Russians rally to protest corruption
Kremlin opponent among hundreds arrested in Moscow
Alexei Navalny, who called for defiance following allegations against Putin’s government, was arrested.
MOSCOW — A wave of rallies swept across Russia on Sunday to protest corruption in the government of President Vladimir Putin, in a nationwide show of defiance not seen in years, and one the Kremlin had tried in vain to prevent with bans and warnings.
Police responded with barricades, tear gas and mass arrests in cities across the nation.
By Sunday evening, riot police in body armor and helmets hauled in more than 700 demonstrators in central Moscow, as the crowd, numbering in the thousands, cheered and whistled and chanted, “Shame! Shame!”
One of the first detained in Moscow was the chief architect of the rallies, Alexei Navalny, who called on people to come out to protest in the wake of his allegations that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has amassed vineyards, luxury yachts and lavish mansions worth more than $1 billion.
Authorities charged Navalny and other members of his Moscow-based Anti-corruption Foundation with extremism; one member of his group was charged with broadcasting the rally illegally.
Also among the detained was American Alec Luhn, an accredited reporter for the Guardian.
A man with a sign that read “We Found Your Money” and depicted drawings of the luxury boats and estates mentioned in Navalny’s report was dragged down and carried off by police seconds after he took the sign out.
On Friday, senior Russian police official Alexander Gorovoi had warned that authorities would “bear no responsibility for any possible negative consequences” for people who showed up to protest. Putin’s spokesman said that even telling people to go to the rallies was “illegal.”
Instead, the demonstrations appeared to amount to the largest coordinated protests in Russia since the street rallies that broke out in 2011 and 2012 after a parliamentary election that opposition leaders decried as fraudulent.
State-run television was silent about the rallies throughout the day, but pictures posted on social media sites including Twitter suggested that sizable rallies were underway across the country, and unofficial news agencies such as the Riga-based Meduza carried extensive updates.
The privately owned Interfax news agency reported on rallies across Siberia and in Russia’s Far East, where it said two dozen protesters had been detained.
The agency cited police as saying about 7,000 protesters gathered in Moscow, but the crowd, which lined Moscow’s main artery, Tverskaya Street, on both sidewalks for more than a mile, and crammed the spacious Pushkin Square, appeared to be much larger.
For some time the protesters blocked the street, until Interior Ministry troops in combat gear moved them.
For about an hour after the rally began, a loudspeaker asked protesters to go “express their will as citizens” at a park away from the city center. Later the message became more strident.
“You are participants in an unsanctioned demonstration,” the voice intoned. “Consider the consequences.”
The Moscow protest presented an odd juxtaposition of anger and outdoor party. High school age children danced and laughed at the long lines of police as the crowd cheered, then led everyone in a chant “You can’t jail us all!” When a young man held up a pair of yellow rubber ducks — a reference to a detail in Navalny’s report that ducks have their ownhouse at one of the estates allegedly owned by Medvedev — he was dragged off.
Official Moscow has dismissed Navalny, who has said he will run for president in 2018, as a widely reviled nuisance whose allegations are an attentiongrabbing stunt.
Putin, who almost certainly will run for re-election, is hoping for a landslide to validate his latest six-year term of authoritarian rule.
Navalny, who emerged as an anti-corruption whistleblower and took a leading role in the street protests that accompanied Putin’s 2012 return to the presidency, has been the target of fraud and embezzlement probes he calls politically motivated. In 2013, he was convicted of siphoning money off a lumber sale, a verdict that the European Court of Human Rights declared “prejudicial,” saying that Navalny and his co-defendant were denied the right to a fair trial.
In November, Russia’s Supreme Court declared a retrial, and Navalny was convicted of embezzlement and handed a five-year suspended sentence in February, which by Russian law would prevent him from running for president.