Russian protesters arrested
Anti-Putin rallies were called for by opposition leader Navalny
MOSCOW — Hundreds of Russian anti-corruption protesters were arrested Monday in the biggest crackdown since President Vladimir Putin came to power.
Russian media reported that more than 1,600 people were arrested during rallies that swept the country and saw protesters chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Russia will be free”.
Alexei Navalny, the charismatic opposition leader who called for the protests, was detained as he left his Moscow home for the rally. He was later sentenced to 15 days in jail for his role in organizing an illegal protest.
After Navalny’s arrest, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, tweeted, “Alexei told me to pass on to us that the plan hasn’t changed.”
The police crackdown was concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg but detentions also took place at protests across Russia’s 11 time zones.
The number of arrests was on course to surpass those in March during a first outbreak of nationwide anti-corruption protests called by Navalny.
The Kremlin is struggling to respond to a wave of anger that has been channelled by Navalny as he seeks to bolster his attempt to run for president in 2018 elections. Many of the protesters are young people who have grown up during Putin’s 17 years of ruling Russia.
“Corruption is everywhere,” said student Artyom Mikhalin, 21, who was attending the protest in central Moscow with a large Russian flag. “It’s the hypocrisy of the authorities who say one thing and do another.”
“I came here wrapped in a Russian flag and I’m afraid the police will arrest me,” said Dmitry Umydov, 30. “What kind of country do we live in when I can’t put a Russian flag on my shoulder?”
“I’m angry, my family is angry, but they’re not going to come to this because they’re scared,” said Alexander Fomenko, a 17-year-old student wearing jean shorts, closely cropped hair and a tattoo with a dragon on his left leg.
Reports of detentions came from more than 100 cities. Police held 11 people in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, 10 people in the Siberian city of Norilsk, while 36 people were arrested in the western exclave of Kaliningrad, according to OVD-Info, a Russian NGO that tracks political arrests. The demonstrations coincided with a public holiday, Russia Day, on which Putin handed out awards at a reception in the Kremlin.
In Moscow, protests took place during a city festival featuring men and women dressed in costumes from the late Middle Ages staging mock sword fights and manning reconstructed Viking longboats. The re-enactments paused as riot police split up protesters and arrested people in the crowd. Protesters chanted slogans including “Putin is a thief!”, “Down with the tsar!”, and “Stop lying and stealing.”
The scale of the protests is likely to cause consternation in the Kremlin, which has been largely unchallenged by Russia’s fractured and divided opposition movement in recent years.
Russian state-owned television channels made no mention of the protests. A team of Navalny’s supporters running an online livefeed of the protests said the electricity was cut to the building where they were working.
The Kremlin was clearly caught off guard by the turnout in March, especially among young people. Authorities made a show of arresting people involved in the protest, and educators forced students to watch documentaries about the evils of protesting. Some Russian parliament members expressed support for a ban against minors attending street rallies.
This time, in Moscow, authorities were ready with thousands of helmeted police on guard.
Russian authorities, through state media, have cast Navalny as a stooge of Western elites who has no plans for how he would lead the country and who produces slanderous videos to grab attention. When authorities do mention Navalny, it is to remind television viewers that he has been twice convicted of fraud. He has denounced the cases as political. The result has been to officially disqualify him from running for president in 2018.
This turbulence is not likely to prevent Putin, whose approval rating has not been below 80 per cent in three years, from winning reelection next March, Denis Volkov, an analyst with Russia’s independent pollster, the Levada Center, said in an interview. But it does point to a fundamental weakness of the system Putin has created.
— With files from Washington Post