Riot police are in front of protesters during a rally in support of Navalny in central Moscow on January 23.
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 faces up to two years in prison for encouraging people to join a protest last month. She is among more than 11,000 people in the last two weeks, after the biggest show of defiance towards President Vladimir Putin in recent years.
As social media was flooded with reports of police brutality, including beatings, The repression of the Kremlin has so far managed to stop the unrest triggered by the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. No further demonstrations are planned until the 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 be thousands more detainees and hundreds beaten, and the activity of our campaign offices will be paralyzed and we will not be able to prepare for the elections,” he told parliament in September. Navalny’s ally, Leonid Volkov, was abroad and wanted by the Russian authorities. “That’s not what we want and Alexey didn’t ask us to do it,” he told TV Rain.
Putin, 68, is digging as Navalny tries to galvanize the years-long dissatisfaction with declining living standards and the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, produced a a series of exhibitions targeting Putin and his inner circle and have built a series of millions in the process.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in dozens of Russian cities for two weekends in a row, sounding the alarm and provoking a violent response from the authorities, accusing Navalny of working with foreign governments to try to destabilize the regime.
Navalny has garnered the most support from any opposition politician in Russia, “although his constituency remains fairly tight for now,” said Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist who correctly predicted the biggest anti-Putin protests in a decade.
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 increase” and more people may be willing to confront the authorities. said.
Navalny, 44, was detained as he arrived in mid-January in Germany, where he recovered from a nervous breakdown that he said was an attempt by Putin to kill him. The Kremlin denies any role in poisoning. Navalny is now the most famous prisoner in Russia. A court in Moscow on February 2 sentenced him to two years and eight months for violating the probationary conditions of a 2014 suspended sentence, including when he was cured in Berlin after a coma.
Russian investigators are also prosecuting many of Navalny’s aides and have warned that he could be charged with other crimes related to other fraud charges that could add another 10 years in prison.
International criticism
Against international criticism, Russia has rejected US and European calls for the release of Navalny despite the risk of further sanctions on Friday. expelled three diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden for attending rallies.
While past waves of protests have also triggered mass arrests and prosecutions, the authorities have been more ruthless this time.
Putin, poison and the importance of Alexey Navalny: QuickTake
Lawyers say they have no access to detainees, protesters spent hours in police vans, without food, water and even heat, and photos posted on social media showed people crammed into cells with open latrines and beds with metal frames and no mattresses .
Aliona Kitaeva, a volunteer working for a Navalny assistant, said police put a plastic bag over her head, pushed her and threatened her with electric shocks to force her to give her mobile phone password. Four officers were present in the cell, which had no surveillance camera, she said.
Navalny is escorted to a police station in Khimki, Russia, on January 18.
Photographer: Alexander Nemenov / AFP / Getty Images
“I was subjected to physical and psychological abuse: it meant torture,” she told Current Time TV just before she was sentenced to 12 days for participating in an unapproved protest.
Putin’s tactics may succeed in intimidating the opposition in the near future, but Navalny in prison will become a strong 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 high, but they can be very significant if Navalny becomes a constant trigger for anti-Putin protests,” Pavlovsky said. “It will not disappear completely and will continue to play a major role.”
With his return from Germany, despite the threat of arrest, Navalny could also have avenged Putin’s plans for his eventual exit from the presidency, as this would be too risky now, according to Pavlovsky.
Opposition rallies alone will not threaten Putin, whose main challenge is to remain loyal to his entourage, according to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the State University of Management who has studied Russia’s 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 assistance of Evgenia Pismennaya