Protests swell in Russia’s far east in a stark new challenge to Putin
KHABAROVSK, Russia — The protests in Khabarovsk, a city 4,000 miles east of Moscow, drew tens of thousands of people for a 3-mile march through central streets for the third straight week Saturday.
Residents were rallying in support of a popular governor arrested and spirited to Moscow this month — but their remarkable outpouring of anger, which has little precedent in post-Soviet Russia, has emerged as stark testimony to the discontent that President Vladimir Putin faces across the country.
Putin won a tightly scripted referendum less than four weeks ago that rewrote the Constitution to allow him to stay in office until 2036. But the vote, seen as fraudulent by critics and many analysts, provided little but a fig leaf for public disenchantment with corruption, stifled freedoms and stagnant incomes made worse by the pandemic.
Yet Putin remains firmly in control. And independent polling shows he still enjoys a 60 percent approval rating, though the figure has been falling.
But the events in Khabarovsk have shown that the well of discontent is such that minor events can ignite a firestorm. The weekend crowds have been so large that the police have not tried to control them — even though the protesters did not have a permit, let alone a clear leader or organizer.
Khabarovsk social media forums erupted in indignation July 9, when a SWAT team dragged the governor, Sergei I. Furgal — a young and well-liked politician who had upset an ally of Putin in the regional election in 2018 — out of his car and whisked him to Moscow on 15-year-old murder accusations.
Tens of thousands spontaneously poured into the streets on July 11 as residents called for protests online, and they reemerged in greater numbers on July 18. Smaller-scale marches through the city continued daily.
Russian journalists who have been following the protestssaid Saturday’s crowds were the biggest yet. Opposition activists estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 had turned out. City officials said that about 6,500 people had attended, clearly an undercount.
The crowd, some of whom wore face masks stenciled with Furgal’s name, demanded Furgal face trial in Khabarovsk rather than in Moscowand did not shy away from challenging Putin directly. They shouted “Shame on the Kremlin!,” “Russia, wake up!” and “We are the ones in power!”
Putin last Monday appointed a 39-year-old politician from outside the region, Mikhail V. Degtyarev, as the acting governor, angering residents further. Asked whether he would meet with the protesters, Degtyarev told reporters that he had better things to do than talk to people “screaming outside the windows.”