Tens of thousands of people took to the streets all across Russia on March 26 in some of the biggest anti-government rallies seen since Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power.
Around 1,000 people were arrested across the country as police cracked down violently on the rallies, which were in most cases unsanctioned by Russia’s government-controlled court system.
Video from Moscow showed riot police manhandling protesters, including women and minors, and severely beating some male protesters as they were being detained.
One of the first to be arrested in Moscow was Alexei Navalny, the opposition figure whose recent video about the vast wealth amassed by Russian Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev was the impetus for the protests. The video has been viewed more than 11.8 million times on YouTube.
Also swept up by the police action was Alec Luhn, a U.S. journalist writing for the UK newspaper the Guardian. Luhn was himself arrested as he photographed a protester being detained by police, even though he had informed the police that he was a journalist.
Luhn later reported on Twitter that he was to be charged with taking part in an unsanctioned protest action.
In Saint Petersburg in western Russia, around 10,000 people gathered for the protest, at one point forcing the police to retreat. Around 180 people were arrested there.
There were also protests in the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok. Altogether, there were more than 80 protests round the vast country. According to some unofficial estimates, up to 60,000 people may have attended the rallies.
However, there was little mention of the protests in Russian media.
The state news agency TASS carried a small item noting that a criminal case had been opened on the injuring of a riot policeman at an unsanctioned protest in Moscow, but did not mention the reason for the protest.
The Kremlin-controlled RT channel, which broadcasts to an international audience, reported that 500 people had been arrested at an anti-corruption protest in Moscow. It also reported that there had been protests in “several” Russian cities.
Meanwhile, the evening broadcast on the Rossiya 1 television channel’s Vesti Nedeli program, hosted by Kremlin arch-propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, focused on corruption and the “demoralized people” – in Ukraine.
