Hundreds Arrested as Group Urges New Russian Revolution

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/europe/russia-revolution-arrests.html

Version 0 of 1.

MOSCOW — The police arrested more than 200 people in a roundup on Sunday that the local news media linked to an obscure right-wing movement that had been calling for a repeat of the Russian Revolution, timed near its 100th anniversary.

The movement, called Artpodgotovka, or Art Preparation, had agitated in online posts for followers to prepare for revolution, but had not been widely known or taken seriously before this weekend.

The tiny turnout did not seem to pose any real threat. The people who followed directions in the group’s online posts and showed up at noon on Sunday on Manezh Square, in the center of Moscow, milled about in seeming confusion before officers arrested them.

“It was a very strange picture,” said Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director of Sova Center, a nongovernmental organization that monitors right-wing groups in Russia.

The movement’s leader, Vyacheslav Maltsev, a video blogger based in France, had for months been posting YouTube videos calling on followers to revolt on Nov. 5. He called it “revolution 2017.”

Nov. 5 falls a day after a holiday in Russia known as Unity Day, a successor to the former Soviet celebration commemorating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. President Vladimir V. Putin introduced the new holiday early in his term.

Mr. Maltsev’s planned event may have overlapped with the aftermath of protests by nationalists who have used Unity Day to stage marches against immigrants. Many nationalist activists were out on the streets over the weekend.

The timing created some initial confusion over whom the police were detaining.

Several dozen protesters were detained at the nationalist march on Saturday, on Unity Day, which was unrelated to Mr. Maltsev’s call for revolt.

It is not clear whether all of those arrested on Sunday were followers of Mr. Maltsev, or even aware of his blog posts, or had stumbled into the gatherings believing them to be a continuation of the Unity Day protests.

Mr. Verkhovsky, a longtime observer of nationalist groups, said many of the same people had turned out for both events.

Artpodgotovka is a nationalist and populist movement that has tried to emulate European far-right organizations. While the Kremlin has financed and is suspected of maintaining ties to European far-right parties and organizations, the arrests over the weekend underscored its scant tolerance for such groups at home.

The police reported 230 arrests in Moscow on Sunday, according to the Interfax news agency. Similar gatherings took place in other Russian cities after the online posts called for supporters to come out at noon on Sunday in a main square of their city.

Some in the crowd in Moscow carried knives and pistols that fire rubber bullets, which are legal in Russia for self-defense, Interfax reported.

The Federal Security Service, Russia’s main domestic law-enforcement agency, said in a statement on Friday it had broken up several cells of Artpodgotovka and that members had “the goal of organizing a revolution in Russia.” The statement said the group planned to attack police officers, set administrative buildings on fire and create mass disturbances.

In July, Russian prosecutors charged Mr. Maltsev under a law that prohibits “calls to commit extremist actions.” But because the authorities have also used the law against peaceful opposition figures in recent years, the accusation drew little attention.