MOSCOW (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Russians staged what a monitoring group called the country’s biggest political protest for eight years yesterday, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow’s city legislature.
Police rounded up scores of people after the demonstration in Moscow and at another rally in St Petersburg, and detained a leading opposition figure before it began. But the response from the authorities was milder than the previous week when more than 1,000 protesters were detained, sometimes violently.
The White Counter monitoring group said up to 60,000 people had attended the Moscow rally, describing it as the biggest in Russia for eight years. Police put turnout at 20,000. A month of demonstrations over elections for the Moscow city legislature have turned into the biggest sustained protest movement in Russia since 2011-2013, when protesters took to the streets against perceived electoral fraud. Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared “down with the tsar!” and waved Russian flags. They are demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month after they were not allowed onto the ballot.
“The authorities have become brazen. It’s time to defend our rights,” said Natalya Plokhova, a recruiting consultant. As the scenes unfolded in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin was shown on state television in a leather jacket at a biker show organised by the Night Wolves motorcycle club on the peninsula of Crimea which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Putin and the Kremlin have so far avoided commenting on the unrest over the Moscow city elections. OVD-Info, a monitoring body, said 245 people were arrested at yesterday’s demonstration in Moscow and 80 in St Petersburg. A small number of other arrests took place in other cities, including Rostov-on-Don and Bryansk.
