On April 10, a conference on the international monitoring of parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011-2012 was held in Moscow. Russian human rights advocates called for fundamental reform of legislation governing elections, parties and public associations.

Noting that Russia no longer has direct elections for regional governors and arguing that parliamentary and presidential elections “have turned into an empty ritual,” Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva said that it was only possible to change the situation through protests and demonstrations. Head of the electoral watchdog Golos, Liliya Shibanova, spoke of “a multilayered system of filtration during and falsification of elections” and called for “strict monitoring and an appeal to international organizations.” And leader of the Interregional Association of Voters, Andrei Buzin, added that the new makeup of the Central Electoral Committee (TsIK), headed by Vladimir Churov – famous for what has been called his “unsurpassed” loyalty to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – “provides the basis to assume that the coming elections will be held like past ones.”

The activists said the TsIK should only “point out violations committed by candidates” and that the courts should be responsible for denying parties registration or taking them off the ballot, not them.

The minimum number of members needed to form a party should be reduced to 5,000 from the current 45 thousand, they added.

Members of the conference called on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Parliament to use their influence to “assist with the registration of parties,” to do away with censorship of the mass media and to stop “the persecution of the opposition” in Russia.

European Parliament deputies Kristiina Ojuland and Heidi Hautala said the parliament already has a group doing preliminary monitoring of upcoming Russian elections that includes members of all of the country’s political forces.

“We should have the same policies toward Russia as we do towards Belarus,” Hautala said, noting that the European Union has already placed sanctions on Belarusian civil servants.

Russian opposition politicians present at the meeting spoke about the persecution of the opposition. Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov said the recently created People’s Freedom Party was “doomed to be denied registration” and that there was no point in directly monitoring elections if they “are already being falsified right now,” when the authorities have already denied registration to seven other opposition parties.

One of the leaders of the People’s Freedom Party, Boris Nemtsov, said the Russian authorities are not preparing for elections, but for “a special operation to preserve money and power under the slogan ‘we’re going to fight to the end.'”

On February 17, the European Parliament issued a critical resolution on Russia’s human rights situation. Deputies expressed concern over the conviction in the second criminal case against oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, and called upon the Russian authorities to do everything possible to institute a fair and transparent judicial system in the country as previously promised by the Russian president.

Tuesday’s rally marked the eleventh iteration of the opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign. About 2000 people came out to Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square to take part in the event, making it the largest rally in the campaign’s history.

As with the previous ten rallies, Moscow city authorities turned down an application by Strategy 31 organizers to obtain legal sanction to hold the event. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov defended this permission-based system in a session of the city government earlier in the day, saying that the city’s decision to allow or disallow any given rally is not due to any “particular love” for certain rally organizers, but to considerations for public safety.

“Before every event in the capital, we take all necessary organizational measures to assure total safety for the people,” said the mayor, noting that anyone who wishes to hold a demonstration can file an application with the city and receive a decision within ten days.

The system will remain as it is, he went on, “and in the future we will continue to carry out this work in accordance with the law.”

“We will now allow chaos in Moscow,” Luzhkov stressed.

Luzhkov’s statements appear to contradict the Russian federal law that governs rallies, marches and demonstrations, which requires only a notification – not an application for permission – to be filed with the city in order to hold such an event.

Tuesday’s rally was scheduled to begin at 6:00 pm, and by that time Triumfalnaya Square had already been completely cordoned off by OMON riot police and internal military forces. According to a Kasparov.ru correspondent, the police left no free space for ralliers to gather. About 50 police buses bordered the perimeter of the square, and police blocked all pedestrians from entering. Part of the sidewalk between the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall and Triumfalnaya Square, where Strategy 31 ralliers have previously gathered when the square itself was blocked off, was also cordoned off.

Strategy 31 organizers issued a statement of concern on Tuesday morning regarding an interview with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that had been published the day before. In the interview, the prime minister charged that the real goal of Strategy 31 participants “is to get bludgeoned upside the head,” and that ralliers routinely provoke police into acting violently. In their response, rally organizers rejected the accusation and stated that any “possible incidents” of violence at the rally would be Putin’s personal responsibility.

At the same time, Moscow City Police Chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev did promise to train his officers to detain activists using less painful methods. There was no apparent option to simply not detain any ralliers at all – Deputy Police Chief Vyacheslav Kozlov said that the unsanctioned rally would be duly broken up.

A three-person delegation from the European Parliament, headed by Human Rights Committee Chairwoman Heidi Hautala, was present at the rally at the invitation of Strategy 31 organizers. Deputy Chief Kozlov said ahead of time that the delegates would not be excluded from possible detention.

According to a count by Kasparov.ru correspondents, approximately 2000 ralliers gathered on Triumfalnaya Square despite the heavy police presence and the fact that the square itself is almost entirely barricaded off for construction. Nevertheless, participants managed to rally for nearly two and a half hours, chanting opposition slogans that called for Putin to step down and for the 31st article of the Russian constitution, which guarantees free assembly, to be observed.

Moscow city police and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents reportedly created a jam in the crowd while attempting to push the ralliers away from the square, but did not manage to break up the protest.

Kasparov.ru estimates that approximately 100 people were detained during the course of the rally, including leading opposition activists Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, Sergei Udaltsov, and Roman Dobrokhotov. Two of the three Strategy 31 organizers, Eduard Limonov and Konstantin Kosyakin, were also detained. The third organizer, Moscow Helsinki Group head and former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, was present at the rally but was not detained.

Official figures from the Moscow City Police cite 70 detainees, and put the number of people present at the rally at 400 people, including 300 journalists.

Eyewitnesses noted that police did not refrain from acting violently while detaining rally participants. Several activists were seen with bloody faces after having been beaten by law enforcement agents. The first participant to be detained was an activist holding a poster picturing Russia’s symbolic two-headed eagle – one head being that of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and the other of Vladimir Putin.

As of 10:00 pm, several of the most high-profile detainees had been released, including Nemtsov and Limonov. Nemtsov was told that he had supposedly blocked pedestrian movement during the rally and had been detained on that basis. They and several other activists were charged with “violating the established procedure for arranging or conducting a meeting, rally, demonstration, procession, or picket,” an administrative violation punishable by a small fine. As of Tuesday night, approximately 80 detainees remained in various Moscow police stations.

Strategy 31 rallies were also held on Tuesday in various cities throughout Russia, with several solidarity events also taking place in Europe. Approximately 80 out of 700 ralliers were detained in an event in St. Petersburg, and rallies were held with varying levels of success or suppression in Omsk, Yaroslav, Sochi, Voronezh, Makhachkala, and numerous other Russian cities. One event in London included the participation of refugee Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the widow of murdered ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, Marina Litvinenko.

Nevertheless, police detained both protesters and independent observers for taking part in the unsanctioned event, reportedly employing extreme brutality against both detainees and journalists, including representatives from state-owned media sources.

“One of our activists, Grigory Torbeyev, was severely injured; his face is broken,” said opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov. “Nevertheless, he was dragged into an OMON police bus and is now being held there. He requires medical attention but the police are doing nothing.”

Both of the rally’s organizers, Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin and National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, were among those detained, as were a number of activists from the Solidarity opposition movement. Chairman Lev Ponomarev of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights, who came to the event as an observer, was also detained.

As they have done for each of the Strategy 31 rallies since their inception last May, organizers had filed the required application with Moscow city authorities to legally hold the rally on Triumfalnaya Square. And as has been the case each of those times, the city denied the request on the premise that the space was already reserved for another event. While such events have usually consisted of various cultural festivities, March 31 was reserved for Generation Day, an event organized by and for a conglomeration of pro-Kremlin youth groups, including the notoriously Komsomolesque organization Nashi.

Limonov argued that the city’s actions showed that it had “cardinally altered its tactics and strategy” by allowing such an event to take place at the traditional place and during the traditional time of the Strategy 31 anti-government protests. In a similar vein, Heidi Hautala of the European Parliament’s human rights committee earlier called attention to “the particularly concerning trend that is newly appearing in the period prior to the demonstration on March 31.”

“I understand that the Russian authorities, it’s possible, are searching for ways to deny sanction to these demonstrations, as has occurred in the past,” said Hautala. “It can even happen that they simultaneously allow rival pro-Kremlin groups to hold demonstrations at the same time and in the same place. This would bring about the risk of creating clashes and excessive violence between the groups.” As it is, each of the Strategy 31 rallies have ended by being violently broken up by police.

One mainstay of the Strategy 31 demonstrations was absent on Wednesday night: 82-year-old former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva chose instead to attend a memorial at the Park Kultury metro station, where one of Monday’s two bombings took place. Noting that the decision had been difficult, Alexeyeva said on Tuesday that “I tried to convince myself that since the official day of mourning was declared to be March 30, I could go to Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st with my ‘Article 31 of the Russian Constitution’ badge. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything when I imagined what the memorial rally that the pro-Kremlin youth are going to be holding at that time is going to turn out like.”

“I have no desire to be present at that orgy; I can bear neither to hear it nor see it,” she concluded.

That somber memorial at Park Kultury took a shocking turn when Alexeyeva was physically attacked by a young man identified as Konstantin Pereverzev. While the elderly activist addressed a crowd of reporters, Pereverzev approached her and asked “Are you still alive, b****?” before striking her across the head. He was immediately restrained by members the crowd. Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports that the police did not act to detain the man, but that members of the crowd instead took him to a police station. Police stated that the assailant was “in a state of extreme alcoholic intoxication.” Interfax reported that the man “frankly cannot put together a single word and is currently a state of unconsciousness,” although Alexeyeva herself and other eyewitnesses claim that Pereverzev was completely sober at the time of the attack.

“I’m an old woman. I behave in a law-abiding fashion. If a young man hits an old woman, it’s not normal,” said Alexeyeva. The elderly activist left for home immediately after the incident, having possibly suffered a slight concussion.

According to National Bolshevik member Sergei Yezhov, Center “E” officials attempted for several hours to enter an apartment on Volgogradsky Prospect, but the residents refused to open the door as the officials would not state the purpose of their visit.

Present in the apartment at the time was National Bolshevik and member of the executive committee of the Other Russia coalition Sergei Fomchenkov, and National Assembly deputies Taisiya Osipova, Margarita Filippova, Mikhail Klyuzhev, Nikolai Medvedev, and Maksim Gromov, as well as an infant child.

The apartment is currently undergoing a search.

A second apartment owned by Aleksandr Averin, press secretary for National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, was broken into by Center “E” officials that same afternoon.

Officials detained Averin and his apartment is also currently being searched.

Gromov had arrived in Moscow to attend a meeting with Heidi Hautala, chairman of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights. He stated that the legitimacy of the activities of Center “E” was to be a topic of discussion during the meeting.

The Center for Extremism Prevention is accused by Amnesty International of stifling dissent from journalists and activists under charges of extremist activity; a 2009 report cites accusations of torture to extract confessions from criminal suspects. In November, members of the opposition Solidarity movement obtained an internal memo indicting Center “E” in the illegal detentions of a number of activists. Solidarity leaders are planning to use the document in a criminal suit against the center.