Gennady Gudkov
Former State Duma Deputy, A Just Russia party
Votes: 26,973
Rank: 14

About 170 thousand people said they were prepared to choose the leaders of the opposition, and more than 80 thousand took part in the election. That’s a lot. It speaks to the fact that there’s a mood for protest in Russia, and that protest movement supporters number in the tens of thousands. I even think that it’s in the hundreds of thousands. For its first time, the election was entirely successful, although, of course, it wasn’t free of mistakes.

Our main task is to express the will of the people, who right now want real, not decorative, changes in our country, who don’t want to live in an atmosphere of lies and falsifications, who don’t want Russia to have an illegitimate government, and who don’t want the country to be imbued with an atmosphere of double standards and hypocrisy.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be difficult for the members of the Council to agree with each other. But I think that we can resolve this issue.

Boris Nemtsov
Co-representative, RPR-PARNAS
Votes: 24,623
Rank: 16

The elections went well; they were good, and honest. I feel that this is a unique experience. It’s the first instance of electronic voting in Russian history, where the most active, non-apathetic people, with a sense of personal dignity, took part. Naturally, I’ll be glad to work on the Coordination Council, and I’m going to do what’s necessary for the resolutions from Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect to become real-life documents. I feel totally comfortable in my rank between Navalny and Udaltsov. We need to understand that our ranks on this list are our places in line behind bars. I’m sixteenth. This also makes me glad. It doesn’t entail access to the budget, property, or a television set. It’s more like a ticket to repression. I should mention that I’m the only person on the Coordination Council with experience working in provincial government, the only governor, the only vice prime minister, the only deputy chairman of the State Duma, the only head of a faction. It seems to me that there were all sorts of moments while I was in those posts where my experience can be helpful.

The main task now is to put a stop to the repression. I don’t see any other tasks. We need to begin our session not with organizational questions, but precisely with questions having to do with freeing political prisoners, including some who have been jailed very recently, such as Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev. I fear that we’re going to have to work on this for the course of the entire year, and work very hard.

Difficulties that the Council might face include repression against its members. This is already happening. Of those who were voted onto the Council, Razvozzhayev and Daniil Konstantinov are behind bars. We need to do everything so that the members of the Council can move about, work, and remain free. The rest are resolvable issues; they’re nothing compared to freedom and repression. So far, in, for example, the Organizational Committee for the protest movement, we’ve managed to come to agreement with each other one way or the other, although it wasn’t simple. Now there are many people who took part in organizing the protests who’ve been voted onto the Council. There are new people as well. It seems to me that the responsibility we have before the people who voted for us, plus the tasks that we are obligated to resolve, should evoke feeling in even the most mettlesome people. We have to be reserved, stubborn, persistent, and calm if we’re going to achieve anything. Of course, there are very many people who want to make us quarrel and split us apart, but there’s always going to be a lot of people like that. Nevertheless, over the course of the year, all attempts to do that have failed. I hope that this is always going to be the case.

If we divide the Coordination Council into factions, I think that the liberal-democratic one would be the largest. Kasparov, Yashin, and I, along with our whole liberal wing – Vladimir Kara-Murza, Piontkovsky, Parkhomenko, Bykov, and Gelfand, of course, have liberal-democratic views. I think that more than half of the Council consists of people with these views. Some of them don’t advertise it much, but still, if you look at their “political compasses,” you can understand – it’s clear from their attitudes towards private property, privatization, and so on.

PARNAS made an official decision not to participate in the Coordination Council elections, and so we, the members of PARNAS, took part in them in a private capacity. But since our representation on the Council is rather significant – at the very least, it’s Yashin, Kara-Murza, and I – I think that cooperation is inevitable. This might not be laid out in any official documents, but it’ll just become the fact of the matter. PARNAS Co-representative Vladimir Ryzhkov is one of the authors of the Bolotnaya and Sakharov Prospect resolutions, which are a main task for the Coordination Council, and he will bring them to life. To be honest, I don’t know how we couldn’t cooperate.

The editors at Yezhednevny Zhurnal sat down with some of the freshly-elected representatives to the Russian opposition’s new Coordination Council to ask what they thought about the election results, the Council’s initial tasks, and what difficulties they might have to face. Theotherrussia.org will continue to bring you several of these responses over the next several days, so stay tuned for more.

Ilya Yashin
Member, Solidarity movement
Total votes: 32,478
Rank: 5th

We had prepared for the difficulties that might come up during the election. The government organized a massive DDoS attack, which, despite the problems we had on the first day, was successfully taken care of and the site worked quite well after that. In Chelyabinsk, the FSB attacked our activists on the regional electoral committee, confiscated computers, frightened people, and the committee simply couldn’t function. There were provocations – prosecutors filed criminal cases about supposed embezzlement of funds. I’m glad that we were able to overcome these difficulties, and in the end, tens of thousands of people took part in the election – this is probably the single largest civil project in years, and shows that the opposition has maintained significant capacity to mobilize civil activity. This is probably the most important result.

The difficulties that await the Council in the future are obvious. They have to do with the fact that the people elected are very different. Although, yesterday, after the election, the elected members of the Coordination Council gathered on the Dozhd channel and had a rather emotional discussion that proved that it’s not going to be very hard to work or to find common ground. We foresaw these difficulties: since there were people of different viewpoints among the candidates, we formed congregations that would guarantee that the entire political spectrum would be represented; we knew that it was going to be rather complicated to find compromise on a whole set of issues. But everyone is generally prepared for this. In fact, one of the tasks of the Coordination Council is to create a dialogue between representatives of various opposition groups and find the common ground that unites us.

It seems to me that there should be several directions our work should take. One of our key tasks is to form a substantive agenda for the protest movement, a structural project that we have long been criticized for lacking, although not entirely fairly, in my view, since the opposition has generated a not insubstantial number of constructive ideas. Now there’s going to be a united platform that will promote our projects in the name of the united opposition. These projects, of course, are going to have, it seems to me, a much larger resonance. One of our main tasks is to formulate within the course of a year our main proposals concerning political reforms that, as we hope, the government will be ready to discuss at some point. Even if it’s not, we should still offer this to society.

The second direction is to support regional politicians, both in elections and within the framework of anti-corruption projects. I think we’re going to offer organizational, political, and sometimes even financial help to people who are forced to battle with local swindlers and thieves and need our help, in small towns and in the regions.

The third direction is education, which has to do with the dissemination of various types of anti-corruption reports and reports dedicated to the results of Putin’s rule. In addition, a background theme will be the defense of political prisoners. I think that right now we should mobilize all the resources we have to give the maximum amount of help possible to people who are currently sitting behind bars because of their dissent.

The liberal wing is represented in the Coordination Council rather heavily. This has to do with the fact that the protests on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt were represented to a significant degree by people of liberal-democratic views, which has been established by nearly all sociological surveys, and voting during the election for the Council confirmed that the basic part, the nucleus of the protest movement, is, like before, people who hold liberal-democratic views. The social portrait of the protest area, it seems to me, is very clearly reflected in the election results.

Igor Berezyuk, Ruslan Khubaev, and Kirill Unchuk, all members of the unregistered Other Russia party, have been sentenced to 5 and a half, 4, and 3 years in prison, respectively.

As lawyer Dmitri Agranovsky explained, the appeal refers to article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial. He and his fellow lawyers believe that the case against the activists was politically motivated and that their clients were not afforded this right.

They have also submitted a supervisory complaint about Berezyuk’s sentence in particular to the presidium of the Moscow City Court.

The three activists were sentenced on August 8, 2012, for inciting riots on Moscow’s Manezh Square in December 2010, when thousands of Russian citizens protested in a violent display of nationalistic fervor in connection with the killing of an ethnically Russian soccer fan by a non-Russian assailant. Anger was also directed at the police for supposedly releasing the suspect on a bribe.

The appeal comes at a time of increased international attention towards political persecution in Russia, largely due to the media sensation of the Pussy Riot trial this past summer. More complaints are sent to the Strasbourg Court from Russia than from any other country within the Council of Europe. Of those cases tried, the Russian authorities are found liable almost every time.

According to Udaltsov, the court agreed with his argument that his detention was unlawful because it happened before the time organizers told the city that the march would end.

“You could say that I’m satisfied with the court’s verdict,” Udaltsov told Kasparov.ru. “It’s good that our judicial system doesn’t always function on what it hears from the higher-ups.”

The decision was a small victory for an opposition that has been increasingly beleaguered by new regulations and other forms of persecution since President Vladimir Putin began his third term this past May.

Udaltsov now intends to appeal for “sizeable” monetary compensation for the moral damage resulting from his detention. He also plans to sue the police officers involved.

The march Udaltsov was detained in was the opposition’s third so-called March of Millions on September 15, in which organizeer estimated 100 thousand people took part. Police reports, which historically underestimate anti-governmental protest participation, put that number at 14 thousand. Udaltsov’s arrest came after he called on people not to leave at the end of the march and instead to create a long-term “Maidan” protest in the style of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

Leonid Volkov, a representative of the Council’s electoral bureau (TsVK), said at a press conference on Tuesday that there will be three events organized by the council for the candidates, who are free to campaign independently as well.

The first TsVK event will be a series of televised debates, scheduled to air live on the independent channel Dozhd. According to Volkov, the debates will take the form of a tournament, in order to ensure a level of fair competition between the 216 people registered to run for the council’s 45 seats. The first stage will consist of 54 groups of four, from which one person each will be chosen. Another six candidates, who were chosen as the most popular through online voting, will then be added to this group of 54. The 60 resulting candidates will then be broken into 20 groups, one person from each of which will be chosen, eventually resulting in five.

The debates, which are not a part of Russia’s electoral tradition, stand in stark contrast to President Vladimir Putin’s comments that he is “too busy” for such activities. Despite this being his third term as president, he has never participated in a debate with his opponents.

Volkov called the second event a “political compass,” in which TsVK representatives will question all candidates about their political positions. The results will then be posted on the KS website for voters to consider.

The third part of “official” TsVK campaigning will be a contest among the candidates’ political programs. Candidates will write essays on how they picture a future Russia that has undergone a change in ruling government, and on what the role of the KS should be. The essays will then be posted online without the authors’ names, and voters can choose which ones they most prefer.

None of the results of these events will have any direct bearing on candidates’ ability to run in the election, Volkov stressed – they are simply meant to inform the public of who their choices are.

The Opposition Coordination Council elections will be held on October 20-21, 2012. Currently, more than 38 thousand people have undergone the thorough verification process to register to vote online. Volkov said he expects those numbers to reach around 150-200 thousand by late October. In addition to online voting, organizers are planning to open 70-80 electoral committees all across Russia where people will be given internet access to vote. The resulting committee, made up of 30 general delegates and five each with particularly left, liberal, or nationalist views, will aim to give the non-systemic opposition a stronger, more united voice in the face of ongoing persecution in Russia.

Members of the Communist Party, Worker’s Russia, the Revolutionary Workers Party, the Left Socialist Movement, the International Organization of Communists, ROT Front, the Other Russia, and others made up the more than thousand participants who marched down along the Moscow River near the Kremlin on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Holding a multitude of banners and proceeding under the cry of slogans like “Russia without Putin” and “Russia for the workers,” the marchers demanded the release of opposition activists currently being held under suspicion of inciting riots during anti-government protests this past May. The charges are widely criticized as politically motivated, and the cases of the detainees were largely overshadowed this past summer by media attention focused on the Pussy Riot scandal.

Representatives of the leftist movements expressed a general sentiment that the system of values in Russia today is such that it’s pointless to even talk about such problems as free and fair elections, social welfare, and other necessary reforms, because whoever becomes the next president will inherit the same set of circumstances.

“We are the first to say that it’s not Putin who’s to blame, but the system, in which every new Putin is going to be just the same as this Putin,” said Denis Zommer, secretary for the Union of Communist Youth.

“Capitalism is the source of all of the problems that we’re experiencing,” he added.

While Sunday’s march was sanctioned by Moscow city authorities, the process was a long and arduous one.

Organizers presented the mayor’s office with six different routes for their march, none of which was deemed acceptable. The final route was only established after a long series of negotiations with city civil servants.

In light of the recent slow-down in anti-government protests in Russia, the editors at Gazeta.ru spoke to various opposition leaders to see what the next steps for the movement might be.

Opposition Strategies: In Search of the People
By Ekaterina Vinokurova; edited by Semyon Kvasha
March 24, 2012
Gazeta.ru

While the protests have ended for now, protest sentiment is still here. Gazeta.ru talked to the leaders of mass protest rallies and asked them what the opposition should do next. Without a leader and or structure, the opposition is ready to do everything simultaneously: to continue the protest rallies, to register parties, to campaign and to take part in elections of all levels.

The state Duma is editing the law on party registration, facilitating the process of doing everything simultaneously.

This law, as well as several others, were offered by President Medvedev as part of a political reform declared as a response to the mass protest rallies last December. Ex-finance minister Alexei Kudrin announced that the fund he was creating was ready to cooperate with billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s party. Revolutionary poet Eduard Limonov is going to attend a monthly prohibited rally at Triumphalnaya square on March 31, part of “Strategy 31”, a campaign of protest for the constitutionally given right for citizens to gather peacefully, without arms (article 31 of Russian Constitution). Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov calls for all the opposition members to come to Moscow for the March of Millions on the day before Putin’s inauguration. Gazeta.ru tried to find out if these different acts have any common tactics or strategy, and what the protest movement’s perspective is.

Has the street ended?

The latest street actions gathered much fewer people than the rallies in Bolotnaya square and Sakharov avenue. The drop in rally attendance was as fast as its growth. This is natural, says Levada-centre deputy director Alexei Grazhdankin, whose company polled the protesters at rallies. He thinks the high season of protest ended with election campaining; but what’s more important, the rallies became a breeding ground for new activists. To continue the protests, the opposition needs its own demands and ideology, sociologists say.

Protest activists do not overdramatize the loss of attendance.

“The protest hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that the street activity is a wave process, we will see new rises and new drops in street protester numbers,” said Alexei Navalny, anticorruption project RosPil founder, to Gazeta.ru.

“Certain events can provoke a hundred thousand people go out in the street suddenly, but one shouldn’t expect a hundred thousand people in the street every weekend,” he said. Protest activity in the street is not the only means of political struggle, “Although you have to understand, that the gang of crooks and thieves is the most afraid of the people in the street,” he added.

“The unwillingness of the leaders of the Bolotnaya and Sakharov protests to come up with constructive suggestions disoriented the people, who were ready to stand up for their rights,” said Xenia Sobchak, TV anchorwoman and a socialite, to Gazeta.ru. She thinks that President’s administration played well off of the democrats’ main problem: their inability to come to agreement, to come up with a common platform, to gather behind one candidate because the leaders were to afraid to lose their supporters.

“People need an agenda, you cannot always go out into the street, stomp your legs and shout that the election is fraudulent, especially if the election is over. If people hear this new agenda, they’ll come back in the streets,” Xenia Sobchak told gazeta.ru.

She also said that the themes that could unite the people and bring them back to political activities could be the demands for independent court, the fight against corruption, and the demand for state officials to leave business.

Should the rallies be continued?

Different leaders of the opposition see its future in different ways. Sergei Udaltsov, a very experienced street protester, insists in expanding the street protests. It was his idea to call for the March of the Millions at the last rally on Novy Arbat street, where 15,000 to 25,000 gathered.
“We need to point out the question of really elections, to ultramobilize and deliver an ultimatum to the government: you either meet our demands or we won’t go home. It’s important that people from the regions come to Moscow and break the stereotype that there are only protesters from Moscow dressed in mink coats, and the other Russia that supports Putin,” he told Gazeta.ru.

“We can influence the government only by gathering large masses of people in the street,” agrees Ilya Yashin, member of political council of Solidarnost movement. The form of any successful event can be primitive, because no matter how creative a rally is, if small number of people come, it will be futile.

The march of the millions was conducted by the Egyptian opposition in Cairo, but whether it’s possible for Russian protesters to create their own Tahrir is a big question. “I can’t say there is hard work going on in the organizing committee creating new slogans and formats. We’ve taken a pause to understand how exactly we need to reformat the street protests and what new slogans will replace ‘For honest elections’,” Just Russia Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov told Gazeta.ru.

“The best opposition creative work is happening for Navalny now, he offers to put the protests on mass scale, but only legal gatherings. On the other hand, we must not get rid of the street protests, rallies and marches,” Gudkov said.

The head of the Foundation for Effective Politics, Gleb Pavlovsky, advises the opposition not to lower its energy but to get rid of its illusions. The March of the Millions, if attended by tens of thousands of people, will be disappointing.

They need to continue rallying but stop announcing their numbers and stop expecting each gathering to be larger than the one before.

“The main achievement of the last months is that the street activities have stopped being marginal, not only ‘professional’ protesters attend the rallies now, but the common people, too. The chasm between street and legal politics has disappeared: street protests have became a real influence on the government, those who attend rallies can later discuss their agenda in government offices,” Pavlovsky said.

The opposition is ready to expand its arsenal, but it needs to define what they are rallying about.

The success of the street action will depend on its demands it makes from the government, thinks one of the chairmen of the unregistered PARNAS party, Boris Nemtsov. “Yes, we need to fight for early parliamentary and presidential elections, but we need to support this fight with other demands: for political reform, freedom to political prisoners, abolishing the censorship in media, early elections in the Moscow city duma, new election of the Moscow mayor,” Boris Nemtsov told Gazeta.ru

The protest needs to adopt new forms, including the street protests: from street “festivals of freedom”, and street carnivals to flash-mobs and marches, Nemtsov said, “There can be other activities other than street rallies: conferences, festivals, participation in elections, printed report publishing,”- he added. Right now opposition has invented a new form of a street meeting – a conversation with an elected deputy, which doesn’t require permission from the city government, but this format is not overly popular, maybe because the police do not always recognize its legitimacy.
“Picket lines, letters of protest, state company account analyses, as Navalny does and many other things,” Dmitry Bykov, writer, poet and one of the Electors’ League founders, lists the possibilities for alternative opposition activities.

From political parties to “the machine of well intentioned propaganda”

For the three months of the protest season, the Russian opposition didn’t come up with a leader and didn’t form an organization. The natural internet based protests remain the same, and not all the participants want to form a bureaucratic structure, although some protest leaders call for people to be the part of a civic struggle and take part in local elections. It’s time for the opposition organizations and movements to strengthen their presence in the regions and to develop horizontal connections between each other, without trying to form an hierarchy, says the leader of ‘the movement for the preservation of Khimki forest,’ Yevgenia Chirikova.

“Our weakness is that we are scattered,” she said. She thinks that the opposition needs to unite on a network basis.

The protesters need to be elected in local self-government institutions to influence the government directly. “We need to create a country that Putin cannot rule without control, and this is possible only with a strong local initiative, strong local self-government,” Chirikova said. This is a process we can see in Moscow, where in some districts the opposition could press United Russia. Chirikova is ready to go even further and to organize a small ‘green’ party.

The other offer is to organize the constantly active structure to coordinate protest actions. “a ‘Protest rally organizing committee’ could become a coordinating structure, but it needs to gain legitimacy. It was formed generally and without registration, now it’s time to for it to go legit. We can conduct the election through this organizing committee on the Internet, as we did when we elected speakers for the rallies, says Sergei Udaltsov. But the opposition doesn’t need to create a united opposition party, because of an ideology disagreement, any structure would be artificial. Boris Nemtsov agrees that the organizing committee is to be preserved so that not to divide the opposition supporters with regard to their ideologies. At the same time, the opposition needs to consolidate into several parties in different political fronts.

New party legislation can lead to the majority of organization that protested on Bolotnaya and Sakharov avenue to become parties, but even without Kremlin spoilers there would be too many structures like this. Democrats in addition to Yabloko will get PARNAS, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is actively creating his party, Vladimir Milo is registering his “Democratic Choice” as a political party. Nationalists told journalists they are going to create at leats two parties, one created by Vladimir Tor (from the Movement against illegal immigration) and the other by Konstantin Krylov (from the Russian public movement). A few days ago, Dmitry Dyomushkin, leader of ‘Russian Movement,’ declared that he wishes to create his own nationalist party.
It’s unclear if Sergei Udaltsov is going to register his Left Front, he recently was offered membership in Sergei Mironov’s Just Russia. Just Russia deputies Gennady and Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev, who took active part in the protests, are creating a super-party structure on the left flank.

“We can keep all the structures, but to take part in the election we need to create a democratic mega-party on the principle of collective management and financing. The left could do something like that, too.”

Meanwhile, in the current legislation, electoral blocks and super-party structures are prohibited and the Duma deputies refused to allow them in the new version of the law.

Alexei Navalny offers a non-party alternative. He says he is going to concentrate on his anti-corruption activities, he doesn’t want to create his party or become a member of any, and that’s why he refused to be a member of the observation council in any nationalist party.

He called on the readers of his blog to enlighten people in the large cities of Russia, to create the opposition’s “machine of well intentioned propaganda” as an alternative to the state media. “The machine” doesn’t need a structure, the activists just need to spend an hour a day explaining the situation with current government to their colleagues, family and friends. “If 100,000 men all over the country spent an hour a day or an hour a month to be part of “the machine”, it would work. For example, you write me from Bryansk: I want to be a part of GMP, what should I do? I reply with a list of options, from leaflets to solitary pickets. You answer you are ready to put up leaflets and so I send them to you. Activists receive the information and advice on how they can act, the rest is their own initiative. Make a list of people you can call once a month and tell the bitter truth about what’s happening, with examples, so that people won’t consider you nuts or a political freak,” Navalny explained in his blog.

Polish scenario

Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin, who tool an active part in the Electors’ league work, thinks the protest activity in Russia has only just begun. He thinks the government, at the very beginning, wrongly interpreted the civic protest as an attempt at revolution. “First, the authorities were frightened by an ‘orange’ protest and tried to find opposition leaders and to start a parley. But later, they found out there were no leaders, and this was its main threat: natural protest doesn’t bring anyone into government, it just shows the people’s attitude towards goverment, and it’s impossible to parley with such protests. People probably won’t come out into the streets by the tens of thousands, though the attitude towards the government hasn’t changed,” Oreshkin told Gazeta.ru. “What happened this winter is a typical ‘innovation wave’: a new trend to reject the authorities that will spread all over the country. When the first mobile phone or the first computer appeared in the capital, everybody was talking about it, a year later they were in million-plus cities, after two years all over the country.

For the government and for the opposition, it already doesn’t matter if the street protests have ended or not – the trend is now set, it will take root and become more popular,” Oreshkin told Gazeta.ru.

The situation in Russia is reminiscent of the situation in Poland in the end of 1970’s, he noticed.

Oreshkin thinks that an ever growing number of citizens are disgusted by the authorities, people have stopped obeying the leadership, the government concedes a bit in response, though later it may institute martial law for a short period of time or eventually give up power peacefully, since martial law always destroys the system.

There will be no radical change in the next few years, continues Oreshkin. But in the long view, the government is in a dead end, disappointment will grow, and if the economic situation worsens, inflation speeds up, prices rise, the social unrest will turn into a political process. “The current system will have no chance to survive in the new conditions of total disappointment,”- Oreshkin concluded.

On Wednesday, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) accepted the documents required to file the request. “Commission member Elena Dubrovina gave Limonov a document confirming that the necessary documents have been submitted in the appropriate form and within the appropriate timeframe,” said Aleksandr Averin, executive committee member of Limonov’s Other Russia party.

According to Averin, the CEC should announce whether it will or not it will register Limonov on December 20 – four days before opposition activists have scheduled another mass demonstration to protest what they say are fraudulent parliamentary election results.

Generally marginalized by the Kremlin and Russia’s state-run media, Limonov was nearly prevented from gathering the proper number of signatures needed to apply for registration when a December 11 meeting of his supporters was suspiciously cancelled.

Writing on his LiveJournal, Limonov described how police had hung banners explaining that the building where the meeting was to be held was cancelled due to “urgent repairs.”

The oppositionist described the conversation between him and an officer at the scene:

Me – You are violating the law, by law we have the right [to hold this meeting]; on November 30 I submitted a written announcement to the CEC that we would be holding a meeting to launch my candidacy at precisely this address, since we paid rent and so on.
Lieutenant – The police have nothing to do with this, the property owners are making repairs… we were called in to keep order.
Me – This is a political crime… they were holding meetings in these very auditoriums yesterday evening…

The abrupt closure was eerily similar to tactics used to prevent opposition leader Garry Kasparov from running for Russian president in 2007.

Russian electoral law requires 500 signatures to be collected at a meeting of a potential candidate’s supporters in order for the candidate to be registered. Forced to collect signatures in a nearby bus, Limonov nevertheless obtained 800.

In Moscow, Triumfalnaya Square was cordoned off by police from early morning hours, with officers telling journalists that “some sort of event” would be held there in the evening.

As the rally began and cries of “freedom of assembly always and everywhere” and “freedom to political prisoners” could be heard among the 200-strong crowd, riot police pushed a crowd of journalists and photographers away from the square towards an underground pedestrian passage and set about detaining the activists. Among those arrested were Solidarity members Ilya Yashin and Anastasia Rybachenko, Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov, and United Civil Front Moscow leader Lolita Tsariya.

According to Kasparov.ru, numerous activists were severely beaten by police while being detained. Doctors called to a police station where Rybachenko was being held advised her to have her neck examined in the station’s trauma center. Other Russia member Konstantin Tofimtsev was also reportedly beaten and placed in a cell separate from the other detainees.

Moscow city authorities had refused to sanction the protest on the basis that “archeological work” was being done on Triumfalnaya Square. While the square has been cordoned off for more than a year due to supposed construction plans for an underground parking garage, virtually no work has been done over that time.

In St. Petersburg, between 400 and 1000 Strategy 31 protesters attempted to hold an unsanctioned march along Nevsky Prospect. They were blocked by police, however, who then began detaining participants. According to local Other Russia leader Andrei Dmitriyev, many were kept in police holding overnight.

Approximately 150 protesters came out to a Strategy 31 protest in Rostov-on-Don. According to local United Civil Front and Solidarity leader Boris Baty, oppositionists were forced to go through several different courts before local authorities would sanction the event.

In Omsk, opposition organizers were prevented by local authorities from holding a regular rally, and local United Civil Front Secretary Viktor Korb explained to the gathered crowd that the group was therefore forced to hold a small public meeting instead.

Rallies were also held in the cities of Saratov, Sochi, Ryazan, Tomsk, and others.

Activists from various Russian civil and political movements have been holding Strategy 31 rallies for more than two years across the country. As a general rule, the protests are not granted sanction by local authorities and are routinely violently dispersed by riot police.

Video of the march in St. Petersburg:

The event, organized by the unregistered People’s Freedom Party (Parnas), was attended by about 1500 people, including representatives of the opposition groups Solidarity, the United Civil Front, the Other Russia party, the Left Front, the Russian People’s Democratic Union, and numerous other civil and political organizations.

Speakers included Parnas leaders Vladimir Ryzhkov, Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov, Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov, Moscow United Civil Front leader Lolita Tsariya and Solidarity activists Ilya Yashin and Anastasia Rybachenko, as well as rap musician Dino MC.

Speaking as the actual MC, Vladimir Ryzhkov said the rally marked the beginning of a national campaign: “We have five weeks until the elections, and in that time we must achieve some results. We have two tasks. The first is to not give a single vote to United Russia, and the second is to catch anyone falsifying [electoral results].”

According to Ryzhkov, the leading party’s real ratings are much lower than they would like people to think, with the actual figure hovering below 40 percent approval.

In his turn, Eduard Limonov put the blame for the current situation on the Russian intelligentsia. He called on famous writers such as Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Valentin Rasputin to come out and join the oppositionists in protests on the December 4 election day.

Despite disagreements within the opposition as to what mode of action to take on election day (options include voting against every candidate, voting for candidates from any party other than United Russia or staging a boycott), all speakers present agreed that the most important thing was to stand together against United Russia.