Moscow
Moscow has been quietly enforcing an unofficial ban on the color orange, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported this week. Ever since last fall’s “Orange Revolution” brought democrats to power in neighboring Ukraine, orange has been seen as politically subversive. Activists from a rural Russian region who came to Moscow recently to protest police brutality said they were instructed not to wear orange ribbons or set up orange tents. A wine-shop owner said city officials would not let him place an orange awning over the sidewalk. Officially, bureaucrats deny having any such policy. But “in private conversations,” Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, they admit that orange emblems could cause “unwanted reactions on the part of Muscovites.”
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