Crowds turn out against pension cut plan
A government plan to increase the age for collecting state pensions brought protests across Russia’s 11 time zones yesterday even though the opposition leader who called them was in jail. Nearly 300 people were reported arrested.
The plan calls for the eligibility age for retirement pensions to be raised by five years, to 65 for men and 60 for women.
Opposition to it spans the political spectrum.
The rallies got started in the Far East and Siberia when it still was early morning in Moscow, where a downtown demonstration in the afternoon ended in scuffles when riot police stopped participants from marching to the Kremlin.
Alexei Navalny, the anticorruption activist who is President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent foe, urged supporters to protest the pension proposal before he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for organising an unsanctioned January protest involving a different issue.
The demonstrators, predominantly people in their 20s and decades away from retirement, chanted ‘‘Russia without Putin’’ and held signs with messages such as ‘‘Putin, when will you go on pension?’’
They later marched toward Red Square and the Kremlin, chanting ‘‘Down with the czar!’’ as they passed the building of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament. –