The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Anti-putin protest attracts large crowd
Despite sanctions, opposition shows it’s not going away.
MOSCOW — Russia’s opposition movement drew tens of thousands to another large anti-Putin demonstration Saturday, sending the message that its ranks are undaunted by a battery of new government sanctions and the two-year prison sentences handed down last month to members of a punk band.
This protest, like the ones that first jolted the Kremlin nine months ago, featured mockery of President Vladimir Putin — largely send-ups of a recent stunt in which Putin flew in a hang glider at the head of a flock of cranes.
The trademark neon balaclavas of the punk band, whose members were prosecuted for singing an anti-Putin song in a cathedral, appeared on buttons and balloons and, in a basket carried by one marcher, on three disembodied mannequin heads.
There were no arrests, and the police offered a crowd estimate similar to the one they gave at the last event, of 14,000. Organizers’ estimates were much larger. Over all, nine months after the first large protests sent waves through Moscow, the movement appears to have reached a kind of cruising altitude. It is not euphoric, as it was in December. But it is also not going away.
“I often hear — What, are we going to go to demonstrations as if we’re going to work?” said Alexei Navalny, the charismatic blogger whose appeal in December helped spark the first large anti-Putin demonstration. “Yes, we will go. We go to work, to provide for our families — and we should go to demonstrations to supply freedom to ourselves and to our children, to defend our human dignity. We will go as if we are going to work. This should be part of our lives.”
During the threemonth gap since the last such demonstration, the government has taken aggressive steps to rein in such protests, most no- tably the use of criminal courts and investigations as a lever against leaders of the opposition, a path that Putin had for many years avoided.
“Today the authorities have set on a repressive course,” said Gennadi V. Gudkov, a fourterm member of Parliament who was stripped of his seat Friday in an unusual step seen as retribution for his participation in protests. “But they have forgotten that they have to deal with the people. And we will not allow our country to be turned into a gulag led by a kingpin who has frightened the whole country, frightened millions of his own citizens.”
Officials from United Russia, the govern- ing party, said Saturday’s turnout showed that the “White Ribbons” have irreconcilable political agendas, with one lawmaker commenting that “all that brings them together is hatred for the current system.” Taking the podium at the end of a march through central Moscow, leaders spoke of the need for resolve, nine months into a protest movement that began euphorically.
One notable change in this protest was the prominence of communists; besides the white ribbons, associated with a liberal agenda, there were many red ribbons among the crowd, and one marcher noted with puzzlement a shout of “Death to the Bourgeoisie!”