Braving bitter cold and the threat of arrest, Russians rally in cities across the nation.
MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of protesters across Russia took to the streets on Sunday for a second consecutive week to rally for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, and they were met by one of the most imposing shows of police force seen in the country’s recent history.
In Moscow, the police shut down subway stations and paralyzed much of the city center as they scrambled to prevent protesters from gathering in one place. It was a show of force — and Kremlin anxiety — unseen in recent years that disrupted the core of a metropolis of 13 million people.
“All for one and one for all!” the column of protesters, which numbered in the thousands, chanted as they marched through Moscow toward the jail where Mr. Navalny was being held.
Mr. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, was among the more than 3,600 detained during the protests nationwide, according to an activist group’s count. Video footage showed her being packed into a blue police van, just minutes after a post on her Instagram account showed her marching in a column of protesters near Moscow’s Sokolniki Park.
As they did one week ago, the protests started in Russia’s Far East and swept across the vast nation of 11 time zones.
The gatherings in some cities appeared to be smaller than those of last weekend, but crowds in the thousands turned out in St. Petersburg, the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk in Siberia, and elsewhere.
The law enforcement presence appeared to be greatly stepped up everywhere. In the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, demonstrators were forced onto the ice of a frozen bay, with riot police officers in pursuit. In Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains region, there was footage of riot police officers clubbing protesters with batons. There were reports of stun guns and tear gas being used in St. Petersburg.
The defiant turnout in so many parts of the nation showed that the accumulated anger with President Vladimir V. Putin remains a potent force, even with Mr. Navalny and most of his main allies across the country now in jail.
Mr. Navalny, a 44-year-old anticorruption activist, fell into a coma after a poisoning in Siberia last summer, recovered in Germany, flew home to Moscow two weeks ago and was arrested at passport control.
At a court hearing on Tuesday, he could receive several years in prison over parole violations stemming from a 2014 embezzlement case that Europe’s top human rights court called politically motivated.
Mr. Navalny’s backers say only the pressure of street protests can force the Kremlin to release the opposition leader, along with the dozens of his associates and supporters across the country who are being threatened with prosecution. The Russian government has called the protests in his support illegal, threatening anyone who participates with jail time.
Reports surface of brutality by Russian security forces.
One video shows a man prone on the sidewalk, offering no apparent resistance before a police officer administers a shock from an electrical device. Another shows officers in riot gear dragging an unconscious protester into a van. Elsewhere, local media reported that plainclothes police officers had beaten protesters.
Even before Russians gathered for a second week of protests, the Kremlin had made it clear that demonstrations would be met with an even greater show of force. Mostly, police officers responded with arrests. But by early Sunday afternoon, reports of police brutality against protesters had surfaced in several cities.
The huge scale of the nationwide operation of recent weeks to defuse the anger sparked by the arrest of Aleksei A. Navalny has revealed deep anxiety in the Kremlin. Images and video from across the country showed lines of hundreds of riot police officers deployed to prevent Mr. Navalny’s supporters from being able to gather in one place. In the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, the authorities dumped snow onto two central squares to make them impassable for pedestrians.
In St. Petersburg, where a large crowd converged on St. Isaac’s Square, the police carried devices that administered electric shocks. In a video aired online by Dozhd, an independent television station, the police shocked a protester though he was already lying on a sidewalk. An audible buzzing noise was followed with cries of pain. It was not clear what had transpired before the short video clip began.
Also in St. Petersburg, a reporter for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta posted a video of police officers dragging an unconscious protester into a police van after a “harsh detention.” Reports of police officers in plain clothes beating protesters surfaced in two provincial cities, Kursk and Volgograd.
At the protests last weekend, which took place in more than 100 cities, some 4,000 people were arrested, according to an activist group.
When the police came to detain Anastasia Vasilyeva, a physician who leads a pro-Navalny group called the Alliance of Doctors, she used the piano as her method of defiance.
Some of Mr. Navalny’s close allies have also been detained in recent days, including his brother, Oleg Navalny, and Maria Alyokhina, of the punk band Pussy Riot. They were both placed under house arrest.
Many were later released, but some received jail terms for violating public-gathering laws and others have been threatened with criminal prosecution for alleged violence.
Protesters in Moscow are on the move, and so are the authorities.
Several thousand protesters scattered across the northern part of Moscow’s city center played an hourslong game of cat and mouse with huge numbers of riot police officers in body armor and camouflage.
Protest organizers had called for people to gather in Lubyanka Square, in front of the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency, but the area was fully sealed off to pedestrians by the police.
Using Twitter and Telegram, supporters of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny directed protesters farther north toward the city’s main train hub, sending columns of police trucks speeding in that direction.
As Mr. Navalny’s team announced new destinations for the protesters, the Moscow city government responded by closing down subway stations on their way and blocking pedestrian traffic.
“We are many!” Mr. Navalny’s team posted on Twitter as it directed protesters. “Not a single riot police car can knock this column off its path.”
Protesters checked their phones, looking up to keep an eye on the riot police. On their way, they chanted “Freedom!”, “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia will be free!”
The police also marched in columns through slushy snow on sidewalks. They detained people in the crowd seemingly at random, dragging them into waiting detention wagons. At least 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow, the OVD-Info activist group reported, among more than 3,600 detained nationwide.
“I don’t understand what they’re afraid of,” a protester named Anastasia Kuzmina, a 25-year-old account manager at an advertising agency, said of the police. Referring to the peak year of Stalin’s mass repression, she added: “It’s like we’re slipping into 1937.”
Police officers chase protesters across a frozen bay, one of many remarkable scenes.
In the frozen port city of Vladivostok, a seven-day train ride from Moscow on the Sea of Japan, the police moved swiftly to try and block protesters from converging in the city center.
They erected barricades and closed underpasses. So the protesters took to the ice covering Amur Bay.
Clasping hands, they formed chains as they chanted “Putin is a thief!” and “Russia will be free!”
Their movements on the ice, captured on social media, looked almost like a dance.
Riot police officers, initially hesitant to follow on the frozen waters, decided to give chase. But it played out in seeming slow motion, with each side moving gingerly on the snow-covered expanse of ice under a gray late-afternoon sky.
It was just one of many remarkable scenes that played out on Sunday in eastern Russia, where large-scale protests are rare.
Although the crowd in Vladivostok was significantly smaller than one week ago, according to a local journalist, the police were taking no chances.
At least 96 people were detained, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks arrests at protests.
“People were disappointed that there weren’t as many people and that there wasn’t as much activity as last Saturday,” the local journalist, Tatyana Menshikova, said by phone.
In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where temperatures approached minus 20 Fahrenheit (minus 29 Celsius), the turnout was also significantly smaller than the thousands who protested last weekend — and the police presence even more imposing.
Aleksei Zhemchuzhnikov, a civic activist, said chains of riot police officers with full body armor and shields were deployed for the first time, cordoning off sections of the city center. Mobile internet access was cut off, he said.
“For Irkutsk, this was a first,” Mr. Zhemchuzhnikov said of the police response. “They were scared.”
‘I’m prepared to be arrested’: Defiance drives the day.
On the snowy streets of Moscow, many protesters said they were ready to go to jail.
“I’m prepared to be arrested, I know what to do,” said Ruslan Katayev, 22, a social worker, in an interview a minute or so before he was in fact arrested. He had said he had a lawyer’s phone number.
He had come out, he said, because “the main demand was not fulfilled: Free Navalny from illegal arrest.”
Dozens of people could be seen being detained at Clean Ponds, a boulevard park in the city center. Nikolai Babikov, 31, a computer systems analyst, gazed apprehensively at the riot police and at the chunky gray police vans that hold detainees, parked and ready nearby.
“Arrest would be unpleasant,” he said.
He said he had turned out to protest repression.
“The bolts are tightening,” he said. “Freedom is being eliminated and bit by bit we are becoming the Soviet Union again.”
As the day began, a steady stream of mostly young people walked along the Garden Ring, the broad circular thoroughfare surrounding the city center, toward the meeting point announced by Mr. Navalny’s team. Some tried taking side streets and found them also flooded with police officers.
Older people joined the protest as well. One of them, Lyudmila Mikhailovna, an 83-year-old retired pediatric doctor who declined to give her last name, said she was no great fan of Mr. Navalny. But she had watched his video about the palace he said was built for President Vladimir V. Putin and decided to join the protest because “I am for honesty, nothing else.”
Glowering at a phalanx of burly cops in front of her, she said “this is oprichnina day,” a reference to a policy of savage repression under Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. She said her age gave her some protection because “the cops usually just arrest young people, not pensioners like me.”
She said she had been going to protests since the Gorbachev era but, despite repeated disappointment, would keep coming out “so that my children and grandchildren don’t have to live in a greedy police state. Things now are just intolerable.”
A secret palace: Public anger is fueled by accusations of vast corruption.
Among the chants at Sunday’s protests, footage circulating on social media showed, was: “Aqua disco!”
The chant showed how deeply an investigative report that Aleksei A. Navalny’s team released shortly after his arrest, about what they describe as President Vladimir V. Putin’s secret palace on the Black Sea, has penetrated the national consciousness.
The 113-minute-long report, with more than 104 million views on YouTube, reveals the details of a compound Mr. Navalny says was built for Mr. Putin at a cost of more than $1 billion, complete with an underground hockey rink, a hookah lounge with a pole-dancing stage, and a fountain area called an “aqua disco.”
The report gained so much traction that the Kremlin, beyond simply denying it, in recent days launched a counteroffensive to claim that Mr. Putin had nothing to do with the palace. On Saturday, Russia’s state television channels aired an interview with a billionaire friend of Mr. Putin, Arkady Rotenberg, in which the business magnate claimed that the property actually belonged to him.
“We want to build an apartment hotel there,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “It’s a beautiful place — a great find.”
Navalny’s return to Russia has transformed the political landscape.
The opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny’s return to Russia on Jan. 17 has shifted the political landscape facing the Kremlin — both at home and abroad.
Inside the country, Russians unhappy with their president suddenly have a clear leader around whom to rally.
Opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin has long come in many hues — from Stalinists who dream of resurrecting the planned economy, to nationalists who want to restrict migration and annex more of Ukraine, to urban liberals who long for democracy and closer ties with the West. Rarely have these disparate groups come together as they have in the last week around Mr. Navalny — because the moment has arrived, more and more Russians say, when they can no longer abide passive acceptance of Mr. Putin.
Internationally, Mr. Putin faces new pressure as a result of the crackdown on Mr. Navalny and his supporters just as President Biden takes office.
“The U.S. condemns the persistent use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists by Russian authorities for a second week straight,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted on Twitter on Sunday. “We renew our call for Russia to release those detained for exercising their human rights, including Aleksey Navalny.”
On Friday, the executive director of Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Vladimir Ashurkov, sent a letter to Mr. Biden urging the White House to respond to Mr. Navalny’s detention by imposing sanctions against 35 Russian officials, state media figures and business tycoons. Mr. Ashurkov said he had put together the list with Mr. Navalny before the opposition leader left Germany for Moscow.
“The West must sanction the decision makers who have made it national policy to rig elections, steal from the budget, and poison,” Mr. Ashurkov said in the letter. “It must also sanction the people who hold their money. Anything less will fail to make the regime change its behavior.”
A battle between the television and the refrigerator: What’s shaping Russian opinion.
KALININGRAD — Aleksandr Dobralsky took to the streets to protest the arrest of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader earlier this month. But he had other grievances as well.
“It’s like somebody stepped on your toe and said, ‘Just be patient with this for a little while,’” Mr. Dobralsky, a lawyer, said of the country’s economic woes. “How can you just wait for it to be over?”
Opinion polls have for a few years now been tracking a pivot in the national mood, away from what was called the “Crimea consensus” of wide support for President Vladimir V. Putin for annexing the Ukrainian peninsula and toward disappointment over slumping wages and pensions.
In Russia, the competition between the rally-around-the-flag effect of Mr. Putin’s assertive foreign policy and anger over the sagging economy is often referred to as the battle between the television and the refrigerator: Do Russians pay attention to the patriotic news on TV or notice their empty fridges?
“Rallying around the flag is no longer an antidote against protest,” Ekaterina Schulmann, an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the British research institute Chatham House, said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Schulmann cited focus-group studies indicating that Russians shown economic statistics about declining wages or rising inflation were more likely to subsequently express support for a cautious foreign policy than Russians not shown the economic data first.
A number of factors eroded the Crimea consensus.
The year Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, 2014, his ratings at home soared even as European countries, the United States and others responded with sanctions that threatened the economy.
The confrontational foreign policy was initially wildly popular. The economic pain took years to work its way into politics.
But financial stagnation brought on by sanctions, a decrease in foreign investment amid tensions with the West and low oil prices have forced the Kremlin to institute unpopular policies, including raising the retirement age to shore up government pension funds.
Russians’ average take-home wages adjusted for inflation have been in decline since the Ukraine crisis. They are now 10 percent lower than they were seven years ago.
It is taking a toll in public opinion.
“If you don’t already have a place in the system you don’t stand a chance” of finding work, Mr. Dobralsky said.
In his hometown, Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania, state propaganda warning of foreign danger was always a tough sell.
“They say, ‘The Americans are building a military base in Poland,’” Dmitry Feldman, a graphic designer working in Kaliningrad, said of the television news. “But we know the Poles. You ask an ordinary dude in Poland ‘Do you want to conquer Siberia?’ and they don’t know what you are talking about.”
"heavy" - Google News
January 31, 2021 at 10:23PM
https://ift.tt/3oDNUf7
Live Updates: Navalny Protests in Russia Face Heavy Policing - The New York Times
"heavy" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35FbxvS
https://ift.tt/3c3RoCk
heavy
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Live Updates: Navalny Protests in Russia Face Heavy Policing - The New York Times"
Post a Comment