10.12.2011, 21:17:37

Participants in a rally against election fraud in Novosibirsk. Photo by RIA Novosti, Alexander Kryazhev

To the very outskirts

Protest rallies on December 10 were held in 99 cities of Russia

On December 10, the first mass protests of citizens in the last decade took place in Russian cities. A total of at least 50 thousand people gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow and Pionerskaya Square in St. Petersburg. Rallies of thousands took place in other large cities. At the same time, although there were no fewer uncoordinated protests than coordinated ones, only two were accompanied by mass arrests.

If you believe the interactive map that appeared on the Internet the day before, demonstrations “For Fair Elections” on December 10 were supposed to take place in 141 cities on three continents. Along with residents of 99 Russian cities, people from the Russian Federation, as well as sympathizers living in New York and Canberra, Vancouver and Dublin, Seoul and Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Oman and even Samui.

Participants of the rally against election fraud in Arkhangelsk. Photo by RIA Novosti, Pavel Kononov

The “Day of Dissent” opened - for some reason, apparently from old memory, the official agencies preferred to call the participants in the December 10 rallies exactly that - the rally in Vladivostok. At noon (5 a.m. Moscow time), about 500 people came to Korabelnaya Embankment calling for fair elections. Agencies reported that no more than two dozen police officers were involved in maintaining order, but eyewitnesses wrote about a “significant number” of law enforcement officers in plain clothes.

Participants in the rally in Vladivostok filmed and posted a short parting video on YouTube to encourage their compatriots, for whom December 10 begins later. The flowers and white ribbons chosen as symbols of Saturday's rallies across the country are not visible in the video, but posters against United Russia can be seen . However, there were no reports of any clashes with the police, not to mention arrests.

The police in Khabarovsk behaved completely differently. Here during the day, several dozen people came out to an uncoordinated action, which took place in the form of a silent picket. Some participants even taped their mouths shut. Ten minutes after the start, the police ordered those gathered to disperse, after which they began to detain the demonstrators, who did not even shout any slogans - the picket was silent, but simply stood on the street, some with their mouths taped, some with a white ribbon.

At least forty people were detained - according to eyewitnesses, two buses were required for transportation. At the same time, law enforcement agencies stated that “about 50 people” took part in the rally. In this case, it turns out that almost everyone was detained. In fact, there were much more participants, apparently no less than a hundred. But even in this case, it turns out that every second person was taken to the police.

The second place where opposition protests were accompanied by mass arrests was Kazan. Here, according to estimates from the local police department, about 500 people came to an uncoordinated rally on Freedom Square. 40 minutes after the start of the action, trucks with police arrived and the area was cordoned off. Police and organizers, each using their own megaphones, advised those gathered to disperse. Two hours later, when there were still people in the square, arrests began.

Agencies report ten detainees, but local media and participants in the events claim that the police took away from 100 to 117 people. Each of the detainees faces up to 15 days of administrative arrest. The only consolation is that Khabarovsk and Kazan, apparently, were the only cities in the entire country where mass arrests of protesters took place on December 10.

At the same time, there were no fewer unauthorized actions on Saturday than agreed ones. It’s just that in some places the police behaved more restrainedly, but in others the organizers managed to get out of it. In Barnaul, for example, the rally was successfully disguised as a meeting of a communist deputy with the electorate. More than a thousand people came to talk with the people's representative. Residents of Perm were less fortunate - their flash mob, during which those gathered danced in a circle and sang the song “Loaf, loaf, choose whoever you want,” was dispersed by the police. 15 people were detained, most were soon released to their homes.

The most massive coordinated protest rallies took place in Novosibirsk and Arkhangelsk. In Novosibirsk, more than three thousand people gathered on Pimenov Square in front of the State Public Scientific and Technical Library. In addition to banners and posters (“Russia - fair elections!”, “No trust in United Russia,” “Churov - resign!”), some of the participants brought badminton equipment .

More than two thousand people came to the rally in Arkhangelsk. Those gathered were allowed to stage a procession from the city hall along Chumbarov-Luchinsky Avenue, chanting the slogans “Putin is a thief” and “Russia without Putin.” The procession was led by the former mayor of Arkhangelsk Alexander Donskoy . None of the large permitted rallies were accompanied by any violations or conflicts with the police. For example, the only complaint that the city authorities were able to present to the organizers of the rally in Novosibirsk was that the stated limit of participants was three times exceeded.

Participants of the rally against election fraud in Tomsk. Photo by RIA Novosti, Yakov Andreev

In Tomsk, instead of the announced two hundred participants, one and a half thousand came to the picket in the city center. None of them were detained.

Ufa became another major center of civil disobedience. Despite the fact that the promised concert of Yuri Shevchuk did not take place, more than a thousand people gathered on the central Lenin Square. The Ufa rally was marked by just one episode: police tried to remove a man from the crowd who said that the December 4 elections were dishonest. Other protesters tried to stop them; as a result, the picketer fell and required medical attention.

Large uncoordinated rallies also took place in Yekaterinburg (from one and a half to several thousand people) and Krasnoyarsk (approximately 700 participants according to official data). In the Siberian city, no incidents were reported, but Yekaterinburg police detained 17 people. It was noted that the police used megaphones to call on citizens to go home, and the crowd responded to these calls by whistling.

Protests in Vologda, Voronezh, Izhevsk, Murmansk, Orenburg, Penza, Rostov-on-Don, Ulyanovsk, Chelyabinsk gathered, according to local internal affairs bodies, from one hundred to several hundred participants. Moreover, in almost every case, not only rally participants, but also journalists announced a significantly larger number of activists than officials. The love of law enforcement agencies for underestimating data on the number of protests was especially evident in Pyatigorsk: according to media reports, about 300 people took part in the protest rally here, but according to law enforcement agencies there was no rally at all.

Konstantin Benyumov

To the very outskirts

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Lenta.ru: Politics: To the very outskirts