Hundreds arrested as anti-corruption protests
sweep Russia
|
Tens of thousands of people rallied, and hundreds were
detained Sunday in Russian cities during massive, mostly unsanctioned
rallies organized by anti-corruption whistleblower and opposition leader
Alexei Navalny.
The demonstrations were the largest in Russia in years and
came three weeks after Navalny’s Fund to Fight Corruption released a
YouTube documentary, now viewed 11 million times, detailing Prime
Minister
Dmitry Medvedev’s purported involvement in massive corruption
schemes.
Navalny had used a social media campaign to spread awareness of the
demonstrations, during which protesters demanded the resignation of Medvedev,
who once enjoyed a reputation as a moderate pro-Western and technocratic
counterpart to President Vladimir Putin.
The documentary said the prime minister is now the billionaire owner
of vast business holdings and a palatial complex larger than the Vatican.
Navalny is a complex and charismatic figure who has long been a
thorn in the Kremlin’s side and has been seen as a potential rival to Putin. His
nationalist, anti-migrant rhetoric, along with his participation in rallies
organized by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, has alienated some of Russia’s
liberal democrats but added to his popularity among Russians critical of the
Kremlin amid growing xenophobia.
And he has a nearly unparalleled ability to rally followers despite
the dangers inherent in public protest in contemporary Russia.
Police said that between 7,000 and 8,000 people marched in central
Moscow, and that at least 100 were detained after police officers urged them to
disperse and relocate their rally to the remote part of a park in the northern
part of the capital, where authorities sanctioned a protest gathering. But the
rally’s organizers and independent monitors claimed that some 20,000 showed up
and at least 880 people were detained in the capital alone by heavily armed,
baton-wielding riot police officers.
Thousands turned out for separate rallies in Russia’s largest
cities, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Volga River cities in central
Russia to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, the organizers said.
In St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, police used stun
guns while detaining dozens of protesters, opposition activists and independent
media said. At least 200 people were brutally rounded up in Makhachkala, the
capital of the violence-plagued, mostly Muslim southern province of Dagestan,
the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily reported. Another 200 were detained in the
southern city of Krasnodar, the Kavkazsky Uzel website said.
In Moscow, several protesters clashed with police after Navalny was
rounded up just minutes after joining the rally. Protesters tried to block a
slow-moving police van with Navalny, the 40-year-old head of the unregistered
Progress Party, inside.
“Guys, no need to get me out,” Navalny tweeted after the detention.
“Keep going on Tverskaya Street [in central Moscow]. Our topic today is to fight
corruption.”
In the
50
minute-long documentary about Medvedev, Navalny claims that the prime
minister used a network of charities and businesses registered to his friends
and relatives to launder billions of dollars purportedly “donated” by Russian
oligarchs. The assets include mansions and luxurious houses, vineyards in
southern Russia and Italy, and two yachts, Navalny claimed in the documentary.
The Kremlin and state-controlled television networks ignored the
documentary, and some of the officials and Medvedev’s relatives mentioned in it
denied their involvement in the schemes.
Sunday’s rallies were Russia’s largest since the 2011-12 protests
against perceived vote-rigging in a parliamentary election and Putin’s return to
the Kremlin for a third presidency.
“We are so fed up with these crooks and thieves in the Kremlin. Now
is the time they realize that they can’t get away with robbing the country,” one
of the protesters, Ilya Zhilin, a 32-year-old computer engineer, said.
“This is our country. We are not their silent serfs,” Oksana
Kolesnichenko, a 22-year-old university student, said, pointing in the direction
of the Kremlin. “We need to stop growing fat in front of computers. Got to get
out and shout a little.”
Minutes later, police forced protesters out of a square in Moscow,
detaining people with banners, beating them and dragging them to police vans.
Police also raided the office of Navalny’s fund, evacuating the
building because of a purported bomb threat and detaining the staffers,
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, tweeted. One of them was charged with
extremism, she said.
Navalny said earlier that Sunday’s nationwide rallies would start
his presidential campaign ahead of the 2018 vote. But under the Russian election
law, he cannot run because he has a criminal record — a suspended sentence for
fraud. His lawyers are
appealing the conviction.
The suspended sentence is seen widely as the Kremlin’s way of
banning Navalny from running without turning him into an imprisoned martyr like
oil tycoon and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent almost a decade
behind bars and now funds opposition groups and media from exile in Switzerland.
Navalny cut his teeth in politics by publishing dozens of
investigative reports on corruption among top Russian officials. In 2013, he ran
for mayor of Moscow and came in second with 27% of the vote, a result that
shocked the Kremlin and political analysts.
Medvedev, a bookish lawyer who worked in St. Petersburg’s
City Hall in the 1990s under Putin, a former KGB officer, served as
Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 because Putin could not run for a
third consecutive term because of constitutional limits. He initially
was seen as a pro-Western liberal who proclaimed moderate reforms and
pledged to crack down on corruption, but later was tarnished by a
perception that he was a puppet of Putin’s.
That perception solidified when Medvedev agreed to switch
positions, becoming prime minister when Putin ran for a third term as
president.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-protests-20170326-story.html