December 10, 2011, 19:54 Society

All-Russian re-elections

Protests against the results of the State Duma elections swept across Russia

Alexandra Koshkina , Sergey Teplyakov (Barnaul) , Nikita Zeya (St. Petersburg) , Mikhail Bely (Ulyanovsk) , Viktor Polyak (Yaroslavl) , Sergey Arshinov (Chelyabinsk) close 100%

Protests against the results of the State Duma elections took place across Russia on Saturday, some of them sanctioned, others not. In most cases, conflicts with law enforcement agencies were avoided. In total, according to preliminary estimates, there are just over a hundred detainees throughout the country. Residents of some cities, as observers note, have not taken to the streets in such large numbers to protest since the 1990s.

elections held last week On Saturday, residents of many Russian cities came out to protest against the State Duma . Some of the rallies organized in the regions were authorized; in other cities, residents gathered spontaneously. From a few people to several thousand attended the protests. The number of detainees, according to unofficial data, exceeded one hundred people.

In St. Petersburg, the authorized rally started on Pionerskaya Square at 15.30, and, according to the organizers, 5 thousand people came to it.

There was not enough space on the square, and people had to stop on the approaches to it, reports a Gazeta.Ru correspondent. Eyewitnesses say it was “the largest opposition rally in the city this year.” The action was attended by both apolitical citizens and “leftists,” nationalists and representatives of liberal political parties. The leader of the St. Petersburg branch of The Other Russia, Andrei Dmitriev, demanded that the election results be reviewed, saying that otherwise “ten times more people will gather here.”

As a Gazeta.Ru correspondent reports, there were isolated arrests, mainly among those who were walking from Vosstaniya Square (according to information initially distributed on social networks, the rally was supposed to take place there) to Pionerskaya. Near Vosstaniya Square, police detained a man who called on citizens to block Nevsky Prospekt. Another person was detained for refusing to fold a red flag. could not name their names According to official data from the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg, in total no more than ten people were detained “for administrative offenses”; the police ; it is only known that among the detainees there were no leaders of local branches of parties and movements.

Before the residents of St. Petersburg came out to the rally, other regions of the country were already summing up the results of the actions.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs at 13.30, the rallies were “few”, and by that time fifty Russians had been detained. Thus, according to official statistics, in Vladivostok , according to the police, about 150 people took part in an unauthorized rally. Up to 100 people gathered in Chita , three of them were detained for attempting to distribute certain printed materials. In Khabarovsk, about 80 people gathered for an unauthorized rally, half of them were detained, Interfax reported. In Blagoveshchensk, 32 people came to the rally, one of them was detained under Art. 20.2 of the Administrative Code (violation of the procedure for organizing rallies).

Gradually, throughout the day, information came in about rallies in other cities - and some of them could no longer be called small.

In Yekaterinburg, more than 800 people took part in the unsanctioned rally, and another hundred in the authorized one. As a result, 17 people were detained in the city during the day, including five minors. “A knife, sharpened fittings, a gas cartridge and a Torch pyrotechnic device were seized from one of them, a 15-year-old teenager,” a police spokesman said.

In Chelyabinsk, in the Gagarin Park, about a thousand people gathered for a picket, according to official data; According to the organizers, there were three thousand citizens there. As observers note, such a number of people have not come out to protest in the city since the 90s.

In Novosibirsk, a 15-degree frost did not prevent at least three thousand citizens from taking to the streets.

The meeting was agreed upon by opposition representatives and local authorities. The organizers, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation , planned to gather a thousand people, but, according to law enforcement agencies, three times as many gathered. The local police promised to give a “legal assessment” of the excess number of protesters. Participants of the action collected signatures for calling re-elections. There were no arrests there.

In Volgograd, one and a half hundred people gathered on the Alley of Heroes under the slogan against election fraud. The protesters adopted a resolution in which they demanded the resignation of the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov , and the dissolution of the regional election commission. After this, the second sanctioned rally began in the city - on the Square of Fallen Fighters. According to police estimates, about a thousand people took part in it.

In Ulyanovsk, the protest action was almost in jeopardy. In the morning, one of its organizers, representative of the Yabloko party Vyacheslav Yemelyanov, was detained. He was taken for questioning to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as part of a criminal case under the article “vandalism.”

The case under Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (vandalism) for posting leaflets calling for people to come to a rally agreed upon with the authorities was opened several days ago; Emelyanov has not yet been charged. “At first I was told that one of the event participants was illegally posting leaflets calling for people to come to the protest. Then they began to interrogate them as part of a criminal case: a few days before the December 4 elections in Ulyanovsk, unknown persons painted the facades of houses with various slogans,” Emelyanov himself told Gazeta.Ru. According to him, he was deliberately kept for a long time. “The police admitted to me: they say, the authorities ordered you not to be released yet,” Emelyanov explained. As a result, he showed up at the rally towards the end.

Another organizer of the protest in Ulyanovsk, Konstantin Troshin, was attacked on Saturday. “When I was getting into a minibus to go to a rally at the regional government, an unknown person ran up to me and started beating me. He started hitting me in the face and pulled me out of the minibus onto the street,” Troshin told a Gazeta.Ru correspondent. The fight was stopped by traffic police officers on duty nearby. They detained the attacker. As a result, Troshin and his offender were taken to the police. The oppositionist wrote a statement demanding that a criminal case be opened against the attacker. “To be honest, I have a hard time believing in such coincidences. I think it was a planned attack so that I wouldn’t get to the protest in the center of Ulyanovsk,” noted Troshin, who, by the way, never showed up at the event.
As a result, at least a thousand people gathered on Lenin Square near the regional government building, according to the Gazeta.Ru correspondent. Police officers cordoned off the monument and asked citizens “not to touch Vladimir Ilyich.”

In Yaroslavl (in this region the percentage of those who voted for United Russia turned out to be the lowest in the country), about one and a half thousand people gathered for a protest against election fraud, according to the organizers, while the participation of three hundred was announced.

For the event, the police installed barriers and metal detectors at the entrances, where there were no queues, although everyone's packages and bags were checked. The picket lasted one hour, the police did not intervene and did not record any violations. The main slogan of the picket was “We are together!”, which called on those gathered to unite to counter violations and maintain fair elections. At the picket it was announced that a meeting was scheduled for a week later at the same place, which should be attended by three thousand people.

In Barnaul, an administrative case has been opened regarding an unauthorized rally, but they do not know who to prosecute.

“The rally was not approved,” explained Svetlana Lyapunova, head of the press center of the regional police department, to Gazeta.Ru. “In this form, it is contrary to the law.” Lyapunova found it difficult to explain who exactly will be held accountable and under what article of the Code of Administrative Offenses. The fact is that citizens gathered for the rally through social networks, in particular VKontakte. A notice of the picket (the action was initially supposed to be a picket with 50 participants) was submitted to the city administration by Barnaul resident Kirill Fomin . However, then he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office and, after a conversation, stated on the Internet that “holding a rally or picket on December 10 is impossible” and he “relinquishes all authority in this regard.” City administration spokesman Andrei Lyapunov said on December 9 that “the organizers have withdrawn the application.” However, this did not stop the residents of Barnaul. On December 9, about 9 thousand people announced their intention to participate in protests on the Internet, and on December 10, on the Square of Soviets, the maximum number of participants in the protest, according to unofficial data, was about 2.5 thousand people.

In Kemerovo , where the picket spontaneously turned into a rally, the organizer was found - and now Nikolai Fedorov faces administrative liability.

“I think we will conduct an analysis. I think that there are administrative violations: he submitted notices to the picket, and this implies silence. But there was agitation, calls,” Valery Plahot, head of the department for organizing public order of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Kemerovo Region, explained to Interfax. According to him, a protocol will be drawn up under Art. 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation (violation of the established procedure for organizing or holding a meeting, rally, demonstration, procession or picketing). The organizer of the picket, on the contrary, believes that there were no violations. He said that the day before he was detained by police and taken to the police station, and then released. The picket, according to preliminary data, gathered about 200 like-minded people. About 50 more people gathered for an unauthorized rally in the city of Novokuznetsk near the city hall.

The Tomsk police will have to deal with the organizers of the action - in Tomsk , according to police estimates, about one and a half thousand people came out to the action on the central square instead of the announced two hundred. The protesters, clapping their hands, chanted: “Honest elections!” The picketers demanded the release of political prisoners, re-elections, and the resignation of the head of government and the chairman of the Central Election Commission. Drivers of passing cars honked their horns in support of those gathered.

In many other Russian cities, the number of participants in the protests, at least according to official estimates, did not exceed 500–700 people (although, for example, in Samara , the organizers said that there were much more protesters; residents of many other regions also say that official statistics turned out to be below actual figures).

But there were detainees: in total, by 19.00, according to various sources, there were from 100 to 150 people throughout the country, including in Tver, Tula, Bryansk, Kazan, Samara, Cheboksary, Kurgan, Perm and Nizhnevartovsk. However, there are no official data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the total number of detainees.

Gazeta.Ru conducted Twitter reports from several Russian cities.