Moscow couple shaken but defiant after crackdown
MOSCOW — The young woman screamed as her boyfriend lay atop her, absorbing the blows of a helmeted riot policeman.
It’s one of the indelible images of the violent police response to an unauthorized protest in Moscow.
Inga Kudracheva’s terror and anguish are clear in the video and photos that spread across Russian social media and foreign news coverage of the July 27 crackdown in which an arrest-monitoring group said nearly 1,400 people were detained.
Yet Kudracheva and Boris Kantorovich say the ordeal has only strengthened them.
“People are not afraid of police anymore. Even though police were beating us violently and tried to intimidate us, it was worth it,” the 27-year-old told The Associated Press on Tuesday, sitting on a sofa with Kudracheva and occasionally squeezing her hand reassuringly.
“I’m really scared, but being scared is fine, and there are other things more important than fear,” said Kantorovich, who works in sales.
Such determination suggests that the fierce police response might have been a miscalculation, hardening resistance rather than dissipating it. Both police and activists likely will be tested again on Saturday, as protest organizers have called for another unsanctioned rally in the Russian capital.
There have been a series of demonstrations denouncing the exclusion of some opposition and independent candidates from a Sept. 8 election for the Moscow city council. In the past month, the issue has provoked a surprisingly large outcry for a local election; on July 20, about 20,000 people turned out for a demonstration that was the largest in the city in several years.
But that earlier demonstration had been sanctioned. When the July 27 protest was called, authorities were clearly determined to stifle the dissent.
The police actions were “demonstrative cruelty,” said Ilya Shablinsky, head of the voters’ rights committee of the presidential human rights council, in an interview with a newspaper.