statism watch

Flashback: Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke | Thousands protest in Russia over financial crisis | Russian police beat auto tariff protesters

Luke Harding, the Guardian
February 2, 2010

Special envoy sent to Russia’s western exclave as thousands take to streets in biggest protest since Soviet Union fell

Dmitry Medvedev sent his special envoy to the western outpost of Kaliningrad ­today after thousands of Russians took to the streets in the largest rally since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The protest, staged at the weekend, saw between 10,000 and 12,000 people gather in Kaliningrad’s main square to demand the resignation of the governor and shout slogans against the ruling United Russia party.

Smaller opposition rallies were held in other towns, including Vladivostok — the scene of regular protests by car drivers over the past 18 months — as well as Moscow and St Petersburg. Riot police violently broke up a peaceful demonstration in Triumfalnaya Square, Moscow, on Sunday, arresting 100 ­people.

Although opposition rallies have taken place throughout the Vladimir Putin era, the scale of the Kaliningrad protest appeared to have caught the Kremlin off guard.

The region — the former German city of Königsberg, which was seized by Stalin during the second world war — is separated from the rest of Russia and bordered by EU member states Poland and Lithuania.

Medvedev sent his plenipotentiary envoy, Ilya Klebanov, to Kaliningrad to investigate. Sources suggested that the Kremlin-appointed governor, Georgy Boos, was also likely to be summoned back to Moscow for a dressing down.

Solomon Ginzburg, an opposition leader and independent deputy, said a wide coalition of residents had taken part in the rally, including communists, liberals and ultra-nationalists. He said people were fed up with rising communal and transport charges and wanted Boos — appointed by Putin in 2005 — to resign.

“Unlike most Russians, we can compare living conditions here with those in Poland and Lithuania,” said Ginzburg. “Boos promised us the same standards as the EU. It turned out he was lying.”

Saturday’s rally was even bigger than the 1991 protests against an attempted putsch by KGB hardliners, he added.

United Russia was now planning a ­counter-rally, bussing in paid supporters from outside the city. “This won’t convince anybody. We don’t live in Turkmenistan but in Europe. And it’s the 21st century,” said Ginzburg.

Analysts said the Kremlin was unlikely to draw the conclusion from Kaliningrad that it needed to liberalise Russia’s tightly controlled political system. Instead, the authorities, fearful of social unrest spreading to other parts of the country, were likely to snuff out other mass rallies.

“The scale of this protest is too big not to react immediately. It’s dangerous [for the Kremlin] if something similar is repeated elsewhere,” said Nikolai Petrov, an expert on regional elites at Moscow’s Carnegie Centre. The government’s commission in Kaliningrad would see what lessons had to be learned, he added.

Human rights groups called on the authorities today to stop blocking peaceful demonstrations. Those arrested at Sunday’s demonstration included Oleg Orlov, the chairman of the Memorial Human Rights Centre, and Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the pro-democracy Solidarity opposition movement.

“Russian law clearly allows for freedom of assembly,” said Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in Moscow. “But these arrests of human rights leaders and peaceful protesters are a prime example of how blatantly the authorities violate this right.”

The Obama administration also expressed concern about Sunday’s arrests in Moscow. “The detention of at least 100 protestors, including prominent human rights defenders and opposition political leaders, together with reports of mistreatment against some of the demonstrators, constitutes another blow against freedom of speech and assembly, which are universal and fundamental rights that deserve to be protected and promoted,” the U.S. Department of State said in a statement.

A letter published in today’s New Times magazine, meanwhile, revealed widespread corruption and abuse of office by riot police in Moscow. The letter, written by Moscow’s OMON police battalion, revealed that officers have quotas for the number of opposition demonstrators they are supposed to arrest, and have pay docked in they fail to fulfil them.

The letter also said OMON police were told by officers that foreign agencies funded anti-government demonstrations, as well as neo-Nazi marches and gay pride events.

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