Mass rallies sweep Russia in protests over Alexei Navalny’s arrest

From the frozen streets of Russia’s Far East and Siberia to the grand plazas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians rallied in support of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Saturday in the biggest nationwide showdown in years between the Kremlin and its opponents.

The protests largely drew young Russians and did not immediately pose a dire threat to President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. But their broad scope signaled widespread fatigue with the stagnant, corruption-plagued political order that Putin has presided over for two decades.

The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country of 11 time zones, and they moved like a wave across the sprawling nation, despite a heavy police presence and a drumbeat of menacing warnings to stay away on state media.

Read: 2100 arrested at protests demanding Navalny's release

By early evening in Moscow, more than 1,900 people had been arrested across the country, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks arrests at protests. Among those taken into custody in Moscow — and later released — was Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who posted a photo of herself in a police wagon on Instagram.

The protests came six days after Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist, was himself arrested upon his arrival in Moscow on a flight from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from poisoning by a military-grade nerve agent. Western officials and Navalny have described the poisoning, which took place in Siberia in August, as an assassination attempt by the Russian state. The Kremlin denies this.

Navalny, who now faces a yearslong prison term, called on his supporters across the country to take to the streets on Saturday. They numbered some 40,000 in Moscow, according to a Reuters estimate. The demonstrators there blocked traffic on central roadways and at one point pelted the police with snowballs. Thousands more marched down St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, and gathered in the main squares of numerous Siberian cities.

Video showed police officers scuffling with demonstrators in Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean and in Khabarovsk, another city in the Far East. In the usually quiet city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, a fishing and energy hub on an island north of Japan, hundreds of people joined the protests.

Read: Russia accuses US diplomats of publishing Navalny rally routes

As the crowd in Moscow swelled in size in the afternoon, the situation grew increasingly tense in Pushkin Square, the focal point of the protest in the capital.

Police officers rushed into groups of protesters, swinging batons. Some in the crowd responded by throwing objects, including what appeared to be plastic bottles, at the police. Hundreds of protesters then began walking away from the square along a boulevard that rings the center of Moscow. Chants of “Putin is a thief” rang out.

By 9 p.m. in Moscow, the protests had largely died down. But Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Navalny, said supporters would organize more protests next weekend.

“Without a doubt this whole story is just beginning,” Volkov said in a live broadcast on YouTube

In all, it appeared to be the biggest day of protest across the country since at least 2017.

But the number of protesters was far lower than in demonstrations last year in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, where hundreds of thousands turned out to protest claims of a landslide reelection victory in August by President Alexander Lukashenko.

After months of huge protests in Belarus, however, Lukashenko remains firmly in power, a possible sign that Putin has little to fear from far smaller displays of dissent in Russia.

“I’m a bit disappointed, honestly,” said Nikita Melekhin, a 21-year-old a nurse in Moscow. “I was expecting more.”

But the scope of the protests in a country where political activism is often confined to Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, indicated that discontent has seeped into even the most remote parts of the country. Saturday’s protests drew the largest crowds ever for Navalny outside the capital, Russian media reported.

In the cities of Vladivostok in the Far East and Irkutsk and Novosibirsk in Siberia, footage showed crowds of well over 1,000 people shouting chants like “We are in charge here!” and “We won’t leave!”

In Yakutsk, often cited as the world’s coldest city, scores of protesters in the freezing fog braved temperatures of minus 60 Fahrenheit. In Khabarovsk, the city on the Chinese border that was the site of anti-Kremlin protests last summer, hundreds who returned to the streets were met with an overwhelming force of riot police officers.

Opinion polls in recent months — of uncertain value in a country saturated by state propaganda and where people are often fearful of speaking out — have indicated that Putin faces no grave challenge to his popularity from Navalny, whose name has never been allowed to appear on a presidential ballot. Putin refuses to utter his name in public.

A November survey of opinion by the Levada Center, an independent and highly respected polling organization, found that only 2% of respondents named Navalny as their first choice when asked whom they would choose if a presidential election were to be held the following Sunday. Fifty-five percent named Putin.

Such polls, however, say less about the level of Navalny’s popularity than the Kremlin’s success in considering even the possibility of an alternative to Putin, who has been in power for so many years that he has become a seemingly immovable fixture.

Nevertheless, Navalny’s dramatic return to Russia last Sunday — and his video report about Putin’s purported secret palace, which has been viewed 70 million times on YouTube — have raised the opposition leader’s prominence across the country.

Vasily Zimin, a 47-year-old partner in a Moscow law firm, trudged through slush and said he had come to protest the rampant corruption during Putin’s time in power.

“The cup is full,” he said, adding: “How can you say, ‘I can’t take any more of this’ while sitting on your couch?”

At regular intervals during his two decades in power, Putin has faced what leaders in most countries would shrug off as inconsequential protests by a few thousand people threatening no more than sporadic traffic disruptions.

But each time, and again on Saturday in cities across Russia, modest challenges from the street have turned into serious spectacles of dissent thanks to the overwhelming response of the country’s vast and often brutal security apparatus.

In Moscow on Saturday, riot police officers wearing black helmets and swinging batons began grabbing people in Pushkin Square even before the start of the protest.

The deployment of so many security officers illustrated how nervously the Kremlin views deviations from the portrayal of Putin as Russia’s inviolable supreme leader. Putin was silent on the protests, though the Kremlin spokesman did find time to announce that Putin felt sad over the death of the American talk show host Larry King.