Clara Weiss
At a new protest by the bourgeois liberal opposition in Moscow on Saturday, the Russian authorities continued their violent crackdown, arresting at least 600 people. Led by pro-US opponents of President Vladimir Putin, the protesters are demanding that opposition candidates who have been barred from participating in the Moscow City Council elections on September 8 be placed on the ballot.
Russian news outlets suggested that the turnout at the protest on Saturday was similar to that of the previous week, when between 3,000 and 5,000 people marched through the city center. The protest was met with a military-style presence of the Russian national guard and its subdivision, the OMON paramilitary forces, resulting in the arrest of over 1,300 people.
Like the previous protest, the one on Saturday had not been authorized. Organizers officially called it a “stroll.” Many of the protesters carried Russian flags. The presence of police and paramilitary forces was similar to the previous week, with at least as many OMON and police forces as there were protesters. Planes belonging either to the Russian national guard or the police flew over the city center.
OMON and the police used teargas at Pushkin Square, shut down several central subway stations, and beat protesters with cudgels. There were multiple reports of passersby being violently arrested. Among them was Alexander Svidersky, a deputy of the ruling United Russia party and member of the district electoral commission, who was arrested while walking his dog in the city center. According to eyewitnesses, OMON even stormed a local McDonalds restaurant to arrest several protesters who were trying to hide there.
The Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that many of the arrested had their fingerprints and mug shots taken. The newspaper said that in the lead-up to the protests, there were threats from the authorities that young men participating would run the danger of being drafted into the military. The official number of arrested is 600, but Russian newspapers suggest that approximately the same number were detained as at the previous week’s demonstration, that is, well over 1,000.
Most leading figures of the liberal opposition, including the right-winger Alexei Navalny, and most election candidates who were barred from the ballot, among them Ilya Yashin and Lyubov Sobol, are now in prison, serving sentences of up to 30 days (in the case of Navalny). Sobol was dragged out of a cab on Saturday and arrested while on her way to the rally. One of her aides was arrested on Friday and charged with instigating “mass unrest,” a charge that carries up to 15 years in jail.
The continuation of the violent crackdown on opposition protests is a sign of deep political and social crisis in Russia. Predictably, the pro-imperialist media in the West has hailed the protests as a welcome challenge to the authoritarian presidency of Putin. The EU condemned the crackdown on the protests, and the US embassy in Moscow declared that Saturday’s response by the Russian authorities “undermines the rights of citizens to participate fully in the democratic process.”
Such statements are thoroughly hypocritical. The governments in both the EU and the US are responsible for violent crackdowns on protests in their own countries, including against supporters of Catalonian separatism in Spain and the yellow vest protests in France. They have set up concentration camps for immigrants and refugees. US President Donald Trump has been inciting fascist violence through his tweets and rallies, resulting in a series of mass shootings just over the past two weeks that have claimed the lives of dozens of people.
The imperialist powers support the opposition protests not out of any concern for democratic rights, but because, of all the fractions of the Russian oligarchy, the liberal opposition’s program aligns most closely with the interests of Western imperialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment