And Civic Platform. The event was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the events on Bolotnaya Square when the protest of the opposition resulted in riots and clashes with the police. According to the organizers, the rally was supposed to be a kind of summing up the results of the five years that have passed since the “bolotnaya”.
The rally on Bolotnaya Square in 2012 ended with mass arrests - more than 400 people were taken to police stations. After that, more than 30 people appeared in court. The whole lawsuit is known as the “Swamp Case”, which became the largest criminal case against the participants of the protest movement in the first half of the 2010s.
Today's event, in turn, was agreed with the authorities and there were no incidents.
The police completely shut down road traffic along Sakharov Avenue from Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street to the Boulevard Ring.
The event was scheduled for 13.00, but its start was delayed by about half an hour. According to eyewitnesses, this was due to the fact that even before the start of the rally, the police asked the organizers to remove some of the banners that were elements of the scenery on the stage.
Data on the number of participants in the rally at the capital's Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation and observers, as usual, differ.
The rally participants shouted the slogans that have already become traditional: “We are the power here!”, “Russia without Putin!”, “Be realistic - demand the impossible!”.
In addition, the same demand, repeated from rally to rally, was put forward to release the “prisoners of Bolotnaya” - those who are serving sentences in colonies for participating in mass riots in the center of the capital five years ago.
The rally ended at 15.00, after which the participants began to disperse.
At the same time, on Bolotnaya Square, activists who did not join the rally against Sakharov staged a rally in support of the person involved in the Bolotnaya case. According to the OVD-Info website, seven people were detained here.
“Only Navalny knows how to protest”
The head of the Center for Economic and Political Reforms, Nikolai, believes that the political successes of the opposition parties and movements that organized the actions on May 6 are rather modest. Therefore, they lost the ability to mobilize their supporters, and the main opposition protest movement moved to, said the interlocutor of Gazeta.Ru. Navalny showed how protest moods should be used in today's conditions, the political scientist believes.
“In addition to Navalny, Yabloko has some opportunities for mobilization, and PARNAS has less,” Mironov added. As for the "Civil Platform", the political scientist considers it just a pro-government "fake". And the appearance of the GP at the rally on May 6 connects with the interest of the authorities in the protests.
Yabloko's problem is that they have not been able to achieve significant political success. PARNAS, in turn, has a weak leader, Mironov added. But the main problem of the oppositionists who came to Sakharov and Bolotnaya today is that each individual movement feels like a "separate corporation", and therefore there is no unification, the source of Gazeta.Ru believes.
Mironov believes that fragments of the protest potential of 2011-2012 should be looked for not at today's rally, but at the rally against corruption on March 26, inspired by the same Navalny. This action took place in a number of Russian cities and in some was allowed by local authorities. In the capital, the event was not sanctioned.
“Of course, someone broke away from the previous protest, but new activists also came into it,” the political scientist said. - The current situation is such that Navalny does not really need other forces. And they can’t collect much without him,” Mironov sums up.
The head of the Petersburg Politics Foundation believes that in addition to large protest actions, there have always been separate rallies with a smaller number of participants. Actually, in 2011-2012 it was the same.
“Sometimes there is a desire to try to do something yourself. Everyone thinks: “Navalny succeeded, so we will succeed,” the political scientist argues in an interview with Gazeta.Ru.
However, in his opinion, the largest number supporters are collected by those actions where their applicants do not claim unequivocal leadership.
“The fewer illusions the organizers of the action have about their leadership, the more participants they have. The more attempts to make ordinary participants "infantrymen", the fewer these participants, ”the expert argues.
March not quite millions
On May 6, 2012, the day before the inauguration of the President of Russia, the opposition held the so-called "March of Millions" in Moscow. It was then that the slogan "Russia without Putin" became widely popular, and was later used during the events of the liberal opposition, regardless of whether they were sanctioned by local authorities or not.
Despite the fact that the "March of Millions" did not gather a million people, the procession turned out to be large-scale - according to various sources, from 7 thousand to 120 thousand people took part in it.
He was the main organizer of the event. The procession was supposed to go from Kaluga to Bolotnaya Square and end with a rally. However, on the way to Bolotnaya, the leaders of the convoy had a conflict with law enforcement officers: the organizers of the march accused the police of changing the agreed scheme for holding the event.
Navalny and Udaltsov announced a sit-in in front of the police cordon, after some time there were calls to break through the cordon. As a result, the marchers succeeded, but the subsequent actions of the protesters led to riots, clashes with the police and mass arrests.
According to the Interior Ministry, 400 people were detained. According to the opposition - about 700. The investigation found out that Sergei Udaltsov called for unrest and - they received 4.5 years in prison. Other participants in the clashes were sentenced to lesser terms. Several defendants in the so-called swamp case were eventually amnestied, and one was sent for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric clinic.
On May 6, 2012, shortly after the presidential elections, an agreed-upon opposition "March of Millions" was to take place in Moscow, including a rally on Bolotnaya Square. The action resulted in unprecedented clashes with the police and mass detentions of protesters. As a result, more than 30 people became defendants in the “bolotnaya case”. What happened on Bolotnaya Square five years ago - in the RBC photo gallery
On May 6, 2012, the "March of Millions" was held on Bolotnaya Square - a protest action against the results of the presidential elections. It was agreed, but escalated into mass arrests and clashes with the police, which, in turn, led to criminal cases, united in the so-called swamp case.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 8 thousand people took part in the action, eyewitnesses reported tens of thousands of participants.
The opposition attributed the causes of the clashes to the fact that the square on Bolotnaya Square and the bridges on the way to it were blocked on the way of the column, and a chain of OMON was put up in front of the Maly Kamenny Bridge. According to the organizers, there was no such agreement with the authorities.
This is also stated in the case file, where it is said that “the cartographic decision and the plan were not agreed with the organizers of the public event, the public and the participants of the event were not brought, because These documents are of an official nature.
Clashes with the police began at the moment when the protesters broke through the cordon. Previously leading politicians, including Alexei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov and Boris Nemtsov, staged a sit-in to keep people from moving forward. The breaking of the cordon and the strike were described in the case file as part of a plan to "organize mass riots."
85 police officers and soldiers were recognized as victims of the riots. internal troops and only two civilians.
Photo: Mikhail Voskresensky / Reuters
Most of the detainees were charged with participating in mass riots (part 2 of article 212 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and of using violence against police officers (part 1 of article 318 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
The trial of the detainees took place in several stages. The first 12 people ended up in the dock in June 2012. The "second wave" of arrests in the case began in February 2013. The arrests of the accused continued in 2015 and 2016.
In September 2015, the ECtHR Russia will pay €7,000 to Artem Savelov, Leonid Kovyazin and Ilya Gushchin, defendants in the Bolotnaya Square riot case. In January 2016, the Russian authorities appealed against the decision of the European Court. At the same time, the Russian court will pay compensation in the amount of €25,000 to oppositionist Yevgeny Frumkin and another €7,000 as compensation for legal costs. During the proceedings, the court concluded that it was the actions of the police that led to the escalation of the conflict on Bolotnaya Square.
Several other cases are pending before the ECtHR.
The organizers of the "March of Millions" Sergey Udaltsov and Leonid Razvozzhaev were convicted as organizers of "mass riots" and received 4.5 years in prison. According to investigators, they staged clashes between activists and the police for money and on the order of the Georgian politician Givi Targamadze. Razvozzhaev was released on April 7, 2017. Udaltsov's term of imprisonment expires in August of this year.
The Moscow Mayor's Office agreed to hold a protest in the center of Moscow on May 6, the day of the fifth anniversary of the opposition rally on Bolotnaya Square, which turned into clashes between activists and law enforcement officers, mass detentions and the so-called "bolotnaya case"
Moscow-Live.ru
"We agreed on a procession along Sakharov Avenue, from Boulevard to the Garden Ring," Alexander Ryklin, one of the organizers of the action, confirmed to journalists (quoted by Interfax). According to him, the rally following the procession was not agreed upon, but the start time of the action and its number remained the same - 14:00 and 10,000 people.
Another member of the organizing committee, former State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov, in turn, explained to RBC that activists from the Civil Initiative, Yabloko, PARNAS, the Organizing Committee of Protest Actions and other opposition parties and movements would take part in the action.
"The theme of the rally is May 6 five years ago, and the repressions that are taking place today, and the attacks, and the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and the creation of draconian conditions for the current opposition," Gudkov said. He noted that the working title of the rally is "Against arbitrariness and repression."
According to him, the mayor's office proposed to hold a rally "with inside Sakharov Avenue, between the Garden and Boulevard Rings, "and the organizing committee agreed with this proposal. "Tomorrow we will formalize it and declare a rally with a population of 10 thousand people," Gudkov confirmed.
The day before it was reported that the Moscow mayor's office refused to allow the oppositionists to hold a rally in the center of the capital. Instead, the officials offered the opposition alternative venues for the rally: the area from the Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station to the Shchukinskaya metro station or Lyublino.
The opposition applied to the Moscow Mayor's Office to hold a march and rally on May 6 on Bolotnaya Square last Monday, April 24. In the application, the organizers indicated that they intended to "draw the attention of the public, the leadership of the city and the country to the inadmissibility of neglecting the foundations of the constitutional order, human and civil rights,<...>, as well as to express an opinion on the main topical socio-political problems of modern Russia".
The opposition planned to hold a procession along the route from Bolshaya Yakimanka Street through Yakimansky Proyezd, Bolshaya Polyanka Street, Maly Kamenny Bridge, Bolotnaya Embankment to Bolotnaya Square. The gathering of participants was to be organized at the end of Bolshaya Yakimanka street near the house 58/2.
An alternative route, as indicated in the application, could be a procession through Bolshaya Ordynka Street, Maly Moskvoretsky Bridge, Bolotnaya Street and Bolotnaya Square with a gathering of participants at the end of Bolshaya Ordynka Street or a procession from Bolshaya Polyanka Street to Bolotnaya Square.
Recall that on May 6, 2012, during an opposition rally authorized by the authorities on Bolotnaya Square, protesters clashed with law enforcement officers, more than 400 people were detained for illegal actions, 30 policemen were injured, and several dozen more people were injured.
The court recognized the organizers of the riots as activists of the Left Front, Sergei Udaltsov, Leonid Razvozzhaev and Konstantin Lebedev. Udaltsov and Razvozzhaev, who did not admit their guilt, received four and a half years each. Lebedev made a deal with the investigation and testified against his associates in exchange for a short term and was released on parole in May 2014.
In total, 35 people became defendants in the "bolotnaya case". 12 of them have already served time and were released. Eight defendants are still in jail and colonies. 13 defendants were amnestied, two received suspended sentences. Opposition supporters call those convicted in the Bolotnaya case political prisoners.
Representatives of the Coordinating Council of the opposition agreed with the Moscow mayor's office on the action on May 6, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the events on Bolotnaya Square. Representatives of the KSO were allowed by the city authorities to hold a rally on Bolotnaya Square on the evening of May 6: gathering from 18.00, the rally is scheduled to start at 19.00. The application, approved by the mayor's office, involves up to 30,000 participants. On this day, the procession from Kaluga Square, which the organizers of the action insisted on, was refused by the mayor's office.
Alexei Mayorov, head of the regional security department of the Moscow City Hall, as usual, said that for the procession on a weekday, it is necessary to block the streets, and this, they say, could create problems for city residents.
Earlier, the mayor's office had already agreed on the procession, but on another day - May 5. The so-called Expert Council opposition, among the applicants was the head of the Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights, Mikhail Anshakov. The organizers of the May 6 rally, in particular the journalist Alexander Ryklin, argued that the May 5 march had nothing to do with the opposition.
According to Nadezhda Mityushkina, a repeated protester in Moscow protests and an activist of the Solidarity movement, May 5 as a possible date for the rally was rejected by the opposition a long time ago: "On May 5, we rejected two months ago, when the shares were discussed at working group for holding events. May 5 is Easter, it is not very nice to hold political events on this day, even if most people consider themselves to be atheists. I do not consider the possibility of an exit on the 5th, for me there is only one date - May 6".
According to Nadezhda Mityushkina, the procession on May 6 is not a matter of principle, it is much more important to hold a rally on this day and tell people about last year's events on Bolotnaya Square: "The May 6 rally is many times more important than the demonstration. There was a public investigation, many cases were taken to court, some guys are already being sued. Now we have something to tell people. This is not an ordinary rally with different speeches, but a rally-story, story about what is happening now. more people. If the demonstration is approved, of course, it will be great, but the rally is more important, because this time we are not going out for ourselves at all, but for the "prisoners of Bolotnaya", for their freedom".
On May 6 last year, the "March of Millions" agreed with the authorities on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow ended in clashes with the police. Several hundred people were detained. Twenty-seven protesters have been held accountable for these events, which the authorities consider mass riots. Most of them were charged with participating in mass riots and using force against police officers. Maxim Luzyanin was the first person convicted in this case. He pleaded guilty and received four and a half years in a penal colony. On April 25, the second sentence was handed down. Konstantin Lebedev, who also pleaded guilty and made a deal with the investigation, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for organizing riots.
