As the rioters flocked to retake Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Saturday, all you could see of them in the crowd was their upright batons, ready to attack. Then, their black helmets appeared, and finally they moved forward, taking waves of panicked Russians to the boulevards and side streets of the capital. “Respected citizens, the current event is illegal. We are doing everything to ensure your safety, ”repeated a policeman over the speaker, despite all evidence to the contrary.
For more than a decade, the Kremlin has used every tool at its disposal to keep Russians off the streets, using fear and boredom to make the protests against Vladimir Putin seem meaningless. Still, in challenging scenes on Saturday in cities across Russia, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and even Yakutsk, where protesters faced temperatures below -50 ° C, tens of thousands of Russians sent a message to a Kremlin that expelled all opposition in Russia: it is enough.
While the police struggled to regain control of city squares, some protesters responded by throwing snowballs and exchanging blows with police in body armor. Many others shouted for Putin to leave, exchanged jokes, filmed Instagram stories and ran to stay one step ahead of the police, who chased them around the city.
The spark was the arrest of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader allegedly poisoned by the FSB. But many of the tens of thousands in Moscow said the problems were deeper, linked to Putin and his two decades of control over the country.
“I had stopped protesting for a long time, everything seemed meaningless,” said Yulia Makhovaya, 45, who attended with her 18-year-old son Nikolai. “But something today made me feel like I had to come. Navalny was just the last straw. “
Saturday’s protests were one of the biggest demonstrations against the Putin government in the past decade. More than 2,500 people were arrested at dozens of unsanctioned rallies across the country, calling for the release of the opposition leader from prison, as attendance far exceeded the expectations of many protesters.
Navalny’s allies hope to be able to force the Kremlin to release him through a show of force, but it is not clear whether the protests will break the government’s determination to send Putin’s determined critic to prison for up to a decade.
Clashes erupted when police wielding batons expelled protesters from major squares in Moscow and several other cities, and columns of protesters broke through police lines in Moscow and St. Petersburg, leading to pitched street battles.
The police sometimes seemed to be losing control. In Moscow, the video showed protesters exchanging blows with riot police near the main protest site, while young protesters kicked a police helmet like a football. In St. Petersburg, protesters closed the city’s main street, Nevsky Prospekt, and Navalny’s team finally had to make a call for them to return home.
Russia’s National Investigative Committee said it opened an investigation into violence against police officers on Saturday night. A spokeswoman for the US embassy condemned the violence against protesters, accusing Moscow of suppressing Russians’ rights to peaceful protest.
No one died, but several protesters appear to have been seriously injured, including a photo bleeding from the head and another who appeared unconscious when he was placed in a police van. Another protester, who was rubbing snow on a bruise below his right eye to reduce swelling, told the Observer he had been hit in the face with a baton twice.
The biggest protests took place in Moscow, where a crowd estimated by Reuters at 40,000 people gathered in a square in the center of the city dominated by a statue of the poet Alexander Pushkin. “Get out!” protesters shouted, asking Putin to step down.
The demonstrations were some of the largest in Moscow since 2012, when more than 100,000 protested failed elections, as well as Putin’s plans to return to the Kremlin for a third term.
These protests were sparked by Navalny’s arrest last Sunday, when he was returning from treatment abroad after his poisoning. A parole commission could send him to a penal colony in late January.
“We feel really bad for Navalny. You don’t have to be a chess master to understand what would happen to him, ”said Natalya Krainova, a former teacher who brought a copy of the constitution with her to the square because she guaranteed her right to protest. “Unless we continue to leave [to protest], the problem in this country will never go away. And that problem is Putin. “
The police appeared to be targeting Navalny’s young supporters, with bands of helmeted officers diving into the crowd to arrest them. Artyom, a 19-year-old who studies at a Moscow university of economics, said the students were warned on Friday not to protest or face the consequences, which he understood to be expulsion.
“They are afraid of losing control over young people, who they think they should be for Putin, they should be grateful to him,” he said. “Much of my [classmates] I was afraid to leave today. “
Vladislav, a 24-year-old sound technician with facial tattoos, said young people are fed up with the lack of change. “It seems impossible,” he said.
The Investigative Committee also opened a criminal investigation into social media calls for school children to attend the rallies, focusing on an explosion of posts on platforms like TikTok in support of the opposition leader.
“Special respect for all students who did what my lawyers call ‘chaos at TikTok’. I’m not sure what that means, but it looks cool, ‘”said Navalny from his prison cell on the night of the protest, according to his team.
In his comments, Navalny also thanked those who supported him and watched a recent investigation broadcast on TouTube about a £ 1 billion palace on the Black Sea allegedly built for Putin. From Saturday
night, he was seen 70 million times.
“I know there are a lot of good people out of this prison and that help is coming,” said Navalny.
The Kremlin did not immediately respond to protests. Putin’s only public comments were to mark the passing of Larry King, the American talk show host.
Public protests have saved Navalny from prison before. In 2013, he was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly embezzling funds from a timber company in the city of Kirov.
But on the day he was sentenced, thousands of protesters broke out on the street in front of the Kremlin, stopping traffic in front of Red Square, right in front of the State Duma. The next day, Navalny’s sentence was switched to parole and the opposition leader was suddenly sacked. The embarrassing turnaround proved what many already knew: court decisions depend on the Kremlin’s whims.
“It is clear that only public pressure, only street protests can remove Alexei from Matrosskaya Tishina, where he was placed by Putin,” said Leonid Volkov, a Navalny ally and one of his few advisers who was not detained last week. “That’s what Putin is more afraid of than anything on earth.”
Navalny’s advisers said they believed the 2013 strategy would work in 2020, but the protests would have to be much bigger, because Navalny had gone from simply an enemy of the Kremlin to someone whom Putin described as a “traitor”.
Analysts said it was unlikely that Navalny would be released from prison this time, but that strong participation in cities across the country would be an important statement.
“Navalny will not be launched,” said Mark Galeotti, a senior associate member of the Royal United Services research institute. “The protests aim, more than anything else, to make the Kremlin pay a price for this and demonstrate that putting a man behind bars is not going to kill his movement.”