Facing the intense cold and intimidation attempts, the protests spread across Russia.
Thousands of people in Russia’s Far East and Siberia gathered in support of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Saturday in what was emerging as the biggest national clash in years between Russian officials and critics of the Kremlin.
The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country with 11 time zones, and as the hours passed, it spread like a wave across the expanding nation.
As the scheduled time for the protest in Moscow approached, hundreds of people filled the Pushkin Square in the city center. Some drivers blew their car horns in support of the passage.
Rows of riot police, in camouflage and black helmets, were standing in the surrounding side streets. The police were allowing most people to meet, but they took others away.
It appeared to be the biggest day of protest in the entire country since at least 2017 – although it was not at all clear whether the demonstration of dissent would force the Kremlin to change course.
In the cities of Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean, and Irkutsk and Novosibirsk in Siberia, the images showed crowds of well over 1,000 people shouting songs like “We are in charge here!” and “We are not leaving!”
In Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, dozens of protesters in the freezing fog have faced temperatures of minus 60 Fahrenheit. In Khabarovsk, the city on the border with China that was the scene of anti-Kremlin protests last summer, hundreds of people who returned to the streets were met with an overwhelming force of riot police.
“I was never a big supporter of Navalny, but I understand perfectly well that this is a very serious situation,” said Vitaliy Blazhevich, 57, a Russian university professor, in a telephone interview on why he came to a demonstration by Mr Navalny in Khabarovsk.
“There is always hope that something will change,” said Blazhevich.
What drives the protests is the demand that Navalny be released from prison.
Aleksei Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist who is the most prominent domestic critic of Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August, in what Western officials described as an assassination attempt. by the Russian state.
He was flown to Germany and recovered. And last Sunday, after flying home to Moscow, he was arrested at passport control.
Russian authorities say Navalny violated the terms of parole on a suspended sentence he received six years ago and are trying to arrest him for one year in prison.
After he was arrested for an initial 30 days on Monday, his supporters called for protests – arguing that just pressure in the streets could prevent what they describe as an attempt by Putin to oust his most popular opponent.
These protests took place in Russia on Saturday, organized in part by Navalny’s extensive network of local offices. Local authorities did not authorize the protests – citing the coronavirus pandemic, among other things – and threatened to arrest anyone who participated.
Police and protesters clash in several cities, with reports of almost 200 people detained.
The video showed police officers fighting with protesters in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, but there were no immediate reports of large-scale violence. OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks arrests in protests, reported 174 arrests across the country by noon, Moscow time – a number that would certainly increase over the course of the day.
In the normally peaceful city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, a fishing and energy center on an island in northern Japan, hundreds of people took part in Saturday’s protests.
Some schools rescheduled classes, while one organized a basketball tournament on Saturday to try to keep teenagers away from protests, said Lyubov Barabashova, a city-based journalist.
The police did not prevent protesters from meeting outside the headquarters of the regional government, Barabashova said. When a police officer announced by megaphone that the demonstration was illegal, protesters shouted in response: “Putin is a thief! Freedom for Navalny! “
The Kremlin has resisted waves of protest in recent years and there was no immediate indication that this time it would be any different. There were growing signs that the Russian government intended to respond to the protests with a new wave of repression.
The United States warns Americans to avoid protests while Russia represses organizers.
The US embassy in Moscow issued a warning to American citizens to stay away from Saturday’s protests – an announcement that Channel One’s anchor used to suggest that the United States had in fact organized them.
“This is very important: information about the location and time of the unsanctioned events planned for tomorrow has appeared on the website of the United States Embassy,” said the Channel One anchor. “As they say, draw your own conclusions.”
Russian officials said they are opening criminal investigations against the protest organizers. And on Friday, the main nightly news broadcast on Russian state television Channel One dedicated about a third of the program to Navalny – a radical departure from the typical state media practice of ignoring him.
Russia strives to prevent young people from taking to the streets.
A ninth-grader from the Russian city of Yekaterinburg asked his colleagues this week why they didn’t like President Vladimir V. Putin.
According to their teacher, Irina V. Skachkova, they responded by quoting imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny: “Putin has a palace that was built with stolen money, and Putin is himself a thief”.
Navalny’s dramatic return from Germany to Russia on Sunday and his immediate arrest, followed by the release of a video documenting Putin’s alleged secret palace on the Black Sea, captivated many young Russians and led authorities to fight to keep them away from protests.
Some universities threatened students with expulsion if they were caught participating in protests calling for the release of Navalny, which is being organized in dozens of cities across Russia, although local authorities have not authorized them.
The Ministry of Education urged families to spend the weekend doing non-political activities like “taking a walk in the park or in the forest”.
Russia’s telecommunications regulator said it had ordered social media to remove the posts promoting Saturday’s protests, and the country’s top investigative body said it had initiated a criminal investigation into the alleged incitement of minors to join.
A few days before Saturday’s protests, Aleksei A. Navalny’s team published a comprehensive investigation describing a secret palace built for President Vladimir V. Putin on the Black Sea.
Released on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after Navalny was sentenced to prison, the report was the latest blow to the Russian opposition leader’s dramatic battle with Putin.
The investigation – complete with floor plans, financial details and photos of the interior of a complex that Navalny says costs more than $ 1 billion – seemed to offer the most comprehensive account of a huge residence where the president would have built himself a verdant southern coastline. from Russia.
The Kremlin denied the findings in the report, which went online as a 113-minute video on YouTube and an illustrated text version that invited users to post photos of Putin’s alleged luxury on Facebook and Instagram. The video has been viewed more than 65 million times on YouTube.
“They will continue to steal more and more, until they bankrupt the entire country,” says Navalny in the video, referring to Putin and his circle. “Russia sells large quantities of oil, gas, metals, fertilizers and wood – but people’s income keeps falling and falling, because Putin has his palace.”
Few people had heard of the nervous agent Novichok until 2018, when Western officials accused Russia of using him in the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain. The issue returned to the headlines in September, when Germany said the poison made Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny sick.
But scientists, spies and chemical weapons experts have known and feared Novichok for decades. It is a potent neurotoxin, developed in the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be supplied in liquid, powder or aerosol form and is considered to be more lethal than the most well-known nervous agents in the West, such as VX and sarin .
The poison causes muscle spasms that can stop the heart, build up fluid in the lungs, which can also be deadly, and damage other nerve cells and organs. Russia has produced several versions of Novichok, and experts say that no one knows how many times they have been used, because the resulting deaths may seem nothing more sinister than a heart attack.
That may have been the plan in the case of Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian spy who lived in Salisbury, England. When Skripal was found almost unconscious in a park in March 2018, there was no obvious reason to suspect poisoning – except that his visiting daughter experienced the same symptoms.
British intelligence agencies identified the substance as Novichok and blamed Russia. The attack became a major international scandal, further cooling relations between Moscow and the West. The British identified Russian agents who they said had flown to Britain, applied the poison to the door handle on Skripal’s house and left the country, leaving a trail of video and chemical evidence.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s government has consistently denied any involvement, weaving a series of alternative theories. And just months before the Salisbury attack, Putin said Russia had destroyed all of its chemical weapons.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reports.