While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

The Rally of Dissent on Triumfalnaya Square, part of the ongoing Strategy-31 initiative by the Other Russia coalition, saw an increased number of participants compared to recent events. Opposition groups put estimates at between 700 and 1000 protesters.

Among those detained were former deputy prime minister and leader of the Solidarity opposition movement Boris Nemtsov, Solidarity leader Ilya Yashin, prominent political activists Roman Dobrokhotov and Nikolai Lyaskin, Memorial human rights organization chairman Oleg Orlov, and Lev Ponomarev of the organization For Human Rights.

Also detained was National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov, who organized the rally together with former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva and activist Konstantin Kosyakin. Limonov was detained several minutes after appearing at the rally, but was able to answer several questions from journalists.

“We, the citizens, have the right to be here on this square,” Limonov declared. “Whether the police have this right is a big question.”

Law enforcement officials, which included internal military forces and the notoriously brutal OMON police forces, were reportedly harsher than usual in their treatment of detainees. Eyewitnesses noted that a girl, bloody after being beaten by police, was among those in an OMON bus on its way to a police station.

Protesters attempted to block the road when the buses began to depart from the square, but were dispersed by police.

Journalists, photographers and cameramen had been cordoned off early in the evening into a small space near the exit of a nearby metro station.

The large number of participants, however, was somewhat overwhelming for the police.

“Usually they manage to detain all the activists in 30 minutes,” said photographer Ilya Varlamov, “but this time it took two hours.”

Many protesters clipped tags to their coats with the phrase “Article 31 of the Russian Constitution,” providing for freedom of assembly, which they hoped would inform the police of “what they were detaining.”

Sunday marked Nemtsov’s first time participating in the series of rallies, dubbed Strategy 31 by its organizers. “I haven’t participated up until now in the rallies on the 31st,” the former deputy prime minister said on his blog. “It seemed to me that with Limonov in charge, it wasn’t worth our ideological differences. On December 31, my attitude toward the rallies changed. It became shameful, upon seeing that while we drank champagne and snacked on olivye, OMON officers were driving the distinguished Lyudmila Alexeyeva onto a police bus.”

The rally on December 31 ended in the detention of approximately 60 of 400 activists present, including the 82-year old Alexeyeva. Her arrest in particular drew immediate scorn from domestic rights groups as well as the United States and various European governments.

Like all previous Rallies of Dissent, Sunday’s demonstration was held without official sanction from the Moscow city authorities. While organizers submitted a proper application, the mayor’s office stated that “winter festivities” had been planned for Triumfalnaya Square on Sunday evening and advised them to pick another location. Organizers of the rally maintain that federal authorities are simply continuing to do whatever they can to block citizens’ rights to exercise freedom of assembly.

Analagous rallies were also held on Sunday in St. Petersburg, Astrakhan, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, Murmansk and other cities througout Russia.

Valmarov’s photographs of the rally can be seen by clicking here.