Approximately 200 people participated in the rally, which is held regularly on the 12th of every month to provide a forum for Russians to express their collective discontent with government authorities. The protesters hailed from a variety of opposition and civil rights movements, including the Moscow Council, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights, For Human Rights, the Left Front, the Moscow Workers Council, groups of automobile owners, environmental activists, and others.

Gathered near the Kremlin on Teatralnaya Square, the group chanted anti-government slogans such as “it’s time to change the government,” “Russia without Putin,” “it’s time to change course,” and “fictional elections are illegal,” the latter representing protesters’ current main grievance. Several leading activists, including Sergei Udaltsov, Lev Ponomarev, and Konstantin Kosyakin, gave speeches calling for a boycott of December parliamentary elections and telling people to go out into the streets in a sign of protest.

Police had thoroughly cordoned off Teatralnaya Square, with rows of officers lining the path from the square to the nearby metro in order to prevent participants from moving outside of their designated area of protest. The event had been sanctioned by Moscow city authorities, but an application to hold a subsequent march to the presidential administration building was turned down on the basis that it would cause traffic jams. However, Kosyakin proposed that the group march anyway, in spite of the ban.

The would-be marchers were immediately halted by police, with four arrested in total. As of Wednesday night, the activists were still in police holding.

A total of nine Day of Wrath protests have been declared unlawful by Moscow city authorities and cracked down upon between 2010 and 2011. Today’s was the first to be granted sanction in a long time, the ban on the march notwithstanding.

Following a Day of Wrath protest this past August, organizers announced that they were giving government authorities a month to organize a meeting between members of the country’s top leadership and themselves to discuss the demands of participants in detail. The meeting, however, never took place.

On March 28, Ponomarev wrote in his blog that the rights activists will be taking up another cause in place of the defense of free assembly. “We are proposing holding a last rally under the name of ‘Movement 31′ or ‘Strategy 31.’ In the future, we won’t be holding rallies on the 31st date. We have diverged in concept from [Strategy 31 co-founder Eduard] Limonov’s group and propose no longer using the 31st date; moreover, our very concept of a rally is changing,” he said.

The group of activists now plans to lend their support to an initiative to ban United Russia – the country’s largest party, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – that has sprung up in the city of Izhevsk.

“We have discussed this issue with lawyers and found that there is no direct legal path to liquidate United Russia, but in places it’s possible to set up organizational structures in case they violate the law,” Ponomarev explained.

The activists say they wish to hold rallies to this end on a regular basis but not latch onto a specific date.

“Our task is to unite the forces of all those who are dissatisfied with the political system that has been created and who are prepared to take control of future elections,” Ponomarev added.

According to Kasparov.ru, 1200 people gathered at a rally in Izhevsk on March 19 to support a ban on United Russia. At the end of the rally, participants issued a call for “the citizens of Russia” to begin a national campaign on April 9 to ban the party.

Until October 2010, Strategy 31 rallies in Moscow were organized by Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin, and Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov. For more than a year, the city refused to sanction the rallies and instead proposed alternative locations that would have isolated the protests from public view. The group split apart after Alexeyeva reached an agreement with city authorities to obtain sanction for a rally on Triumfalnaya Square with a limit of 800 participants. Limonov and Kosyakin insisted that no such limits should be imposed, and since then dual rallies have been held on the square on the 31st of each date – one sanctioned and one not.

Earlier this month, Alexeyeva announced that she and other human rights activists would be holding their sanctioned Strategy 31 rally on Pushkin Square, separate from Limonov’s. “We think that there will be more participants at a rally on Pushkin Square,” Alexeyeva said at the time. “In addition, we don’t want for there to be any confrontation.”

A group of prominent Russian human rights advocates have penned a letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on the subject, asking him to take immediate action to put an end to the widespread use of torture in Russia’s detention facilities.

To the President of the Russian Federation
D.A. Medvedev

Message from members of public hearings dedicated to the problem of torture within law enforcement agencies and the penitentiary system

Respected Dmitri Anatolevich!

The prevalence of torture, physical and psychological, that happens in our country during both inquiries and investigations and also during detention has taken on a scale characteristic of a totalitarian society.

Medieval in nature, torture is used far and wide to obtain self-incriminating statements and statements incriminating others as well as for morally suppressing prisoners. Regardless of the changes in law and all reforms in law enforcement agencies, the practice of torture has been preserved and is even expanding.

We consider the current situation to be absolutely intolerable and feel that it demands joint action from both the state and civil society.

We are pinning our hopes on you, since it is precisely you who has repeatedly proclaimed that observing the principle of the supremacy of law is important and is the main guarantor of constitutional human rights and freedoms in our country.

We call upon you to issue a legislative initiative to change the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation so that it would preserve the testimony of accused persons given during preliminary investigations only in the case that it is later confirmed by the defendant in court. This would render the use of torture and forced testimony during inquiries and investigations pointless.

In addition, we call upon you to initiate changes to strip prison administrations of any motivation to use unlawful pressure against people in detention. With this goal in mind, limits on the actions of penal system operational staff should be introduced into the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. They should not have the authority to engage in illegal activities that are committed by persons outside of the given place of detention or which go beyond the punishment that the prisoner has been sentenced to. In this way, operatives will only work to prevent and put a stop to violations of the law that are planned or committed in these places of detention.

We call upon you to create a joint public and state commission to investigate incidents of torture and cruel and degrading treatment.

Such a commission should be created with the participation of representatives of state agencies and also the Presidential Council on the Development of Society and Human Rights, the Public Chamber of the RF, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the RF, a specialized committee of the State Duma of the RF, and specialized human rights organizations.

We members of the organizational committee for public hearings dedicated to the problem of torture in law enforcement agencies and the penitentiary system also feel it is very important to take part in the work of such a commission.

We are certain that, without your immediate interference, the problem of the expansion of the use of torture will definitively destroy the prestige of Russian justice and will undermind the faith of the Russian people in the law.

Hearing Organizational Committee:

L.M. Alexeyeva, representative of the Moscow Helsinki Group, representative of the head of the foundation In Defense of the Rights of Prisoners
V.V. Borshchev, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group
S.A. Kovalev, president of the Institute of Human Rights
L.A. Ponomarev, leader of For Human Rights
S.V. Belyak, lawyer
D.N. Dmitriev, lawyer

February 21, 2011
A.D. Sakharov Museum & Public Center

In an interview published Monday by Gazeta.ru, Khamovnichesky Court aide and press secretary Natalya Vasilyeva said the pressure Danilkin was subjected to was “constant” throughout the entire trial and up through when the verdict was read. “I can say that the whole judicial community understands very well that this is a made-to-order case and a made-to-order trial,” she said.

As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports:

Vasilyeva said Danilkin was summoned to the Moscow City Court on December 25, two days before he began reading the verdict, where he was to meet an “important person who had to give him clear instructions about the verdict.”

On December 30, Danilkin sentenced Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev to 14 years in prison. The first eight years were to run concurrently with the eight-year sentences for tax evasion and fraud that the two had been serving since 2003 and which were set to finish this year.

According to Vasilyeva, unspecified top Russian officials were concerned that Danilkin’s verdict would not be sufficiently harsh, “My suspicions are based on what I heard in the court corridors,” she said. “I heard people who were close to the judge say that [Khodorkovsky's] verdict was written in the Moscow City Court, that it was all done in a hurry, very quickly, and that Danilkin had nothing to do with this verdict.”

At another point in the interview, Vasilyeva said she knew “with absolute certainty that the verdict was brought [to the Khamovnichesky District Court] from the Moscow City Court.”

In remarks reported by Russian news agencies, Danilkin denounced Vasilyeva’s allegations as “slander.”

Likewise, Anna Usacheva, a spokeswoman for the Moscow City Court, called the interview a “provocation” and a “well-planned PR act,” in remarks reported by ITAR-TASS. “I’m certain that Natalya Vasilyeva will … renounce her comments,” she said.

Speaking to Kasparov.ru, political analysts and opposition figures had mixed reactions to the interview:

Stanislav Belkovsky, political analyst:

- Now society will have no doubt that the verdict was unjust. I wouldn’t rule out that Judge Viktor Danilkin himself, who wants to save his own reputation, had something to do with the interview. It’s well known that Danilkin was already acutely distressed back in August 2010, because he knew then that he would have to hand down a conviction without sufficient basis for it. It seems to me that he expected decisions by the Supreme Court and the Kremlin that could have lightened pressure on him from the Moscow City Court and Olga Yegorova, but these decisions never came to be.

It’s unlikely that this interview would have happened without Danilkin’s sanction; I have reason to believe that he knew about it. And the fact that he’s denying this now is entirely normal. Otherwise he would have had the courage to say that he was pressured himself.

Ilya Yashin, co-leader of the Solidarity opposition movement

- This is not, alas, going to have any effect on Khodorkovsky’s fate. Not Danilkin, nor Olga Yegorova, nor the fact that Khodorkovsky was the head of Yukos will have any effect on his fate. The course of events can be affected only one person, and his name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Since Khodorkovsky is Putin’s personal enemy, he’s going to sit in prison for as long as Putin stays in power, because there are going to be illegal reprisals against him.

Aleksei Mukhin, political analyst:

- There are two versions of what happened. Either the girl has a sense of conscience or, more likely, she wants to become famous – to become a witness of the opposition, a ‘devil’s advocate.’ But this is a dead end. The entire state machine is going to work to make sure that this story doesn’t develop. Here we’re talking about chief government executives, and there could be any possible consequences.

Lev Ponomarev, leader of the movement For Human Rights:

- I see this as an extraordinary event that is going to influence the entire situation surrounding Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s conviction. Criminal charges should be filed for impeding due process. I (and possibly other human rights advocates) are going to appeal to the prosecutor’s office in regards to the publication of this interview. We also need to appeal for Medvedev to take Khodorkovsky’s case under his own control. Vasilyeva needs to be taken into protection. Indeed, criminal charges are going to be filed against her. Even Danilkin has promised to file charges.

A video and the full text of the interview can be found here.

With a new mayor and a rift between rally organizers, nobody knew what to expect from Moscow’s Strategy 31 rally. When the three organizers – Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva, National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, and Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin – were told by the mayor’s office that they would be allowed to hold a rally for no more than 200 people on Triumfalnaya Square, it was both the first time ever that such permission had been granted and the first time that the trio had become so split on how to respond. Alexeyeva came to an agreement with the mayor’s office to allow a rally for 800, while Limonov and Kosyakin chose to split off and hold a separate rally – on the same square, at the same time, and still under the banner of Strategy 31 – unsanctioned and thus more liable to a police crackdown, but for as many people as wanted to come.

According to Gazeta.ru, Moscow city police were given an order ahead of the rally to avoid detaining participants and to behave in an appropriate fashion. To ensure this, Police Chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev and the new deputy mayor in charge of work with city law enforcement, Vladimir Shukshin, were present at the rally to observe. Presidential rights advisor Mikhail Fedotov and federal Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin also came as observers.  And it showed. Metal detectors were set up at the entrance to the sanctioned part of the rally, and police stopped traffic to allow activists arriving from the metro to cross the street. OMON riot police, who are most often noted in the media for their particularly brutal treatment of opposition protesters, were heard yelling into a microphone: “Go to Alexeyeva, she’s waiting for you.” About 1000 showed up for the sanctioned event.

Protesters who chose to join with Limonov and Kosyakin were forced to squish onto the terrace outside the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, which borders Triumfalnaya Square. At the height of the rally, the crowd was estimated at between 1500-2000 people. Police made several detentions when activists from the unsanctioned rally attempted to saw open the barrier that is currently blocking off the majority of Triumfalnaya Square for construction. Another two were detained for setting off smoke bombs.

A half hour after the rally began, police formed a human chain and began to push the unsanctioned crowd towards Alexeyeva’s event, knocking over the metal detectors in the process. According to Ekho Moskvy radio, Limonov himself was hoisted by his arms and legs over that part of the square. Once inside, ralliers were not allowed back out.

While this was going on, Lyudmila Alexeyeva and singer Katya Gordon were giving speeches to their crowd, with Gordon shaming the police for jamming Limonov’s ralliers together and Alexeyeva hailing the sanctioned event as “our shared achievement.” “I want to thank you for coming to Triumfalnaya Square on every 31st date for the course of a year and a half,” said the elderly rights activist. “We must force the government to treat our rights with respect.”

A number of notable civic organizations had representatives at Alexeyeva’s rally, including Lev Ponomarev of For Human Rights, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, Solidarity members Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, Sergei Davidis, and Oleg Kozlovsky, Khimki Forest defense activist Yevgeniya Chirkova, and representatives from the Memorial human rights center. Nemtsov decried the conflict between the Strategy 31 organizers, saying that “we mustn’t give the Kremlin such a gift as a schism.” He then proposed that ralliers gather once again on December 31 and end their rally by marching on the Kremlin.

After an hour, the sanctioned rally was over, and both organizers and police began asking people to leave. However, a group of between 300-800 people broke off and began marching south down the Garden Ring towards the Russian White House, blocking traffic and apparently taking Nemtsov’s words as a call to immediate action. Police broke up the crowd amidst cries of “it’s our city!” and “revolution!”

At that point, most of the marchers scattered, but about 30 reformed and continued to march on the White House. Mobile Twitter messages from those present gave some insight into the group’s mentality. “Part of the group has set off for the White House, IMHO in vain: you really need to know when to stop,” tweeted Solidarity member Oleg Kozlovsky.

According to reporter Ilya Azar, “Nobody knows where the White House is. Kozlovsky is asking people not to go and nobody is listening to him.” Eventually, OMON riot police caught up with the marchers, and half ran away. Gazeta.ru reported that seven were detained right outside of the White House entrance, including activist Marina Litvinovich, Kasparov.ru correspondent Pavel Nikulin, and Polit.ru journalist Maria Klimova.

The total 38 detainees were released on Monday morning from holding cells in Moscow, according to Other Russia representative Aleksandr Averin.

Two separate rallies in defense of free assembly were also held in St. Petersburg on Sunday. About 1000 people gathered at Gostiny Dvor, were police immediately began making detentions. Another 300 people rallied at Dvortsovaya Square. Police began detaining those activists after they unfurled a 30-meter-long Russian flag.

Other Strategy 31 events were held in the Russian cities of Vladivostok, Kurgan, Penza, Murmansk, Tver, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Astrakhan, Sochi, Ryazan, Krasnodarsk, and others, largely without incident.

For the second time in a row, about 50 protesters also held a solidarity rally outside of the Russian embassy in London. Participants included exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, and Marina Litvinenko, the widow of murdered ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko.

Video from RIA Novosti on the Moscow protest (in Russian):

Lev Ponomarev, head of the organization For Human Rights, told Ekho Moskvy radio that a request had been sent to Interim Mayor Vladimir Resin to sanction the “Day of Anger,” part of a regular series of rallies under that name. The demonstrations are aimed at allowing Russian citizens to voice their collective grievances against corrupt government officials, civil rights abuses, unconstitutional policies, and other political and societal problems. The rallies are routinely banned and violently broken up by police.

While it is completely routine for the Russian authorities to ban opposition protests on weak or nonexistent pretexts, former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov was known for going to the extreme and banning rallies just so he didn’t have to see them. As Ponomarev told Ekho Moskvy, it would not be right for Resin “to continue the tradition that was formed under Yury Luzhkov, in which any rally on Tverskaya Square across from his office was automatically banned.”

“There were many violations of the rights of Muscovites, illegal actions, corruption” under Luzhkov, the rights advocate went on. “One of these violations was the regular prohibition of large demonstrations outside his window. There must be changes. Resin, in temporarily fulfilling the mayor’s duties, should act according to the law.”

Organizers of the upcoming Day of Anger, scheduled for October 12 on Moscow’s Tverskaya Square, handed in an application for the event the day Luzhkov was fired. On September 30, they received notification that their application had been denied, on the basis that the rally would “bother Muscovites and guests of the city” and could possibly result in damage to a monument on the square. Oppositionists decried the move as unfounded, saying that the city was giving up the chance to improve the political climate in the capitol.

Corresponding Day of Anger rallies are planned for October 12 in cities throughout Russia, including in St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Penza, Kirov, Voronezh, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Ivanovo, and many other cities. The last Day of Anger in Moscow was held without official sanction on September 12. Thirty out of the approximately 200 participants were detained by police.

According to a report by local news agency MediaRyazan, police say that 1276 large public events have been held in Ryazan so far this year, with 748 of those being civic or political demonstrations or rallies. The civic or political events were attended by approximately 150 thousand people, with 350 thousand law enforcement officers also on the scene.

Ryazan’s anti-terrorism commission said that with the number of demonstrations on the rise each month – and unsanctioned ones in particular – the police have become unable to properly maintain law and order during official holiday events. As a result, said the commission, no more than one large event should be allowed to be held in the city per day.

MediaRyazan did not manage to obtain comment from any of the members of the commission: Governor Oleg Kovalyov left after the meeting for a business trip, Deputy Governor Andrei Sevelev was unavailable altogether, and the regional police bureau turned down requests to speak with the press.

Oppositionists were more than skeptical of the legal basis for the initiative. “It’s hard for me to imagine how you can ban holding several massive events in the city,” said Sergei Yezhov, leader of the Ryazan branch of the Other Russia opposition coalition and a co-organizer of local rallies in the Strategy 31 campaign for free assembly. “We sometimes have more police come to our rallies than participants. Let them sit at home and not participate.”

The opposition leader added that Ryazan Deputy Police Chief Sergei Sosnovsky denied that such a ban would ever actually go into effect.

Nevertheless, political analyst Vladimir Avdonin noted that Ryazan was an odd choice for such an initiative, given that it has few large protests. The only ones that regularly occur are held annually by the Communist Party on November 7 and May 1, he said.

“So it’s possible that this is a test run,” Avdonin explained. “First ban [rallies] in Ryazan, and then in other cities.”

That sentiment was shared by Lev Ponomarev, notable activist and head of the organization For Human Rights. He added that limits on civil rights can only be introduced during states of emergency, “but there’s no state of emergency in the city.” Ponomarev also noted that this was not the first time local authorities have attempted to ban rallies on the basis of too few police officers, citing Yekaterinburg as an example.

One of the organizers of the Moscow Strategy 31 rallies, Konstantin Kosyakin, agreed that the commission’s initiative has nothing to do with terrorism and was solely meant to prevent legitimate anti-government protests. “”It’s not right,” he told the Kasparov.ru news portal. “There is a federal law about rallies, in which the frequency of holding events is in no way written; to ban holding more than one rally a day is something awful.”

The Tverskoy Court handed down the ruling on September 7, convicting the 69-year-old leader of the organization For Human Rights of insubordination to a police officer. The accusations stemmed from Ponomarev’s participation as a co-organizer of an unsanctioned opposition protest dubbed the Day of Wrath, part of a series of demonstrations in which about 300 protesters gathered in Moscow on August 12 to demand the resignation of the Russian federal government and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. According to police figures, 35 people were detained at the event.

Ponomarev decided to face the court on Tuesday without a lawyer. He denounced the ruling as politically motivated.

As a result of his sentence, Ponomarev told Interfax, he was unable to attend a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday between Russian rights leaders and United States presidential advisor Michael McFaul.

William Burns, the United States under secretary of state for political affairs who attended the meeting, was critical of the ruling. “I should note that it is regrettable that Lev Ponomarev, who was supposed to be at the meeting, was not able to attend,” he said in remarks to the Interfax news agency. “The freedom of assembly is very important to the United States and very important for any democratic society.”

The Russian bureau of the international human rights organization Amnesty International expressed concern at Tuesday’s ruling. “Lev Ponomarev, who was just recently named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, has now received yet another punishment,” said bureau chief Sergei Nikitin.

Speaking to Ekho Moskvy radio, Memorial civil rights society chairman Oleg Orlov said that Ponomarev’s sentence was part of a disturbing pattern of crackdowns on human rights activists in Russia. “These kinds of sentences are becoming typical. They are repressive actions,” he said.

According to Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the Russian authorities are altogether scared of people coming out and protesting in the streets. This, she explained, is what explains “Ponomarev’s ridiculous punishment.”

The two other Day of Wrath organizers were also convicted of insubordination to an officer back on August 14. Konstantin Kosyakin was sentenced to three days of administrative arrest, and Sergei Udaltsov to four. Ponomarev’s court date was postponed after he fell ill in during holding in a police station and, fearing a hypertensive crisis, was hospitalized.

The two were detained on August 22 in downtown Moscow together with Solidarity co-leader Boris Nemtsov under the pretense that they were attempting to stage an unsanctioned march. While the city authorities had given sanction to the oppositionists to hold a rally, they refused to sanction a march. As Nemtsov noted on his blog on August 20:

Can you imagine such absurdity as that, on Flag Day, demonstrators are banned from carrying the state flag through the streets of the capitol?

Is there such a country in the world?

It turns out that there is.

It’s called Putin’s Russia.

Flag Day is celebrated in Russia to commemorate the decision to return the tricolor as the national symbol in place of the Soviet Red Army flag. The date of August 22 denotes the day that Boris Yeltsin waved a white, blue and red tricolor at a rally following the August 1991 coup d’état attempt against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that, despite failing, hastened the fall of the Soviet Union.

According to RIA Novosti, rally participants gathered on Sunday to mark the holiday as sanctioned, but then proceeded to walk down the street holding a large Russian flag at Nemtsov and Shneyder’s behest. The two men were then detained by police; Ponomarev was detained several hours later.

On Tuesday, a Moscow court threw out the case against Nemtsov, which had accused him of insubordination to a police officer. The ruling was made due to lack of evidence from the police. Nemtsov told journalists that the decision “attests to the fact that [I] was detained illegally.”

Ponomarev, however, was sentenced on Wednesday to three days of detention on the same charge. Judge Mikhail Pronyakin said that the ruling took into consideration the fact that the 69-year-old rights advocate had previously served time on similar charges, referring to a three-day sentence he received following an unsanctioned demonstration in memory of victims of the Beslan school massacre. A court later ruled that it had been illegal for the authorities to refuse to sanction the demonstration.

Solidarity activists, including Nemtsov, held protests outside of Ponomarev’s holding facility on Thursday throughout the day.

Reports came out late on Thursday that Shneyder had also been sentenced to the same term under the same charge.

Speaking to Gazeta.ru, former Deputy Prime Minister and co-leader of the Solidarity opposition movement Boris Nemtsov said that the offer came several days ago from Vladislav Surkov, a primary Kremlin ideologist and highly influential aid to both the president and prime minister. Nemtsov refrained from specifying precisely to whom the proposition was made, but reports cite that it was to the “moderate” wing of the Russian opposition. Nemtsov denied that Surkov made the proposal directly to him, as some sources were reporting.

Left Front opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov expressed certainty that the Kremlin met with representatives from Solidarity, “since the Kremlin considers them to be moderate figures.”

According to Limonov himself, the offer was made both to Nemtsov and noted human rights advocate Lev Ponomarev, who heads the organization For Human Rights and is also part of Solidarity’s leadership. “At first they confirmed it. Then, clearly, they began to shy away – because now they have connections in the Kremlin,” he said.

Limonov, whose National Bolshevik Party is officially banned by the Russian government, characterized the proposal by the presidential administration as “the arrogance of a government that doesn’t want to give into Limonov.” He added that he has no intention of giving up his post as Strategy 31 organizer: “You cannot make concessions to the government: today they’re asking to sacrifice Limonov, but tomorrow it’ll be Limonov’s children.”

Meanwhile, the Kremlin denied the existence of any contact with the opposition at all. One high-level presidential representative, speaking under condition of anonymity to Gazeta.ru, said that he had no knowledge of any such negotiations.

In any case, opposition leaders are categorically refusing to abandon Limonov.

“I think the proposal is obscene,” Nemtsov said, noting that Limonov and his supporters had participated in Strategy 31 since the very beginning in July 2009. “And although it’s now a shared event, nobody has the right to start colluding with the government in this regard,” he concluded.

Vsevolod Chernozub, co-chairman of the Moscow branch of Solidarity, commented that the Kremlin’s proposal “reflects the cop-like and Chekist style of thinking of the current government.”

Strategy 31’s organizational committee has routinely consisted of Limonov, former Soviet dissident and Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva, and Left Front representative Konstantin Kosyakin. The three have applied to the Moscow mayor’s office for official sanction on seven separate occasions – on each month with a 31st date – and have been denied every time.

Alexeyeva also said that she had no plans to exclude Limonov for the upcoming rally on July 31. “I’m in favor of holding consultations with the Moscow government, as is required by law. Like always, three representatives of the event will hold these consultations,” she told Gazeta.ru.

Limonov added that, as a Strategy 31 organizer, he is currently participating in mediation procedures with Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin and Moscow Human Rights Ombudsman Aleksandr Muzykantsky. Their most recent session was held on June 1, one day after police violently broke up May’s Strategy 31 rally. During that meeting, said Limonov, a different proposition was made: “The July 31 event could be held on Pushkin Square, and then as a reward they would supposedly give us Triumfalnaya [the next month], and the next time again on Pushkin, and so on,” he explained. “But I said that this was unacceptable to us: we aren’t migrant workers who can be driven back and forth.”

The Kremlin offer comes two weeks after Limonov announced the creation of a political party based on the Other Russia opposition coalition and his intentions to lead the party in upcoming parliamentary elections. Reports about the Kremlin proposal itself come on the same day as the pro-Kremlin youth organization Young Guard announced that they have been denied sanction by the Moscow authorities to hold an event on Triumfalnaya Square on July 31 – the same date and place where the Strategy 31 rally is planned to be held. A representative from the Moscow regional government told Gazeta.ru that a three-day automobile festival has been planned for the last weekend in July on Triumfalnaya Square.

The leadership of Young Russia confirmed that they had been denied sanction for their event, and also expressed a great deal of disbelief. As has been the pattern until now, Strategy 31 opposition leaders are continually denied sanction for their own rallies, with one commonly-given excuse being that pro-Kremlin youth groups have already applied to use the same space at the same time.