Demonstrations were held in about 50 cities across the country, but even the largest in the cities of Irkutsk and Vladivostok consisted of no more than 2,000 people. Organizers in Irkutsk, which included the liberal Yabloko party, the opposition Solidarity movement, and a variety of human rights organizations, had originally projected that 10,000 people would be taking part in the demonstration.

Approximately 70 people were detained in Moscow, where several hundred people turned out for a protest on Pushkin Square that had earlier been banned by city authorities. Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front political movement, was among those detained and said on Sunday that he plans to file a criminal suit against the city authorities for causing massive disorder, beating detained protesters, and using pepper spray to disperse the crowd.

Oppositionists complained that there was no reason for the city to ban their peaceful protest, which was largely focused on calling for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to resign. One of the protesters who turned up at Pushkin Square was detained for holding a sign reading “Zhukovsky or a new Cherkizon?” referring to the controversial government shutdown of a Moscow market last summer that put tens of thousands of merchants out of work. However, when the protester showed the police his identification as State Duma Deputy Anton Belyakov, a member of the party A Just Russia, the police not only released him but put began voicing agreement that it was indeed about time for Mayor Luzhkov to go.

The most creative rally was held in Kaliningrad, where an anti-government protest of about 10,000 people had taken place in January. The stage was set for Saturday to see about 30,000 participants, when city officials relegated the protest to a sports arena instead of the open city center as organizers had wanted, on the basis that a farmers market was planned for the original location. Fearing what could happen if violence was to break out in an enclosed area, local opposition leader Konstantin Doroshok agreed to cancel the rally after holding negotiations with Kaliningrad Governor Georgy Boos. As part of their deal, a four hour question-and-answer session was held in Kaliningrad at the time when the rally was intended to occur, in which the governor and Doroshok took part.

Left on their own, however, a group of activists organized on the social networking website Vkontakte and rallied on the market in the early afternoon. Given that the governor had acquired the nickname “the Tangerine” among Kaliningrad oppositionists, the protesters held the fruits above their heads and called for Boos and Putin both to step down. Approximately 1000 people turned out for what has since been dubbed the “tangerine flash mob.”

Other rallies, consisting of between a few dozen to several hundred participants, were held in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Yaroslavl, and other cities across the country.

In a press release issued on Monday, ecologists at the Baikal Environmental Wave expressed concern that police officers had been visiting the homes and places of work of members of the organization. Among those officers were agents from the notoriously brutal Center for Extremism Prevention, commonly known as Center “E” and accused by Amnesty International of torturing detainees.

Over the course of “discussion” with ecologists’ relatives, says the statement, officers made disparaging remarks about the Baikal Environmental Wave and co-leader Marina Rikhvanova.

Rikhvanova told Kasparov.ru that the police most likely obtained the ecologists’ home addresses from computers confiscated from the organization at the end of January, supposedly for using unlicensed software.

The ecologists believe that the police visits and confiscations are a direct result of the organization’s protest against the reopening of the infamous Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill. In particular, Rikhvanova was critical of a notification from the city sanitation department, which claimed that the mill would clean its sewage before dumping it into Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“But nobody knows how they’re going to clean it, or if they’re going to clean it at all, because all of the cleaning equipment is kept out under the open sky and, as the mill’s management said earlier, a minimum of three months of above-freezing temperatures are required to start it up,” Rikhvanova explained.

The organization is planning to hold a rally in defense of the lake on March 20.

After decades of protests, the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill was closed in October 2008 due to environmental concerns regarding the mill’s discharge of toxic waste into Lake Baikal: Over the course of 40 years of operation, toxic discharge created dead zone in the lake of more than 12 square miles. Hundreds of tons of waste stored in open-air pits have created more air pollution than almost anywhere else in Russia.

Despite this, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a decree in mid-January to change the environmental laws previously prohibiting waste from being dumped into the lake, thus allowing the mill to resume operations. Approximately two thousand people gathered in protest on February 13, demanding that the mill be closed, that mill owner and oligarch Oleg Deripaska be held accountable, and that Prime Minister Putin resign. Police responded to the protest with greatly excessive measures, calling out armored vehicles and a small tank to flank the demonstrators.