggle. (Beketov nearly paid with his life, however, his fingers smashed and his skull crushed. He remains brain dead and confined to a wheelchair.) Indeed a campaign to save a forest, ostensibly an environmental movement, has suddenly become the new face of Russian civil society. Of course this has raised the stakes. And with the construction of the highway looming it appears that the government and the Khimki forest defenders, as they call themselves, are headed for a showdown. At least ten activists were arrested at a gathering today for allegedly demonstrating without a permit.

With most of their options, short of civil disobedience, within Russia closed off, activists have turned their attention to the French company, Vinci, which has signed the contract to construct the highway. Vinci is the world’s largest building and civil engineering firm, pulling in over 33 billion euros in sales in 2009. The activists will be holding a series of international actions during the last week of April in advance of the company’s May 2^nd shareholders meeting in Paris. They’ve launched an online petition at Change.org and have sent a letter to Vinci alleging that the company has violated the human rights and environmental principles of the U.N. Global Compact, to which Vinci is a signatory. The company has dismissed the claims and said that the opposition movement is “not a source of concern for us, otherwise we should be changing business.”

But judging from continued threats to organizers and activists they are a source of concern to someone. And the company, by pushing ahead with the project, is tacitly endorsing the intimidation and violence used against the peaceful protesters. In mid-March, Yevgenia Chirikova, a mother of two who has become the group’s de-facto leader received a visit from representatives of the municipal department of guardianship. According to the Washington Post, the officials said that they had received a letter from a neighbor alleging that Yevgenia—who took up a life of activism because of the potential impacts of clear cutting the Khimki forest—“beats” and “starves” her daughters. The charges were apparently groundless and the department later admitted that there was no such letter and that they were simply performing their “duty” to check on the children.

Chirikova’s husband, Mikhail Matveev, has also been targeted. Head of an electrical engineering firm, his company’s offices were raided and he and several of his employees interrogated the day after Yevgenia led a demonstration calling for the minister of transportation to step down. The police also seized company documents and paperwork.

This is par for the course in Russia. On one of my first visits to the country in 2002 I spent several months working with an environmental NGO in Irkutsk, Baikal Environmental Wave. They had been leading a campaign to stop the construction of an oil pipeline that would have cut through the Baikal watershed, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, holding meetings in small villages and towns in an effort to raise public awareness. On my very first day there the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, raided Baikal Wave’s offices. Several men wearing jeans and black t-shirts came into the office and addressed the group of mostly Russian, German, and American volunteers. They seized the group’s hard drives and files and searched the office, alleging that the organization possessed a map that disclosed state secrets.

In a way it is surprising that the authorities (an admittedly vague phrase but it remains unclear who is behind the attacks on Khimki activists) are willing to use such crude tactics to intimidate the popular leader of a movement that has such widespread support. According to Yaroslav Nikitenko, another Khimki activist, 73 percent of Khimki residents and 66 percent of all Russians are against the project. But the list of activists and journalists beaten because of their involvement, either as observers or participants, is growing. Konstantin Fetisov, an environmental activist who had organized around the Khimki issue, was severely beaten in November. A few days later, Oleg Kashin, a journalist for the newspaper Kommersant who had written on Khimki, was attacked outside of his Moscow apartment.

When asked if she thinks about what happened to Beketov—the journalist nearly beaten to death—Chirikova told the Washington Post that if she did she’d go crazy. “My tactic is complete openness. Whatever I undertake, I try somehow to reflect it or publish it in all kinds of media,” she said. Thus far it’s worked.

You can learn more about the defense of Khimki on their Facebook page, and you can sign a petition to pressure Vinci to withdraw its support here.

A decision to halt the construction of a highway that would cut through Moscow’s Khimki forest earlier this year has been overturned. Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov, announced on Tuesday that the development would go ahead as planned, adding that, “additional ecological measures will be taken.” The issue had become a cause celebre and culminated in an unusually large rally and concert in Moscow in September. Even Bono got in on the act. It was then that President Dmitry Medvedev seemed willing to bend, calling for a public review of the project and raising the possibility that the highway would be redirected.

As the Washington Post put it:

With powerful construction and political interests arrayed against nascent civic activism, his attention offered the possibility that ordinary citizens were being heard in a country where the powerful, the connected and the corrupt hold sway.

Others saw the move as nothing more than a way of letting off steam. After a summer of devastating forest fires, a record setting heat wave, and crippling draught—one fifth of the country’s wheat crop was destroyed—the old growth Khimki forest had taken on a larger significance.

“There was never any chance of an alternative route being chosen,” Alexei Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information, told the Moscow Times. “Too much money had already been spent on the original route. All the authorities did was take a timeout to let public opinion cool off. It was a good tactic on their part.”

Activists had campaigned for years to bring the issue to the broader public and it seemed to have paid off. But it also came at a price.

People hold portraits of journalist Mikhail Beketov and environmental activist Konstantin Fetisov during a rally in central Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010.

In 2008, Mikhail Beketov, a Khimki journalist, was brutally beaten for his coverage of the issue and corruption linked to the town’s mayor. On November 4, Konstantin Fetisov, a prominent Khimki activist and opposition politician ended up in a coma with a fractured skull after he was viciously beaten by men with baseball bats. Two days later, Oleg Kashin, a young reporter for the daily newspaper Kommersant was attacked outside of his Moscow apartment, just a 10-minute walk from the Kremlin. “A month later, I am still in the hospital,” Kashin wrote in a column printed in the New York Times. “One of my fingers has been amputated, one of my legs and both halves of my jaw have been broken, and I have several cranial wounds.”

Kashin covered many issues—from nationalist youth movements to regional corruption—as well as the Khimki forest dispute. “I had written several articles criticizing a proposed highway between the two cities that would run through the town,” he notes, “something the local authorities want but many residents oppose.” It is unlikely that those who ordered the attack will be apprehended. Or that either case will be solved.

Still, the Khimki forest defenders, as they’ve come to be known, have vowed to push on. They’re already pursuing a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights and campaign leader Yevgeniya Chirikova has said that, “there will be more lawsuits.” The forest defenders also plan to hold a demonstration in central Moscow on New Year’s Eve protesting the Kremlin’s decision.

Western papers seem to take great pleasure in writing about protest movements in Russia. In fact, you’re far more likely to find a story about a small protest in Moscow or Siberia than you are to find news of a rally or insurrection in your own hometown. This is in part understandable: it’s difficult to stand up and make your voice heard in Putin’s Russia. When it does happen, it is newsworthy.

Take the successful campaign to stop the construction of a highway through an old growth oak forest just outside of Moscow. No one imagined that the administration would back down. After years of knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, filing lawsuits, and eventually setting up camp in the forest the environmental activists achieved their goal. It is a real possibility now that the highway will be rerouted to spare the Khimki forest. The campaign also managed to bring some 2,000 protesters onto the streets of Moscow for a concert and demonstration that was broken up by police and security forces. Several arrests were made.

Just days later, on August 31, a far smaller rally—estimates put the number at about 200 protesters—was quashed by an overwhelming display of force. The “Strategy 31” protesters have been staging rallies in Moscow’s Triumph Square for months, drawing attention to article 31 of the Russian constitution, which protects freedom of assembly. According to Agence France Press there were an astonishing 500 policemen at the latest rally and 70 protesters were detained. Moreover, several days before the scheduled protest the government announced that Triumph Square was to be converted into a massive underground parking garage. So they fenced it off. If you can’t stop the protesters from showing up you can just build a parking garage on top of the public square. At least that seems to be the strategy at the moment.

But is Russia’s opposition getting louder? And is their influence growing? Certainly, the case of Khimki was an effective campaign on several fronts. There hasn’t been a great deal of analysis as to why Medvedev suddenly backed down.

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Long-time earth and animal liberation activist Rod Coronado has plenty of street cred, but apparently he wasn’t hip to the perils of Facebook. In early August, the seasoned activist was sentenced to four months in prison for violating the terms of his probation. The charge: “friending” a figure the FBI describes as, “a well-known environmental activist who has a history of condoning direct action and violence as a means of protest or demonstration.” That activist is Mike Roselle, the author of Tree Spiker, a confrontational and outspoken opponent of destructive environmental practices, from mountaintop removal to deforestation, who claims to have been arrested at least 50 times.

According to the Missoula Independent, Coronado’s probation officer, Rhonda J. Wallock, reported that the activist violated the terms of his supervision by becoming Roselle’s “friend” and for using an unauthorized computer. “In monitoring Mr. Coronado’s Facebook account,” the court document reads, “this officer found Michael Roselle to be a “friend” of Mr. Coronado.”

Well, yes. But apparently it was Roselle who asked Coronado to be his friend and not Coronado who approached Roselle. Moreover, they had been friends for some time, just not Facebook friends. As Roselle explained, “I sent him a friend request because someone had suggested that I friend him and given that I’ve known Rod for quite a while, I did. I guess he hit the accept button.”

The irony is that a couple of monkeywrenchers, each with a long list of arrests and convictions, have now been nabbed as friends. For Coronado, it is without a doubt the most prosaic charge he has ever faced.

For years, Coronado was the unofficial bad boy of the radical environmental movement. As a teenager he cut his teeth with the now well known Sea Shepherd Society and, in 1986, participated in a risky act of eco-sabotage: taking aim at Iceland’s refusal to conform to an international ban on whaling, Coronado and a partner destroyed the Hvalfjordur whaling station and sank two of the country’s whaling vessels, causing some $2 million in damage. Coronado went on to wage an underground war against the fur industry, targeting research facilities and fur farms across North America. (His story, and the story of the modern American environmental movement, is told in Dean Kuipers recent book, Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness).

Coronado was a divisive figure: his use of arson and increasingly radical stance alienated even those who sympathized with his views. In 1995, Coronado was arrested for his role in an arson attack on research facilities at Michigan State University. Since then he has moved back and forth between prison and some form of house arrest or parole. He has done time for allegedly demonstrating the use of an incendiary device, dismantling mountain lion traps, and destruction of government property.

In 2006, he distanced himself from the direct action tactics of his youth and said, in an open letter that, “No longer do I personally choose to represent the cause of peace and compassion in that way.”

A long running battle over the construction of a highway through Moscow’s Khimki forest has taken a surprising turn. Earlier this week I wrote about the broad based campaign to save one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and old growth oak forests. Environmentalists and activists have been working since 2007 to halt the construction of a highway through the 2,500-acre forest, which many viewed as inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the organizers, Yevgenia Chirikova, told the Washington Post that, “The next step is probably that they will start building. We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”

For the moment, however, the highway construction has been put on hold. In a video blog posted Thursday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the government to, “halt the implementation” of the highway pending “further civic and expert discussions.” It is a rare victory for environmentalists or opposition activists of any kind in Russia. Perhaps not since Vladimir Putin’s 2006 decision to reroute an oil pipeline that would have come dangerously close to Lake Baikal—a national treasure and a UNESCO world heritage site—has the administration responded so forcefully to public protest.

“This has flabbergasted us. It was completely unexpected,” Sergei Ageyev, a member of the environmental group leading the opposition to the highway, told the New York Times. “It is simply a stunning victory for civil society.”

Some are also speculating that it reveals a deeper split between Russia’s President and Prime Minister. “It’s another step that destroys the myth of the all-powerful Putin,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a founder of the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute, told Bloomberg.

However, Putin is already spinning the Kremlin’s decision as entirely consistent. From the Russian Far East, where the Prime Minister was touting the opening of another roadway, the Chita-Khabarovsk highway, he said, “This is entirely consistent with the logic of our behavior and actions in recent years.”

And in a sense it is. If a local issue threatens to spin out of control and undermine the authority of the state the Kremlin will respond. Last year, in the midst of the financial crisis, Putin flew by helicopter to the beleaguered town of Pikalyovo to scold local politicians and businessmen. He forced them to pay workers back wages and turned the town’s woes into a publicity stunt. It looked good on television but of course did little to change things nation wide. It was damage control.

In the case of Khimki, Reuters summed up the strategy well:

Medvedev’s order looked like carefully orchestrated damage control by Russia’s leaders before a parliamentary election next year and a 2012 presidential ballot.

Referring to suggestions by the leaders that they planned to remain in power for years to come, Ekho Moskvy radio commentator Sergei Buntman said Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin couldn’t let the issue hinder ‘Operation Continuity’.

Nonetheless the decision is a victory for environmentalists. And, in a sense, a political victory too. The question now is whether they can build on their success and turn the Khimki campaign into a broader civic and political movement.

As Russia’s forests go up in flames, a group of activists and environmentalists is struggling to protect one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and stands of old growth oaks. This time the threat isn’t wildfires but rather a 10-lane super highway that would link Moscow and St. Petersburg. The campaign to prevent the road from passing through the 2,500-acre Khimki forest, a long protected reserve just outside of Moscow, began in 2007. Since then journalists and editors investigating the story have been attacked (one nearly beaten to death), environmental activists have been arrested, and European investors—including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB)—have begun to question the viability of the project. Recently efforts to halt the construction of the highway and leveling of the forest have escalated.

In late July, Khimki’s administrative building was attacked by a group of anarchists and anti-fascists, while activists who had set up a camp in the forest were detained and arrested. Then, on Sunday, Moscow police and security forces broke up a rally and concert in defense of Khimki that attracted perhaps as many as 2,000 supporters.

It is difficult to hold rallies in Moscow. Obtaining a permit is a bit like playing the lottery; your chances are slim and subject to the whims of the city’s Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who, over the course of his 18-year rule has come to run the city like a fiefdom. He is particularly non-plussed by gay rights campaigners and has denied them the right to march in Moscow year after year. So getting 2,000 people out onto the streets in defense of a public forest is no small feat. Like Lake Baikal in the 1960s, Khimki has become the symbol of a rejuvenated Russian environmental movement, one that has largely relied on civil disobedience and non-violent protest to achieve its goals.

The face of the new movement is Yevgenia Chirikova, a 33-year-old mother of two with degrees in business and engineering. She and her husband moved to Khimki in 1998 for many of the same reasons that any young family would: It is quiet, clean, and close to a large public green space. (It is worth noting that Moscow is one of the most polluted, congested, dangerous, and expensive cities in the world.)

In 2007, when Chirikova and her husband noticed large swaths of trees marked with red x’s they were naturally concerned and did some digging. They soon found out that the forest had been sold to a Russian company, Avtodor, a spin-off of the Transport Ministry, and would be cleared to build a massive highway. The work had been sub-contracted to a French company, Vinci, and most of the financing was to come from international bodies.

The residents of Khimki were largely unaware of what was happening; the project had been kept completely under wraps. An engineer by trade, Chirikova thought it was odd that the administration had decided to build the road in this particular spot. Why build a highway that has to conform to the irregularities of a forest when there are simpler, more direct, and perhaps even less expensive routes?

“It was totally obvious that it was simply a backroom deal to begin [property] development in our oak forest,” Chirikova recently told Radio Free Europe.

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