MOSCOW – From the frozen streets of the Far East of Russia and Siberia to the large squares in Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians gathered in support of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Saturday, in the biggest national clash in years. the Kremlin and its opponents.
The demonstrations did not immediately pose a terrible threat to the control of President Vladimir V. Putin in power. But its broad scope and the remarkable challenge demonstrated by many of the protesters signaled widespread weariness at the stagnant and corruption-infested political order that Putin presided over for two decades.
The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country with 11 time zones, and spread like a wave across the country, despite the strong police presence and a drum beat of menacing warnings in the state media to stay away .
On the island of Sakhalin, in northern Japan, hundreds gathered in front of the regional government building and shouted, “Putin is a thief!” The protests spread to the subarctic city of Yakutsk, where it was minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and for rallies attended by thousands of cities across Siberia. Hours later, at nightfall in Moscow, people threw snowballs at the police and kicked a car belonging to the domestic intelligence agency.
At the end of the night in Moscow, more than 3,000 people were arrested in at least 109 cities, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks arrests in protests.
Navalny’s supporters claimed success and promised more protests next weekend – although many directors at their regional offices have been arrested.
“If Putin thinks the scariest things are behind him, he is very and naively mistaken,” said Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s aide, in a live broadcast to YouTube from an undisclosed location outside Russia.
The protests came six days after Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist, was arrested when he arrived in Moscow on a flight from Germany, where he spent months recovering from poisoning by a military-grade nerve agent. Western and Navalny officials described the poisoning, which occurred in Siberia in August, as an assassination attempt by the Russian state. The Kremlin denies this.
Navalny, who now faces a one-year prison sentence, called on his supporters across the country to take to the streets this weekend, although officials have not authorized protests. The Russians responded with the most widespread demonstrations the country has seen since at least 2017 – numbering tens of thousands in Moscow and St. Petersburg and by the thousands in each of the various cities in the east, including Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk and the port of Vladivostok in the Pacific.
“There was a heavy feeling that Russian public opinion had hardened on the cement, as if it were stuck in a dead and confused ball,” said Vyacheslav Ivanets, a lawyer from the Siberian city of Irkutsk who participated in the protests. “Now I feel that the situation has changed.”
Navalny, long the loudest domestic critic of Putin, used his populist touch on social media and his humor, tough and simple, to emerge as Russia’s only opposition leader with followers in a wide segment of society. His status among Putin’s critics has increased even more in the past few months, when he survived the attack by the nervous agent and then returned home to Russia, although he faced an almost certain prison.
The arrest on Sunday, protesters said, helped to trigger repressed discontent over economic stagnation and widespread official corruption under Putin.
But Putin’s Kremlin had survived the protests before – and there was little immediate evidence that this time it would be any different. Russian state media quickly made it clear that there was no chance that the Kremlin would give in under pressure, condemning the protests as a national “wave of aggression” that could lead to the arrest of some participants.
“Attacking a police officer is a crime,” said a state television report. “Hundreds of videos were filmed. All the faces are on them. “
In Washington, the State Department said on Saturday that it “strongly condemns the use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists” in Russia. Russia’s Foreign Ministry countered by claiming that the United States helped “incite radical elements” to join the unauthorized protests and that American officials were “facing a serious discussion” of Russian diplomats.
Some protesters acknowledged that, despite the importance of Saturday’s protests, much larger numbers would be needed to change the course of the country’s policy. In neighboring Belarus, many more people protested for weeks last year against authoritarian President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko – a close ally of Putin – without toppling him.
“I’m a little disappointed, honestly,” said Nikita Melekhin, a 21-year-old Moscow nurse. “I expected more.”
On the streets, the police showed a monumental display of strength, but refrained from large-scale violence. At Pushkin Square in central Moscow, the focal point of the rally in the capital, the riot police wielding a truncheon ran repeatedly to try to disperse it, but avoided using tear gas or other more violent methods of crowd control.
They arrested most of Navalny’s top associates in advance and detained his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in a protest on Saturday before releasing her hours later.
Still, the videos that circulated on social media captured notable clashes between protesters and the police – an indication of new courage among some Russians and the uncertainty of what is to come. In several cases, protesters could be seen throwing snowballs at the police, although prosecutors in the past have asked for years in prison sentences for people who threw objects at police officers.
Singing “shame” protesters in Moscow too threw snowballs in a passing government car. After it stopped, people ran to the car, which belongs to the Russian domestic intelligence agency, and started kicking it. The driver suffered an eye injury in the attack, state media later said.
State media reported that at least 39 Moscow police were injured in Saturday’s events. There were also videos of police officers beating and kicking protesters violently, including outside the Moscow prison where Navalny was confined.
The question now is whether the intensity of the clashes will further galvanize the Russians – or ultimately dissuade them from heeding the Navalny team’s call for more protests.
Opinion polls in recent months – of uncertain value in a country saturated with state propaganda and where people are often afraid to speak out – have indicated that Putin faces no serious challenge from Navalny to his popularity, whose name has never been allowed to appear on a presidential ballot. Putin refuses to pronounce his name in public.
A November poll by Levada Center, an independent and highly respected research organization, found that only 2 percent of respondents named Navalny as their first choice when asked who they would choose if a presidential election was held the following Sunday. Fifty-five percent named Mr. Putin.
However, Navalny’s dramatic return to Russia last Sunday – and his video report on Putin’s alleged secret palace, which has been viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube – have increased the prominence of the opposition leader across the country. .
“I was never a great defender of Navalny, but I understand perfectly well that this is a very serious situation,” said Vitaliy Blazhevich, 57, a university professor, in a telephone interview about why he left to do a rally for Mr. Navalny in the city of Khabarovsk, on the border with China.
“There is always hope that something will change,” said Blazhevich.
Vasily Zimin, a 47-year-old partner at a Moscow law firm, walked through the mud and said he came to protest rampant corruption during Putin’s time in power.
“How can you say, ‘I can’t take this anymore’ while sitting on the couch?” he said.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reports from Moscow. Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed to the research.