Started with Telegram, finished Putin: how the rally against Telegram blocking went

A rally on Sakharov Avenue, a photo from an account of a press secretary of Navalny Kira Yar.

In Moscow, a rally was held against Telegram blocking. According to a group of volunteers from the White Counter , more than 12 thousand people came to Academician Sakharov Avenue on Monday. According to police , 7.5 thousand people came.

Details

Among the participants in the rally there were many teenagers and young people under the age of 25, someone came with children and at least one participant in the rally-with a dog, the correspondent of The Bell said.
Many had posters in their hands. “Big Brother Is Watching You”, “So bad that even introverts here”, “Freedom 404”, “For safety, I need anonymity, not surveillance”, “Pavel Durov: the degradation of Roskomnadzor is 146%,” - these are just a few of them. The most interesting posters can be seen here .

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Poster at the rally. Photo by Alexander Amzin

Aleksey Navalny spoke at the rally. He began his speech with gratitudeto Pavel Durov because he resists the lock. Navalny said that he would not endure silently, like some guys with huge fat faces “for some reason, for some reason, considered that they should have the right to read everything”, that he writes in Telegram. “Our country is really poor in which no one has prospects. The only industry that has developed in recent years itself, without a state, without subsidies, without transfers, without benefits, is the Internet, right? And these people tell us that you behave badly on your Internet, so we take it out of it, ”said Navalny to the rally. In the end, he urged to reach the action with the authorities on Tverskaya on May 5. The whole performance of Navalny can be seen here (marriage by sound).
As the chief of staff of Navalny Leonid Volkov wrote on his channel in Telegram, this is the first politician from the scene of a large rally in Moscow since October 2015.

Speech by Navalny, photo from Twitter Kira Yar.

The shares were also made by the editor-in-chief of Mediazones, Sergei Smirnov, general director of the Drezhamny Forest, Philip Kulin, mathematician Dmitry Bogatov (spent eight months in a pre-trial detention center and under house arrest on suspicion that under pseudonym and through anonymizers he called for mass unrest for the protest on April 2, 2017 in Moscow), rapper LoqieMean, Artem Kozlyuk from Roskomvoboda. See the text broadcast of the action here , and the video broadcast here and here .

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The action ended with the chanting of the slogans “Russia without Putin”, “Putin thief” and the mass launch of airplane.
According to the results of the rally, a resolution was adopted. According to Interfax , it refers to the need to stop the Telegram blocking until May 5, cancel the laws that limit the freedom of the Internet, as well as send the head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov to resign and liquidate the department. “Our rights to the secret of correspondence, freedom of speech and conscience are guaranteed by the Constitution and cannot be limited either by law or conscience,” the document says.

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Commenting on the rally, Durov wrote on VKontakte: “This is unprecedented. I am proud that I was born in the same country with these people. Your energy changes the world. ” He later published another post in Telegram. “Thank you!” Durov wrote.

Context

On April 13, the Tagan court decided to block Telegram in Russia. Since then, Roskomnadzor has been trying to make a messenger inaccessible to Russian users, but so far unsuccessfully: constantly changing the IP address, Telegram remains available to most of the Russian audience.
Having blocked millions of IP addresses in Russia over the past weeks, Roskomnadzor caused interruptions in the work of the largest resources of Runet, including Google, Yandex, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Viber and others.

Sakharov’s rally has become one of the largest in recent months. The authorities will be difficult to ignore the growth of protest due to Telegram, which also has already spilled out into the street.

Svetlana Reuters, Vladimir Motorin