The riot police stand in front of the protesters during a demonstration in support of Navalny in central Moscow on 23 January.
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Lyudmila Shtein, a 24-year-old Muscovite and city deputy, is under house arrest until May and risks being sentenced to two years in prison for encouraging people to join a protest last month. She is among more than 11,000 people arrested in the past two weeks, after the biggest demonstration of defiance to President Vladimir Putin in years.
While social media flooded with reports of police brutality, including beatings, a The Kremlin’s repression has managed, for the time being, to contain the agitation triggered by the arrest of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. There are no more planned demonstrations until spring, but after more than two decades in power, Putin has not extinguished the threat to his government.
“If we continue to protest every weekend, there will only be thousands of detainees and hundreds of beaten, and the work of our campaign offices will be paralyzed and we will not be able to prepare for elections” for Parliament in September, said a source Navalny’s ally, Leonid Volkov, who is out of the country and wanted by Russian authorities. “This is not what we want and it is not what Alexey asked us to do,” he told Rain TV.
Putin, 68, is struggling as Navalny seeks to galvanize discontent fueled by years of declining living standards and the recession caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, produced a series of exhibitions aimed at Putin and his inner circle and won millions of followers in the process.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in dozens of cities across Russia for two consecutive weekends, setting off the alarm and provoking a violent response from the authorities, who accuse Navalny of working with foreign governments to try to destabilize the regime.
Navalny garnered the most support from any opposition politician in Russia, “although his constituency remains rather restricted,” said Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist who correctly predicted the biggest anti-Putin protests a decade ago.
For the time being, most Russians are concerned about the need to survive, but as the economic situation stabilizes, “the demand for political rights and freedoms and the rule of law will grow” and more people may be willing to face the challenges. authorities, he said.
Navalny, 44, was arrested as he arrived in mid-January from Germany, where he recovered from an attack by a nervous agent who said it was an attempt by Putin to kill him. The Kremlin denies any role in the poisoning. Navalny is now Russia’s most famous prisoner. A court in Moscow on February 2 sentenced him to two years and eight months for violating the terms of parole in a 2014 suspended fraud sentence, including when he was recovering in Berlin after a coma.
Russian investigators are also suing many of Navalny’s aides and have warned that they can charge him with other crimes related to other fraud charges that could add another 10 years of punishment.
International criticism
Resisting international criticism, Russia rejected calls from the US and Europe to free Navalny, despite the risk of further sanctions and on Friday he expelled three diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden for attending rallies.
While waves of previous protests have also caused mass arrests and prosecutions, officials have been more relentless this time around.
Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny: QuickTake
Lawyers say they are not having access to detainees, protesters spent hours in police vans, deprived of food, water and even heating, and photos posted on social media showed people huddled in cells with open latrines and beds with metal structures and no mattresses.
Aliona Kitaeva, a volunteer who works for a Navalny aide, said the police put a plastic bag on her head, pushed it on and threatened electric shocks to force her to provide her cell phone password. Four police officers were present in the cell that had no surveillance camera, she said.
Navalny is escorted out of a police station in Khimki, Russia, on 18 January.
Photographer: Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty Images
“I was subjected to physical and psychological abuse: it was torture,” she told Current Time TV shortly before being taken to serve a 12-day sentence for participating in an unsanctioned protest.
Putin’s tactics may succeed in intimidating the opposition in the near future, but Navalny inside the prison will become a powerful symbol of resistance, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who worked for the Kremlin until 2011.
Risks for Putin
“In the short term, the risks to the Kremlin are not great, but they can be very significant if Navalny becomes a constant trigger for anti-Putin protests,” said Pavlovsky. “It will not disappear entirely and will continue to play an important role.”
With his return from Germany, despite the threat of arrest, Navalny may also have revoked Putin’s plans for his eventual departure from the presidency because that would be too risky now, according to Pavlovsky.
Only opposition rallies do not threaten Putin, whose main challenge is to keep his entourage loyal, according to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the State University of Administration who has studied the Russian elite for the past three decades.
“The two sides are so unequal that the only thing that can bring about change is an internal coup,” she said.
– With the help of Evgenia Pismennaya