Nadezhda Mityushkina: "Titles have always been"

The OVD-Info announces the “Week of Titus”: over the next days, a series of stories of activists will be published about how they came across aggression emanating from the pro-Kremlin movements. The cycle will end with a review text about the problem. The first publication is the story of Nadezhda Mityushkina, executive director of Solidarity.

When in the winter of 2012, Anton Demidov from Russia Young tried to break a notification to the rally that I had to file, and, to put it mildly, at the same time my passport, because it was all in the same plastic folder, he very negatively slapped me against the mayor's wall when my attempt to pick up the folder back. The documents were saved only because one of our associates, Stas Pozdnyakov, who could not cope with him, was very strong, they are generally very trained guys-at some point he just fell at his feet, knees to him, and then the police, who looked at us joyfully, finally woke up and pulled both out of the city hall. Demidova released, but Stas was lucky to drag from the police department too. These same “Rumolovites” on the same Volodya Ionov about five years ago on “Baumanskaya”, in the winter, when he distributed reports or leaflets, poured a bucket of cold water. We knew that Volodya was bathing in the hole-he bathed last year-therefore he heroically withstood all this, but imagine: pour a bucket of water into an elderly person in winter!

But they always shared - then there were “young Russia”, Mger and the movement “ours”. “Ours” were more engaged in trolling, provocations-they asked all sorts of questions, surrounded, did not give something to hand out, drove the cameras in the face. And the guys like “Russia are young” have always been more “power”.

When I was attacked near the city hall, there were more than one demidov, there were quite a few of them, this Maxim Mishchenko himself (at that time the leader of the “young”-OVD-info), who steamed everyone. We then filed an application for March 5, a rally on Pushkinskaya Square after the presidential election. I was the applicant since December 10, 2011, and on March 5 there was the fourth big rally in my memory. He was distinguished from all other large rallies that there were most provocateurs. Eastern people who looked like Dagestanis went there dozens, and the police launched them before the framework opened, there were about fifty to sixty of them, and they saw more in the yards. Then some youth with identification marks in the form of a ribbon of colors of the Russian flag on the hand, such as bracelets, went to this rally. And more than a dozen, several groups of twenty, thirty, conditional “Uralvagonzavod” are such a strange type of peasant and aunts, mainly in dark jackets, with banners like “We are for Putin”, which also went into groups, they had a leader, and we spent a lot of time to identify them and withdraw from the rally to output. They did not manage to do anything, because we caught them at the entry moment. I think they were going to chant Putin. I have a phrase on duty: “I ask you to take these people, because the topic of their banner does not correspond to the declared topic of our event.” I was then in such a hysteria and so driven the police that at the end they accidentally expelled ten operas who, in order not to lose each other in the crowd, tied up St. George ribbons. The policeman, already started from me, screamed so that they just ran away at first, and then one came and began to show the documents. I, since this was connected with Putin’s elections, apparently paid for the project to interfere with the event, and this began with the submission of the notification and continued until the event itself.

At some point, after the decline in their activity, after 2012, after the “swamp”, when there was a “swamp process”, the activation of the “ours” movement, which came to all the events associated with political prisoners, in a suit of vegetables-like “We are in the garden, plant us” was seen.

The force wave never stopped completely-just at some point a plan arose to use it. Some attacks have always been. At first, they came to our Ukrainian pickets if we wrote in a public (we are not always writing in a public, because it is too tiring to fight with them, and there is no much sense), and we were trolls - they say, we also have the right to express our position, and all such nonsense, we dragged our posters. Naturally, the police did not pay attention to the fact that they violate the rules of picket-we also stood with posters, but we had coordination, but they did not.

And somewhere closer to late autumn, they began to really climb into a fight, tear posters and flags, break the poles, push people, that is, the confrontation became more powerful. Apparently, for some time it will go on growing until they begin to save on them, for example. This has always been seen: large rallies began, therefore, to contain a crazy number of members of the “ours” movement, a lot of money was already needed, and they were put on a shelf. Maybe they were engaged in other projects-they still have some kind of activity. Then it was clear that they were periodically removed from the shelves, but in minimized quantities, such as these “vegetables”. Therefore, now all the cries that the titles have appeared - they didn’t appear, they have always been, they are in different clothes, they call different names, but the presence of such an audience has always been encouraged by our power, sometimes in a more active one, sometimes in a more passive version.