Riot police face protesters on January 23 during a rally in support of Navalny in central Moscow.
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images
Lyudmila Shtein, a 24-year-old Muscovite and municipal deputy, is under house arrest until May and faces two years in prison for encouraging people to join a protest last month. She is one of more than 11,000 people arrested in the past two weeks after the largest display of resistance to President Vladimir Putin in years.
While social media has been inundated with reports of police violence, including beatings, one For the time being, the Kremlin’s actions have managed to stop the unrest caused by the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. No more demonstrations are planned until the spring, but after more than two decades in power, Putin has not extinguished the threat to his rule.
“If we continue to protest every weekend, there will simply be thousands more detained and hundreds beaten, and the work of our campaign agencies will be paralyzed and we will not be able to prepare for elections,” said a top Navalny ally Leonid in parliament in September. Volkov, who is out of the country and wanted by the Russian authorities. “This is not what we want and it is not what Alexey has asked us to do,” he told TV Rain.
Putin, 68, digs in as Navalny tries to stir up the discontent fueled by years of declining living standards and the recession sparked by the Coronavirus pandemic. Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, has one series of revelations focused on Putin and his inner circle, building a following of millions.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in dozens of cities in Russia for two weekends in a row, alarming and provocative a violent response from the authorities, who accuse Navalny of cooperating with foreign governments to try to destabilize the regime.
Navalny has received the most support of all opposition politicians in Russia, “although his constituency remains quite narrow at the moment,” said Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist who correctly predicted the biggest anti-Putin protests a decade ago.
For now, the majority of Russians are preoccupied with the need to survive, but as the economic situation stabilizes, “the demand for political rights and freedoms and the rule of law will increase” and more people will be ready to confront the authorities, he said.
Navalny, 44, was detained as he arrived from Germany in mid-January, where he was recovering from a nervous attack that he said was Putin’s attempt 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 breaking the probation period of a 2014 conditional con sentence, including while he was recovering in Berlin from a coma.
Russian detectives are also prosecuting many of Navalny’s aides and have warned they could charge him with further crimes related to other allegations of fraud that could add another 10 years of punishment.
International criticism
Despite international criticism, Russia has rejected US and Europe’s call to liberate Navalny despite the risk of new sanctions and on Friday sent three diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden for attending the meetings.
While previous waves of protests have also led to mass arrests and prosecutions, this time the authorities have been more ruthless.
Putin, Poison and the Importance of Alexey Navalny: QuickTake
Lawyers say they cannot access detainees, protesters have spent hours in police vans without food, water and even heat, and photos on social media showed people crammed into cells with open latrines and beds with metal frames and no mattresses. .
Aliona Kitaeva, a volunteer who works for a Navalny assistant, said police put a plastic bag on her head, pushed her around, and threatened electric shocks to force her to provide the password for her cell phone. Four officers were in the cell that did not have a security camera, she said.
Navalny is escorted from a police station in Khimki, Russia, on January 18.
Photographer: Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty Images
“I was subjected to physical and psychological abuse: it amounted to torture,” she told Current Time TV, just before she was 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 in prison will be a powerful symbol of resistance, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political adviser who worked for the Kremlin until 2011.
Risks to Putin
“In the short term, the risks to the Kremlin are not great, but they could be very great if Navalny becomes a constant trigger for protests against Putin,” Pavlovsky said. “He will not disappear completely and will continue to play a major role.”
With his return from Germany despite the threat of arrest, Navalny may also have turned Putin’s plans for his eventual exit from the presidency on its head because it would be too risky now, Pavlovsky said.
According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the State University of Management who has studied Russia’s elite for the past three decades, opposition rallies alone will not threaten Putin, whose main challenge is to keep his entourage loyal.
“The two sides are so unequal that the only thing that can change it is an internal coup,” she said.
– With the help of Evgenia Pismennaya