With the released

On the evening of December 22, the next meeting of the Initiative Group to prepare for the rally on December 24 was held on Academician Sakharov Avenue. The idol of the dissatisfied public, Alexei Navalny, who was released from a special detention center, took part in it. At this meeting, as at the previous one, the greatest disagreements were caused by the draft resolution of the meeting and the list of speakers. The nationalists were not satisfied that the drafting group (at which some of them, however, were present) did not accept their demands for the abolition of Article 282 and anti-extremist legislation. As a result, the draft resolution was not supported by the meeting, so for now it is believed that the meeting on December 24 will not have a separate resolution. Navalny promised that in his speech at the rally he would demand the abolition of Article 282. This point was especially objected to by the head of the editorial group, the head of the movement “For Human Rights,” Lev Ponomarev, who eventually left the meeting.

As for the list of speakers, it seriously suffered from cheating, as a result of which the pyramid builder Sergei Mavrodi fell into second place after, of course, Navalny (and the nationalist Maxim Martsinkevich, known as Tesak, who calls Navalny bad words, came into third place).

As a result, it was decided that the final list would include, first of all, those whose names are among the first twenty both in the list considered official by the Initiative Group (on the website surveymonkey.com) and in the list on Facebook, which the Organizing Committee of the rally is guided by. To them will be added speakers from political movements (three each from - let's accept these terms - leftists, liberals and nationalists; the question is how much this corresponds to what percentage of those who are going to the rally, which of them supports) and civil activists (two, which is quite strange). Candidates will be agreed upon by a group consisting of two leftists (Anastasia Udaltsova and Ilya Ponomarev), two liberals (Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov) and two nationalists (Vladimir Thor and Konstantin Krylov) and one Navalny.

It was also proposed to create a single “protest committee” that would further coordinate the entire process, so that there would be no more than two organizing committees or one Organizing Committee and one Initiative Group, which now and then stumble over each other and doubt each other’s legitimacy. It was proposed to become the head of this committee... correctly, Navalny.

Well, let’s remember Kipling, who was still mentioned unkindly by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin: as the not-so-nice character in the same story “Mowgli” said, “let’s see what the Flock says.” That is, the Organizing Committee of the rally, the meeting of which will be held on December 23.