SATURDAY’S MOSCOW rally was smaller than the massive assemblies in the Russian capital after the parliamentary elections in December but the demonstrators remained cheerful and optimistic. Some of their leaders, however, seemed less enthusiastic.
The popular writer Boris Akunin has already returned to his home in Saint Malo. The right-wing anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny attended the rally but inexplicably did not speak.
Others kept the anti-Putin struggle going. The chess champion Garry Kasparov denigrated the candidates who opposed Putin on the ballot paper but not on the streets. They were like the characters in popular Soviet films: Trus, a nervous hypochondriac; Balbes, a heavy drinker with a red nose; and Byvaly, a tough guy and the leader of the gang.
He called for a president with a sense of humour, a demand that would have been appreciated by those who tell a joke doing the rounds: Vladimir Churov, head of the central election commission tells prime minister Putin he has good news and bad news. Putin wants the good news first and Churov replies: “The good news is you have been elected president of the Russian Federation. The bad news is nobody voted for you.”
As usual the left-wing Sergei Udaltsov gave a stirring speech and as usual he was arrested afterwards. He, Navalny and Ilya Yashin had also been taken in by the police after the Pushkin Square demonstration on March 5th. There would be more demonstrations, Udaltsov told the crowd and, giving a hostage to fortune, called for millions to take to the streets on May 1st.
The police said 10,000 people were present and the organisers said 25,000. But there were other more accurate and more powerful statistics to be taken into account.
Despite claims of falsification and the carefully limited choice offered to voters on the ballot paper, almost 54 per cent of those who voted in Moscow cast their ballots against Mr Putin. This carries far more weight than comparisons between the 100,000 who attended Mr Putin’s victory rally on Manege Square on March 4th and the much smaller group at Novy Arbat on Saturday.
In the latest poll issued by the usually reliable Levada Centre and conducted throughout Russia, respondents were asked who they would like to see elected in the 2018 presidential elections. Just 19 per cent opted for Mr Putin.
Mr Putin has his own figures to comfort him. His opponents admit that he won the election. They dispute only his margin of victory and they are angry at the limited choice offered on the ballot paper and his near-total dominance of airtime on the major TV networks.
As for the attendance on Novy Arbat, a long street of high-rise building built in the 1960s, the police have always underestimated opposition rallies, so the attendance was obviously more than 10,000. The real attendance was particularly difficult to gauge because the nature of the rally was different to previous demonstrations and there was a constant coming and going of people through the sunny but bitterly cold afternoon.
Those I spoke too were cheerful and happy, in far better spirits than at the demo on Pushkin Square five days earlier. The ladies from the Dorogomilovsky area were in particularly good spirits. Their candidates after all had been successful in the local elections that took place in tandem with the presidential poll.
The newly elected Zoya Shargatova, deputy head of the pro-western Yabloko Party in the Moscow region, rejected suggestions that fissures were opening between militant and moderate elements in the opposition. A leader of her party, Sergei Mitrokhin, had earlier labelled Udaltsov, Navalny and Yashin as “adventurists”, but she took a more lenient view.
“They’re just young. They want to get everything done immediately. We older people support peaceful protests.” Her colleague Natalia Belyayeva, who teaches criminal law at a Moscow college, admitted the struggle was becoming “more severe”, but she was undeterred by this and marched on to the row of metal detectors through which all demonstrators in Russia must pass.
There had been scuffles after the March 5th event on Pushkin Square and that’s why Ivan Gurov (33) Daria Poshukina (31) and Dmitriy Mosolov (30) came to Novy Arbat. All three work for the mobile phone group Beeline.
Dmitriy had voted for the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov in the election, while Daria and Ivan cast their ballots for the billionaire independent Mikhail Prokhorov who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball time in the US.
Dmitriy disagreed with the results of the elections, Ivan said he wanted to show the authorities that there were many people who did not support them. Daria said she came because the Omon riot police should see that the arrests they made on Pushkin Square had not scared people away.
