The fate of the country is decided not in the kitchen, but on the (city) square

It was exactly this sentence of Andrei Sannikov which the authorities reckoned to be “extremist”.

In the Supreme Economic Court representatives of “Avtoradio” and the Ministry of Information expressed their positions, and the case will be considered on 24 February.

“Procedural questions were looked at, along with the necessity to involve additional parties. Also there was a wonderful opportunity to expound in detail our positions”, said Yurii Bazan, the director of European radio “Avtoradio”.

The case of the Ministry of Information against the radio station concerned the ‘breaking of creative concepts’ and its calls for extremist action, which supposedly they aired on a broadcast in December. In the words of Yurii Bazan, “At first it was generally incomprehensible exactly on which sentence the Ministry was making its case”.

“You know, it happened that I started to call it “the sentence of three pines” (note for English readers: this signifies being lost), where the fate of the country has got lost. The sentence ‘The fate of the country is decided not in the kitchen but on the (city) square’ is from the platform of one of the candidates, Sannikov“, Bazan said.

It is interesting that this very sentence was retained in campaign materials, in many printed publications, and expressed on television and radio. But know one suffered further from it.

“Were warnings sent out to someone by this phrase? It is in our favour that we did not receive an answer (to that question). ‘Avtoradio’ is ahead of everyone, in this sense,” said the director of “Avtoradio”.

Also in the Ministry of Information they did not want to pay attention to the fact that material can be taken as extremist only after a corresponding decision of a court.

“The Ministry of information does not want to pay attention to the existence of a law on opposition to extremist action, which defines that material can be taken as extremist only on the decision of a court. There has been no such decision of a court on this phrase,” said Bazan.

The second claim against “Avtoradio” concerns divergences in the amount of those or other materials within the broadcast. Here again, up to now nothing is clear. For example, this (divergence) could be an increase or decrease in the amount of advertisements, or a shortening of the length of some programme.

“To be honest, not one radio station can comply with these percentages (ratio of advertisements to content), especially with the sort of exactness which they demand,” said the director of Avtoradio decisively.

According to the analysis which ”Avtoradio” carried out, the divergences (from norms) in the broadcast were absolutely small.