MOSCOW – A day after protests swept through Russia in support of a jailed opposition leader, authorities said on Monday that some participants face severe punishments, including spells in the prison system once known as the gulag.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov told journalists in a conference call on Monday that the protests “included a large number of hooligans and provocateurs” and that “the law must be applied with the utmost rigor”.
For the second consecutive weekend, tens of thousands of people came to cities across Russia on Sunday to advocate for the release of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader who was sentenced to 30 days in jail last month after returning to Russia.
Navalny returned from recovery in a German hospital after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in August, an attack confirmed by German, French and Swedish laboratories.
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption activist who has been active in street protests in Russia for ten years, said the Kremlin was behind the poisoning and wanted to kill him. The Russian government has denied this and has questioned whether Mr Navalny was really poisoned.
The near-fatal dose of poison, an advanced nerve agent called Novichok, developed by the Soviet Union, was put into Mr Navalny’s underwear, according to the opposition leader, citing what he said was a recorded confession of a Russian agent.
Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, although authorities threatened to arrest him on arrival. He was subsequently detained for violating parole on the basis of a 2014 financial crime conviction that was politically motivated according to the European Court of Human Rights.
Mr Navalny said the financial crime was fabricated by the Russian authorities and called allegations of violation of parole absurd as he was unable to report to a probation officer twice a month as he was being evacuated from Russia to Germany while in a coma lay after the attack with nerve gas.
He has been in custody for 30 days. On Tuesday, a court is considering imposing a prison sentence that could put him behind bars for several years.
The Attorney General’s office issued a statement on Monday saying Navalny should be incarcerated for the parole violations, virtually assuring that outcome, as judges have only a small number of cases in Russian prosecutors’ requests. defy criminal justice system.
Politically, imprisonment would indicate a shift in President Vladimir V Putin’s administration of Navalny. For years he often served short sentences on minor charges, but never jailed.
The incarceration of political dissidents usually stopped in the immediate post-Soviet period, but was revived, on a small and focused scale, under Mr Putin.
After street protests in Moscow in 2012, courts sentenced several dozen of the tens of thousands of protesters to lengthy prison terms, seemingly exemplifying others.
These several dozen cases received widespread publicity to highlight the illegality of unsanctioned street action, but the approach prevented large numbers of Moscow families from becoming angry with prosecution, threatening a spiral of oppression and protest. In contrast, in neighboring Belarus, police have held at least hundreds of protesters against the government for extended periods since last summer.
During Sunday’s protest, police across Russia detained 5,300 people, although many were released later in the day.
It is unclear how wide the net the prosecutors will now cast. Several dozen cases were reported that could lead to spells in prison.
Kremlin spokesman, Mr Peskov, referred to people who were “more or less aggressive” towards the police when they called for severe punishment. “There should be no talks with hooligans and provocateurs,” he said.
Supporters of Mr Navalny said in a statement published online Monday that they expected prosecutors to justify allegations of riots against protesters based on two incidents: a police car that caught fire and a man on an otherwise empty street walking into a line of police with a club. Police issued a statement saying they were investigating the car fire as vandalism.
The statement noted that the two episodes were exposed on pro-government media and could justify prosecuting participants in the marches on allegations of riots, which carry long sentences. In Russia, short sentences are served in prisons, while most longer terms are served in penal colonies.