Antifa will not pass. Along the City Hall route

Photo: ITAR-TASS

UPDATE 18.32

Moscow authorities said they had agreed with civil activists on holding the march. “We have agreed on everything. Some issues remain, but we will resolve them in a working manner,” Alexey Mayorov, head of the capital’s regional security department, told Interfax. “We did not give a route that ended at one of the churches in Moscow. I think that the organizers of the event understood everything correctly. They will go from Tverskaya along Tverskoy Boulevard to the Nikitsky Gate. I think that they will have the opportunity to go to the place of death, and lay flowers. This is not a problem,” said a representative of the mayor’s office.

The Moscow authorities refused to approve an action in memory of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, which was to take place on January 19, the fourth anniversary of the murder of the lawyer and journalist. The application was submitted for 2 thousand participants, and it was assumed that the procession was to go from Novopushkinsky Square to the Kropotkinskaya metro station. The main slogans: “For freedom against fascism” and “Moscow is an anti-fascist city.” At the end, the participants wanted to walk from the metro to the murder site on Prechistenka and lay flowers there. The city authorities rejected the application and proposed a route only to the Nikitsky Gate, limiting the number of participants to 300 people.

Human rights activist Lev Ponomarev is confident that the authorities, by refusing to approve the initial route, are deliberately trying to provoke a clash between demonstrators and police.

Lev Ponomarev, executive director of the movement “For Human Rights”:

“There were no negotiations! We sent the application, after which they called us back and said that they would only agree on their version. We motivatedly explained (to city hall officials - PublicPost) why we could not agree to it. I started calling Oleynik (deputy head of the regional security department Moscow Vasily Oleinik - PublicPost), tried to talk with Gorbenko (Alexander Gorbenko - Deputy Mayor of the capital - PublicPost), but they did not agree to negotiate.

Today we were given a written answer: they are coordinating a route from Pushkinskaya Square to Nikitsky Gate, along the boulevard. For 300 people. They always deliberately reduce the number of participants several times, although they know that thousands will come. That's how it is with them. There are people, and there is something similar to people, and that’s how it is for them to count three people as one. But God bless them, they think so. But that's not the point!

The mayor's proposal is provocative. The provocation is that they propose to end the route not at the Kropotkinskaya metro station, but rather far from this place. It is quite obvious that since we are not planning a rally, but rather laying flowers, all people will bring flowers to the place where Stas and Nastya died. It is obvious that the authorities will view this as an uncoordinated march. Moreover, people will take exactly the route for which we submitted an application - along the boulevards. So the mayor’s office will have a reason to say: “We haven’t agreed on the route, but they are still going.”

I cannot say that I am ready to bear responsibility for every young person who comes to the rally. Concerted actions usually go well. But then someone will come with flowers, someone with posters, they will be twirling them...

So this is completely intentional. This is either a deliberate provocation or simply rudeness. When they realize that tens of thousands of people can come out, they carefully consider (the application - PublicPost), bargain, of course, but still. And when a thousand come out, I don’t care about them. Although the officials to whom we pay salaries must carefully consider any application. So I do not rule out provocation; it is quite possible.

The “January 19 Committee” preparing the march emphasized that if agreement is not reached, the committee reserves the right to organize an uncoordinated action.

Lawyer Stanislav Markelov was killed on January 19, 2009 on Prechistenka. Novaya Gazeta freelance journalist Anastasia Baburova, who tried to detain the killer, was wounded in the head and died in the hospital in the evening of the same day. In November 2009, the Basmanny Court of Moscow issued a warrant for the arrest of nationalist Nikita Tikhonov and his girlfriend Evgenia Khasis, who were charged under Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code (“Murder of two or more persons”). In April 2011, Tikhonov and Khasis were found guilty of murder by a jury and not deserving of leniency. On May 6, 2011, the Moscow City Court, based on a jury's guilty verdict, sentenced Tikhonov to life imprisonment; Khasis received 18 years in prison for complicity in murder.

Processions in memory of Markelov and Baburova are held annually. In January 2010, the action escalated into clashes between antifa and anarchists and the police. About a thousand of its participants tried to walk along Petrovsky Boulevard to the picket site on Chistye Prudy, but the police tried to divide the march participants into groups of 50 people. Participants in the march lit smoke bombs and threw snowballs at the police, and then tried to break through the riot police cordon. In total, about 20 people were detained, many were beaten.

In 2012, memorial events took place not only in Moscow, but also in other Russian cities: St. Petersburg, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Petrozavodsk, Ufa, Omsk, Naberezhnye Chelny, Severodvinsk, Perm, Tyumen. The memory of Markelov and Baburova is honored outside Russia - in Bishkek, Kyiv, Kharkov, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Yalta, Sarajevo, Berlin and Paris.