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Across Russia, Protesters Heed Navalny’s Anti-Kremlin Rallying Cry Across Russia, Protesters Heed Navalny’s Anti-Kremlin Rallying Cry
(about 2 hours later)
MOSCOW — A wave of antigovernment demonstrations rolled across Russia on Monday as thousands of people gathered in scores of cities to protest corruption and political stagnation despite vigorous attempts by the authorities to thwart or ban the rallies. MOSCOW — An extraordinary wave of antigovernment protests swept across Russia on Monday, as thousands of demonstrators gathered in more than 100 cities to denounce corruption and political stagnation despite official attempts to stifle the expression of outrage.
The police detained the architect of the national protests, the Kremlin critic Aleksei A. Navalny, as he emerged from his apartment building to attend a rally that he had forced into the center of Moscow. He was sentenced to 30 days in prison.There were scattered reports of hundreds of detentions elsewhere, too. Riot police officers in large cities and small detained hundreds of participants, with more than 700 apprehended in Moscow and 300 in St. Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an independent organization that tracks arrests. There were reports of hundreds of detentions elsewhere, too.
The protests were the broadest antigovernment outpouring in Russia in years, with people in more cities heeding Mr. Navalny’s call than his last series of demonstrations in March. In Moscow, the police arrested the Kremlin foe and anticorruption crusader Aleksei A. Navalny, the main architect of the protests on Monday and similar ones in March, as he left his apartment to attend the demonstration downtown. A Moscow court quickly sentenced him to 30 days in jail for organizing an unauthorized protest.
Organizers in more than 200 cities across Russia had filed requests to hold demonstrations on Monday, trying to revive a popular opposition that had been somnolent since a violent crackdown in 2011 and 2012. Protests unfolded on Monday in more than 100 cities as the sun moved westward, even in some where they had been banned outright. The recent outpourings of popular discontent, spurred on by Mr. Navalny, have been the biggest antigovernment demonstrations in Russia in years.
Russian news media reported an estimated 5,000 people turned out in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the largest crowds since demonstrations in 1991 calling for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Protest organizers estimated 4,000 participants in the southwestern Siberian city of Omsk, and 2,000 in Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, though the police estimates in those cities were less than half. After witnessing the geographic sweep of the protests on Monday and the enthusiastic resolve of the mostly young participants in the face of a harsh police presence, some analysts came away saying that Russian politics was being reborn.
In the eastern city of Kazan, a permit was for 7 a.m., a markedly early hour in a country that generally gets going around 10 a.m. The authorities had told organizers that anything later in the day would interfere with a major soccer match. Protesters showed up anyway. “I think we are seeing the beginning of a youth protest movement,” said Anatoly Golubovsky, a Russian historian surveying the crowd at one corner of Moscow’s Pushkin Square, which erupted in vigorous jeers of “Shame” whenever a phalanx of riot police officers rushed into the crowd to drag someone away.
In addition to their resolve, the protesters displayed a sly mastery of modern political organization. The demonstration in Vladivostok, a port city in Russia’s far east, nearly 4,000 miles away from Moscow, resembled a social-media-driven flash mob more than a traditional political rally. Mr. Golubovsky ticked off cities across Russia where protesters had turned out: an estimated 4,000 in Novosibirsk, as well as in Omsk and other large Siberian cities. There were energetic demonstrations in Vladivostok in the Far East, and in large cities in southern Russia like Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar.
Their approach had its drawbacks: Without a public address system, people could not hear what was being shouted from a makeshift podium hastily installed near a bronze statue of Lenin. Still, when it looked as if the riot police were about to intervene, supported by camouflage-clad Cossacks — thuggish men carrying horsewhips — the crowd nimbly decamped. Protesters quickly marched through the center of the city unmolested to another site, where the demonstration continued until more police officers moved in to snatch people suspected of being the organizers. “All these regions were considered to be very conservative and not politicized, very loyal to the power,” he said, referring to the Kremlin. “And they turned out to be politicized.”
In Moscow, Mr. Navalny set the stage for a confrontation with the police by insisting that demonstrators ignore the officially sanctioned venue and gather instead on Tverskaya Street, the main boulevard leading toward the Kremlin and Red Square. It was difficult to assess the exact number of cities or people involved in the demonstrations across this vast continent of a country with 11 time zones. But the proliferation of protests and the predominantly youthful crowds seemed to indicate that Mr. Navalny had succeeded in broadening his movement beyond the more than 80 cities that took part in demonstrations in March.
After he was detained, his wife posted a picture of the incident on his Twitter account with the caption “Happy Russia Day!” — referring to the national holiday on Monday. In addition, workers at his headquarters reported that their electricity and internet connection, used to transmit updates from around the country, had been severed. Officials had tried to prevent a repeat by vilifying Mr. Navalny and issuing thinly disguised threats of force and dire consequences for those attending demonstrations, as well as for their parents. Russian politics had been generally somnolent since mass protests in 2011 and 2012 were met with harsh prison sentences.
To commemorate the holiday, Red Square was scheduled as the site of historical re-enactments of various Russian military and other achievements across the centuries. On Sunday night, the end of Tverskaya Street near the Ritz Carlton Hotel had been shut off by a wall of sandbags and tank traps that were officially part of a re-enactment, but that conveniently also blocked protesters from mingling with visitors to the Russia Day celebrations. “I cannot remember, and old-timers, as they say, cannot remember, when was the last time in Russia that so many people attended demonstrations in different cities,” said Georgy Alburov, the deputy head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, started by Mr. Navalny.
The protesters managed to circumvent the makeshift blockade, and there were reports on Monday that the city had relented at the last minute and agreed to allow the protest march on the main boulevard. As the crowd in Moscow surged this way and that to avoid the charging police officers, Mr. Alburov expressed a sense of accomplishment. “We are very happy that so many people share our views and are ready to go to demonstrations,” he said.
It was difficult to ascertain the scale of the protests because riot police officers kept groups of protesters divided around Pushkin Square, which was also the site of some of the historical re-enactments and a public concert. The protests were ostensibly focused on government corruption, but other issues, like economic doldrums and the mass demolition of apartments, brought people onto the street. Many participants said they were disgusted at the gradual dismantling of democracy in Russia, and of any semblance of a real opposition.
Protesters mingled awkwardly with Russians who had come out to participate in the holiday celebrations. As some people dressed as medieval knights acted out historical battles with wooden shields and prop swords, crowds chanted “Russia without Putin,” referring to President Vladimir V. Putin. “I came here not because of the corruption,” said Nikita Orlov, 18, a student in international law. “I came here because we have no democracy, our Parliament is not real, our politicians are not real and our mass media is not real.”
Whenever the police swooped in to arrest protesters in Pushkin Square, the crowds erupted in vigorous chants of “Shame!” Initial reports from OVD.info, an independent organization that tracks arrests, said around 670 people had been detained in Moscow and 300 were arrested in St. Petersburg. Those sentiments were not limited to Moscow.
Mr. Navalny urged potential protesters not to fear arrest, saying time in jail was worth the effort — Mr. Navalny himself was detained for 15 days after a protest on March 26. “They cannot put everyone in prison” has become one of his mantras. In Naberezhnye Chelny, a usually dormant city of 500,000 that lies 600 miles east of Moscow, around 230 people turned out.
He has also said repeatedly that the demonstrations should be nonviolent. Protesting “doesn’t mean there will be an awful revolution or a civil war,” he said on his YouTube talk show on June 1. “We will live better, because they will stop stealing from us,” he said. Officials authorized the rally, but, as in many cities, they relegated the protesters to a long-neglected park in the outskirts where they were practically hidden among the trees and anonymous apartment blocks.
The latest confrontation between Mr. Navalny and the Kremlin began on March 2, when the 41-year-old opposition leader released a video depicting Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev as the crooked beneficiary of palaces, yachts, vineyards and other luxuries paid for by some of Russia’s richest tycoons and disguised as charity holdings. Sergei Trokhin, one of the organizers in Naberezhnye Chelny, turned 20 on Monday. Two years ago, he was studying at a local college to become a construction worker, and said he ignored politics. That changed as economic hardships worsened in the town, which, like hundreds of towns across Russia, is heavily dependent on one industry: in this case, a truck factory.
“People understand very well the connection between corruption and property,” Mr. Navalny said in an interview this month. “The main driver of people coming out in the regions is poverty, the constant worsening of the standard of living.” “My mother didn’t get a raise for four years, while prices only grew,” Mr. Trokhin said, adding that the protests were about more than Mr. Navalny, even if the director of his college warned him that the protests would help Mr. Navalny “destroy Russia.”
Officially, the demonstrations are against corruption, but they are also an effort by Mr. Navalny to force the Kremlin to let him run against Mr. Putin in the March 2018 presidential election, even if he has virtually zero chance of unseating the president. A felony conviction, which Mr. Navalny has called politically motivated, technically bars him from running. The latest confrontation between Mr. Navalny, 41, and the Kremlin began on March 2, when he released a video depicting Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev as the crooked beneficiary of palaces, yachts and other luxuries paid for by some of Russia’s richest tycoons.
In Vladivostok, home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet, where at least 11 protesters were detained, according to OVD-Info, the protest crowds were peaceful if wily in their efforts to avoid the riot police. The demonstrations were also an effort by Mr. Navalny to force the Kremlin to let him run against President Vladimir V. Putin in the March 2018 presidential election, even if he has virtually zero chance of winning. A felony conviction, which Mr. Navalny has called politically motivated, bars him from running.
The crowd of hundreds, while constituting only a tiny portion of the city’s population of 600,000, signaled defiance against the authorities by waving copies of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly. The demonstrators paraded through narrow streets with Russian flags to an esplanade overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Navalny has plenty of critics. Sergei Markov, a political analyst close to the Kremlin, accused him of “radicalizing” the protest movement and said on Facebook that he doubted the numbers had exceeded those of the March protests.
“Russia without Putin,” they shouted, while one protest banner said “Power must be changeable,” a reference to tightly controlled elections that mostly consolidate the power of Mr. Putin and his allies. In Naberezhnye Chelny, some onlookers expressed skepticism, too. “Mr. Navalny is a thief, just like all of them,” said Dmitri Ivanov, 34, a factory manager. “Look at these people,” he said, pointing to the crowd. “They are just kids. They know nothing. They need to graduate from school first.”
The rally broke up after riot police officers plunged into the crowd and dragged away several protesters. Mr. Navalny called the rally on Russia Day, a national holiday, to underscore the idea that protesters are patriots, too. The Interior Ministry said that more than seven million people had participated in various celebrations around the country. That would dwarf the protest participation.
The authorities in the city had rejected a request from protest organizers to gather in the square by the station, saying that it had already been booked by Cossacks, descendants of the fierce horsemen who secured the frontiers of the Russian Empire under the czar. In an unsubtle hint, the Cossacks who gathered put on a display of how to smash eggs with a horsewhip. In Moscow, officials organized historical re-enactments to celebrate Russian achievements from medieval times through World War II. The juxtaposition of the protests and the re-enactments caused some confusion.
Yuri Kuchin, an organizer of the Vladivostok protest, said he was detained by the police on Monday morning to prevent him from participating, before being released and then detained again until late afternoon. He said he had been fined the equivalent of about $350 for organizing an illegal event. Mr. Kuchin had said in an earlier interview that the Cossack event had been orchestrated by the local government as a ruse to keep Mr. Navalny’s supporters from gathering. A wall of sandbags erected across Tverskaya Street in Moscow, by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, seemed designed to block protesters but turned out to be part of the re-enactments. Walls of riot police officers and police vehicles lining the street were all too real.
“They have put us all under tremendous pressure,” he said, complaining that local officials in places like Vladivostok were particularly zealous because they wanted to prove their loyalty to the Kremlin and because they feared being punished if dissent against Mr. Putin sprouted too openly. At one point, men dressed as medieval knights held a sword fight in the middle of a street as chants of “Russia without Putin” erupted from protesters nearby.
As was the case during the day of nationwide protests called by Mr. Navalny in March, the demonstrators who turned up in Vladivostok were mostly young people, members of a generation who have known nothing but the 17-year rule of Mr. Putin. On Pushkin Square, protesters were being physically carted off while a singer at a free Russia Day concert belted out a Russian version of “Those Were the Days.”
“I am here for my future,” said a 22-year-old protester who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals. “The Cossacks can stand up for their own future, but I want to defend mine,” he added, waving a big Russian flag. Mr. Navalny, jailed for 15 days for organizing the March protests, was sentenced to 30 days on similar charges this time after moving the Moscow demonstrations downtown, away from a street approved by the city.
Organizers in more than 200 cities filed requests to hold demonstrations on Monday. Around 120 were granted, 50 were rejected, and the fate of the rest was unclear. Some cities tried to play games with the organizers.
In Vladivostok, 4,000 miles east of Moscow and home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet, protesters were told that they could not rally on the central square opposite the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway because it had been booked by Cossacks, descendants of the fierce horsemen who secured the frontiers of the Russian Empire under the czar.
In an unsubtle hint, the burly Cossacks who gathered in camouflage uniforms or czarist-era outfits put on a display of how to smash eggs with a horsewhip.
After gathering nearby to chant against corruption and to wave copies of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, the demonstrators paraded through narrow streets with Russian flags to an esplanade overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“Russia without Putin,” they shouted. One banner said “Power must be changeable,” a reference to tightly controlled elections that mostly consolidate the power of Mr. Putin and his allies.
The rally broke up after riot police officers plunged into the crowd and dragged away protesters. At least 11 protesters were detained, according to OVD-Info.