MOSCOW – When the team of the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, asked people to go out in their residential yards and shine their mobile phone flashlights in a unity rally, many responded with jokes and skepticism. After two weekends of demonstrations nationwide, the new protest format looked to some like a retreat.
But not to the Russian authorities, who moved vigorously to extinguish the enlightened protests planned on Sunday.
Officials have accused Navalny’s allies of acting on NATO instructions. Kremlin-backed TV channels warned that flashlight rallies were part of major riots around the world. State news agencies quoted unnamed sources as saying that a terrorist group was planning attacks during unapproved mass protests.
Suppression attempts are a change of tactics for the authorities who once tried to weaken Navalny’s influence by erasing him.
Kremlin-controlled TV channels used to largely ignore Navalny’s protests. Russian President Vladimir Putin has never mentioned his most prominent critic by name. State news agencies referred to the anti-corruption politician and investigator as “a blogger” in the rare stories they conducted mentioning him.
“Navalny went from a person whose name is not allowed to be mentioned to the main topic of discussion” on state television, Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at the Navalny Foundations to Fight Corruption, said in a YouTube video on Friday .
Pevchikh credited Navalny’s latest exposition for the sudden surge of attention. The video of his foundation, which lasted two hours, claiming that a generous Black Sea palace was built for Putin through elaborate corruption has been viewed over 111 million times on YouTube since it was posted on January 19.
The video was released two days after Navalny was arrested on his return to Russia from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from the nerve poisoning he blames on the Kremlin. The Russian government denies involvement and said it had no evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
While the high-level arrest and subsequent exposure were a double whammy for authorities, political analyst and former Kremlin speech writer Abbas Gallyamov says keeping Navalny and his work out of the airwaves would deprive him of additional publicity. it doesn’t make sense anymore.
“The fact that this strategy has changed suggests that the pro-government television audience somehow receives information about Navalny’s activities through other channels, he admits, is interested in his work and, in this sense, keeping silence makes no sense,” he said. Gallyamov.
Weekend protests in dozens of cities last month over Navalny’s detention were the biggest outpouring of popular discontent in recent years and appear to have shaken the Kremlin.
Police in riot gear stormed a rally on Friday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck. Police in riot gear stormed a rally on Friday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck.
TV channels broadcast images of empty markets in cities where protests were announced and claimed that few people showed up. Some reports described the police as polite and restrained, claiming that officers helped people with disabilities cross crowded streets, handed masks in front of protesters and offered them hot tea.
Once the protests were extinguished and Navalny’s ally, Leonid Volkov, announced a break until the spring, the Kremlin-backed media reported that the basic flash mobs entitled “Putin is our president” began to sweep the country. . The state news channel Rossiya 24 broadcast videos of various cities of people dancing to patriotic songs and waving Russian flags, describing them as a genuine expression of support for Putin.
Several independent online stores reported that instructions to record videos in support of Putin came from the Kremlin and the ruling United Russia party, and that people featured in some recordings were invited to film under false pretenses.
Russian President Dmitry Peskov’s spokesman said the Kremlin had nothing to do with pro-Putin videos.
After Navalny’s team posted a video of the palace that would have been built for Putin, the Rossiya state channel broadcast Navalny’s own exhibition. Anchor Dmitry Kiselev said that while working on the investigation in Germany, Navalny lived “in the luxury he despises so much.”
The reporter sent to chronicle the alleged lifestyle that the politician maintained abroad filmed inside a house that Navalny rented, but failed to capture luxury items in the two-story building, which had several bedrooms and a small pool.
She pointed to “two sofas, a TV, fresh fruit on the table” in the living room and “a kitchen with a coffee maker” and described a bedroom as “luxurious”, although it didn’t look much different from a room in a hotel. business.
In recent days, the official media coverage has focused on the protest plans of the lanterns in the yard this weekend. The reports quoted extensively on the social media post of Navalny, an ally of Volkov, who announced the event and accused him of acting on the instructions of his Western leaders, indicating an online conference with European officials he had attended the day before.
The political talk show “60 Minutes” devoted almost half an hour to the subject, calling the flashlight an idea from a textbook about revolutions. He broadcast images of protesters shining lanterns during the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, mass rallies in Belarus last summer and other uprisings around the world.
On Thursday, state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti reported, citing anonymous sources, that a terrorist group in Syria was preparing insurgents for possible terrorist attacks in Russian cities “in mass rally locations.”
The reports did not address specific protests. Public warnings against “unauthorized public events” were also not issued on Thursday by the General Prosecutor’s Office and Russia’s Interior Ministry, although the ministry mentioned events “planned for the nearest period”.
“The Kremlin is terribly frightened by the action of the flashlight,” because such a peaceful and easy event would allow the opposition to build a relationship with new supporters who are not ready to be more visible and involved in protests, Volkov said in a YouTube video .
He suggested that the difficult response to the announcement actually helped dispel skepticism about the court demonstrations.
“I saw a lot of posts on social media (saying)” When Navalny’s headquarters announced the flashlight rally, I thought what nonsense … But when I saw the Kremlin’s reaction, I realized they were right to come with he. ”