In past years, Vladimir Putin has hosted an annual televised call-in for Russian citizens to ask him various questions. For the first time, this year’s conference featured no such citizens, and instead took the form of a four-and-a-half-hour press conference. While the general consensus seems to be that the event was overwhelmingly boring, reactions to some of Putin’s particular statements are worthy of mention. Below are some responses to the press conference by analysts, politicians, and journalists, all gathered from Gazeta.ru and Kasparov.ru.

Aleksei Makarkin, Deputy Director of the Center for Political Technology:

The main thing in Putin’s address was the mass media. The questions did not used to be so incisive, and moreover, if the president responded, then it was a definitive response. He no longer observes these rules. Some of his answers contained counterattacks, and sometimes he said he wasn’t informed of the issue.

In regards to the anti-Magnitsky law, he gave the impression that he really wanted to sign it, but at the same time wanted to leave a little leeway to have the possibility of backing off from this law.

Not one of his statements was surprising. The goal of this press conference was to retain his supporters. When he answered a question from Gazeta.ru, he was not so much addressing the publication’s readers, but his own supporters, in order to demonstrate that the president is strong.

Mikhail Vinogradov, Director of the Petersburg Policy Foundation:

There was no clear message here.

The questions were more striking than their answers, just like during Dmitri Medvedev’s television interview. The main issue in the press conference was the rebirth of public political life; the press spoke up, and not just the servile ones like Izvestia. The situation is reminiscent of the end of the ’80s, when the press became the country’s key opposition force.

Boris Nemtsov, Co-Representative of Parnas, Member of the Opposition Coordination Council:

I really liked Putin’s statement about Serdyukov today. It turns out that he isn’t a swindler or a thief, since there hasn’t been a court decision yet. But Magnitsky is a swindler and a thief, and [Hermitage Capital Management head William] Browder is a swindler and a thief, despite the fact that there hasn’t been a court decision.

It’s obvious that the war on corruption is a complete fake; they won’t give up their own… I was also struck by [Putin’s statement] that Magnitsky had passed away, and hadn’t been tortured. Although it’s true that after his death they found marks of torture on his body, and his fingers had been crushed. These lies struck me deeply….

Sergei Obukhov, State Duma Deputy from the Communist Party:

Such boredom! Four and a half hours of banality and repetition. Nothing stuck in my memory, everything was predictable. Putin is maintaining the status quo.

In regards to the anti-Magnitsky bill – that which he organized, he answered. It is not as if the Duma came up with this bill; it was, of course, the presidential administration. All of this is psychotherapy that has nothing to do with real politics.

Ilya Yashin, Co-Representative of Solidarity:

Putin says: “We do not have authoritarianism.” And just as swiftly: “I could easily change the constitution.” This is some sort of comedy club, not a press conference.

Ilya Ponomarev, State Duma Deputy from A Just Russia:

The most striking thing to me was the female journalists who asked questions.

Katya Vinokurova, Diana Khachaturian, and Masha who said “Thanks, Vova!” all showed with the same conversational manner just how much attitudes toward the acting president have changed in this country. Secondly, it is very important that the issue of yesterday’s law [on banning US adoptions of Russian children] came up seven times, and the people who asked those questions deserve a gracious bow. Thanks to that, the chances of the president vetoing this bill have risen considerably.

Yevgeniya Albats, Editor-in-Chief of the New Times:

I was certain that he would act like this during the press conference. He basically said: we’re not going to cave to public opinion. The scariest part is that Putin genuinely thinks that how it is in Russia is how it is everywhere. That is unfortunate. He genuinely does not understand basic things.

Masha Gessen, Author and Journalist, US News & World Report:

The most common thing people say to me after my meeting with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: “But no, it’s impossible that he didn’t know about you and your book. He’s a security services guy! They would have had to prepare him!” But did he have to prepare for today? To repeat facts and figures, to rehearse answers to totally predictable questions? Enough overestimating this guy. There are already plenty of people who agree that he’s a miscreant. What people still need to understand is that he’s not a very smart miscreant, standing at the head of a behemoth that is utterly casting off the last vestiges of professionalism and the general ability to function. It is a state apparatus built in the image and likeness of its leader: evil and stupid.

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.

According to Solidarity member Sergei Davidis, the organizational committee of the March of Millions concluded that the march would go on as planned, regardless of the actions of security officials.

Since Ilya Yashin was scheduled to be one of leaders of the march but may now be unable to attend because of a subpoena, the committee named State Duma Deputy Dmitri Gudkov from A Just Russia as his replacement.

According to Interfax, Russia’s Investigative Committee issued subpoenas to march organizers Aleksei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov, and Ksenia Sobchak in addition to Yashin, ordering them to appear on at 11 am on Tuesday to “undergo investigation” in regards to riots in Moscow during an mass opposition protest on May 6 that ended with about 650 arrests and 47 injured activists.

The subpoenas were issued after investigative units raided (or attempted to raid, as some residents weren’t home) 10 Moscow apartments, purportedly in connection with the riots. In addition to the aforementioned activists, the apartment of Voina art activist Pyotr Verzilov was also raided. A number of computers, iPads, cellphones, and other materials were confiscated from Navalny and Udaltsov, as was Navalny’s t-shirt that read “United Russia is the Party of Swindlers and Thieves” and an item from Udaltsov with the Left Front logo on it.

Police also took 1.5 million euros from Sobchak’s apartment, on the vague basis that “the source that the funds were acquired from has not been established.” Sobchak was not one of the organizers of the May 6 protests.

The office of the Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption, created by Navalny, was also raided, as was the apartment of the parents of his fiancé.

A trio of Duma deputies from A Just Russia compared the raids to Soviet tactics of repression. “We feel that this might provoke an irreversible rise in tension in society and close the path to the constructive evolution of the political system in Russia,” said the statement released by Gennady Gudkov, Dmitri Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev.

Another opposition camp on its way from Chistoprudny Boulevard to the Barrikadnaya metro station was broken up by police this evening, unable to hold out for a single day.

The police have made arrests, basing these on the lack of proper food documentation in the oppositionists “kitchen.”

The arrest of the oppositionists began unexpectedly.

In the evening, a group of police officers without proper documentation confiscated food and cash donations that were in the camp, and detained several nearby people. In the official version, the reason for the confiscation was the lack of supporting documents [to distribute] the food. In response, the oppositionists attempted to block the police van, breaking its mirror and blocking the road, after which new police buses began to arrive and arrest more people.

A group of supporters of former Astrakhan mayoral candidate Oleg Shein from the A Just Russia party were gathered on the southern city’s central square when provocators from a pro-Kremlin youth group began to harass them. When police refused to intervene, the protesters were forced to defend themselves.

News of the arrest came from activist Georgy Alburov, who posted numerous photographs of the rally on Twitter.

Also through Twitter, A Just Russia deputy Dmitry Gudkov reported that Yashin was released later Wednesday evening. It was unclear if he faced any charges or if any of the provacators had also been arrested.

Earlier in the day, deputies from A Just Russia left the State Duma in protest after receiving an unsatisfactory answer from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in regards to Shein’s hunger strike.

When A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov asked what Putin thought about the situation, Putin responded that he didn’t know all the details but had “been informed about all of it.”

Putin continued to respond to other questions as the A Just Russia members left the hall. When a loud murmur arose, Putin complained that he found it “difficult to communicate.”

Oleg Shein began his hunger strike on March 15 after losing what he says was a corrupt mayoral election. The winner, Mikhail Stolyarov, is a member of Putin’s leading United Russia party. A number of supporters have joined Shein in his strike. Gudkov told RIA Novosti on Wednesday that the ex-candidate’s condition has since markedly deteriorated.

While Astrakhan regional governor Aleksandr Zhilkin has said that a reelection would be the best way to end the dispute, Stolyarov would have to agree. The latter has thus far refused, arguing that even if there were some falsifications during the election, the majority of Astrakhan residents still supported him.

Yashin is also scheduled to speak at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute tonight, April 4 at 5:30 pm.

Watch the talk in full below (in Russian with English interpretation):

According to Agora, Russia was home to 730 rallies, demonstrations, and pickets attended by a total of more than 400 thousand people during 2011. Of those participants, more than four thousand were detained before, during, or immediately after the event.

The group found that 117 civil activists, made up mostly of bloggers, anarchist or antifascists, and members of the banned National Bolshevik Party, were subjected to criminal prosecution in the past year. They were mostly incriminated under Russia’s controversial “extremism” laws, which critics denounce for their broad, vague wording, and also under laws against slandering or insulting government figures. Among the persecuted activists was music critic Artemy Troitsky, Novosibirsk artist Artem Loskutov, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaev of the art group Voina, and Tyumen State University professor Andrei Kutuzov.

Three activists were killed in 2011: in May, editor Yakhya Magomedov of the Avar-language Islamic newspaper As-Salam; in June, Rector Maksud Sadikov of the Institute of Theology and International Relations was shot along with his nephew in Makhachkala; in December, Gadzhimurad Kamalov, a journalist and founder of the independent newspaper Chernovik, was murdered in Dagestan.

Agora also recorded 45 incidents of beatings and other attacks.

The most at-risk groups were ecologists (primarily members of the Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest and opponents of environmental damage due to Olympic construction in Sochi), LGBT activists, and activists and participants of protests in the North Caucasus.

There were also 42 arrests, most commonly of members of the National Bolsheviks, Khimki Forest activists, and members of the electoral watchdog Golos. Irina Teplinskaya, a vocal critic of Russia’s treatment of drug addicts, was arrested in a Kaliningrad airport in August, and Golos head Liliya Shibanova was arrested in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in December. Noting the arrests of blogger Aleksei Navalny, oppositionist Ilya Yashin, and pianist Fedor Amirov, analysts at Agora said that from December 5-7, Russia for the first time began detaining people en masse and sentencing them to the maximum term of administrative arrest, with more than 100 people turning up in Moscow holding facilities during that time.

Additionally, 2011 saw 25 police searches of NGO offices and activists’ apartments.

The searches included a firm owned by Khimki Forest activist Yevgenia Chirikova and her husband, the office of the opposition movement Solidarity, and the Ulyanovsk branch of the Memorial human rights center.

The 850 cases of persecution recorded by Agora in 2011 followed 603 such cases in 2010, 308 in 2009, and 144 in 2008.

Yashin was released on Wednesday at 2:30 am in northwest Moscow. According to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, he was feeling fine.

Navalny was released from another facility at 2:35 am to a waiting crowd of journalists and supporters. The whistleblowing blogger said that intends to file a complaint against police for forcibly transferring him from a detention center to a police station.

“Ilya Yashin and I were asked if we’d like to go to the police station, but we declined. Several hours ago I was called supposedly to sign a document, after which someone in a t-shirt and flip-flops forced me into a car and took me away,” Navalny said. “I consider this to be unlawful and am going to complain about these actions by the police.”

Both oppositionists were arrested on December 5 following a mass rally at Moscow’s Chistye Prudy and sentenced to 15 days in jail for supposedly “violating police orders.” They were among 300 other demonstrators arrested out of a crowd of approximately 10,000; about 60 were given jail sentences from between 10 and 15 days each.

Oppositionists have scheduled another mass rally to protest the election results for December 24.

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:

Update 06/01/11: Number of detainees in Moscow updated; note of Toronoto rally added.

Russian opposition activists held rallies in defense of free assembly in dozens of cities across the country on Tuesday in the latest iteration of the Strategy 31 campaign. As usual, dozens of demonstrators were arrested in cities where local authorities refused to grant permission for the rallies.

In Moscow, an estimated 60 people were detained at an unsanctioned rally on Triumfalnaya Square, including, as has become customary, Other Russia party leader and rally co-organizer Eduard Limonov, Solidarity co-leader Ilya Yashin, and Left Front leaders Sergei Udaltsov and Konstantin Kosyakin. According to photojournalist Ilya Varlamov, it was very difficult to estimate the number of attendants, but it was likely no more than 300.

In a break from recent tradition, Limonov’s Strategy 31 rally was the only one held in Moscow on Tuesday. Leading Russian human rights advocate and former Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who for the past several months has successfully received official approval to hold her own Strategy 31 rallies, has chosen to organize different demonstrations on different days of the month.

The first to arrive on Triumfalnaya Square were Yashin, Udaltsov and Kosyakin, for whom Strategy 31 rallies usually with their detentions by police. This time was no different, as the three were arrested before they even had a chance to speak to clamoring television reporters – OMON riot police forced their way through a group of journalists to reach the opposition leaders. Similarly, Limonov was arrested as soon as he climbed out of his car.

Another traditional participant of the Strategy 31 rallies, Boris Nemtsov, was this time in Nizhny Novgorod, where activists held their own rally in defense of free assembly. Nemtsov, who came to the rally accompanied by his mother, signed several copies of his report “Putin. Results” for those present. Local police made no attempts to detain him.

“Recently, everyone has argued so much that it’s unclear how many people were coming and what they were going to do,” a rallier on Triumfalnaya Square told Gazeta.ru. Protesters did seem less prepared than usual – no flags or posters were seen in the crowd, and only a handful of people had badges with the number 31 pinned to their shirts. At the same time, organizers say that a demand for free and fair elections has officially been added to the Strategy 31 campaign.

Because Triumfalnaya Square itself continues to be blocked off for construction, ralliers were forced to gather along the bordering sidewalks – until police set upon them from both sides. Many were brutally pushed around; one woman cried out into the crowd, “they have no wives, that’s why they grope us!”

Cries of “freedom!” and “shame!” also sounded from the crowd, but police had almost entirely cleared the square of oppositionists half an hour after the rally had begun.

On the other side of the square, a small group of environmental activists calling for the defense of the Khimki Forest and representatives of a group called the Free Radicals tried to hold a small march, but were literally thrown to the ground by police after only 10 meters. Police then began to carry off the demonstrators; Sergei Konstantinov, head of the Free Radicals, howled at the top of his lungs until police brought him out of the view of journalists.

Police figures cite 26 detainees altogether on Triumfalnaya Square Tuesday night, while rally organizers put the number at 60. As usual, rally leaders are being charged with organizing an unsanctioned demonstration. They face up to 15 days of administrative arrest.

Strategy 31 rallies were also held in dozens of other Russian cities, some with arrests. In St. Petersburg, approximately 100 demonstrators were detained, including at least one minor, at two unsanctioned demonstrations. A heavy police and separate “monitoring” presence was noted at a rally in Omsk, and protesters were forced to hold solitary pickets in Blagoveshchensk after local authorities refused to sanction a larger demonstration – on the basis that 500 visiting Chinese children were scheduled to play in the square.

Rallies in solidarity were also held in New York City, Toronto, London and Rome.

Article compiled from reports by Gazeta.ru and Kasparov.ru.