Olga Kurnosova, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the United Civil Front, said that protesters gathered on Pionerskaya Square and shouted slogans including “Power to the millions, not to millionaires!” “Putin, step down!” and “We are for fair elections!”

Along with Kurnosova, Oksana Dmitrieva from A Just Russia and leading opposition politician Boris Nemtsov made speeches at the rally.

While the protest had been sanctioned by city authorities, witnesses reported that around ten armored military trucks were seen making their way towards the center of the city on Sunday morning.

In addition, police briefly detained Nemtsov at the Moskovsky train station and demanded an explanation for his trip to the city.

According to Grani.ru, the police presented Nemtsov with a document labeling him as a “leader of extremists.” The opposition leader was released after explaining that he had come to participate in a sanctioned rally.

The incident compacted Nemtsov’s fears that he is being watched. “The police continue to follow me earnestly, and I suspect that my freedom could soon come to an end,” he said.

Accusations of “extremist” activity are commonly used by Russian government authorities to persecute or marginalize opposition politicians.

Also on Sunday, the Russian Central Electoral Commission rejected an application by fellow opposition leader Eduard Limonov to run for president.

The commission stated that the rejection was based on a lack of minutes from a meeting that is required by law to be held in support of the candidate.

Limonov denounced the decision as politically motivated and promised to challenge it in court. On December 15, the oppositionist found himself without a physical place to hold the meeting, since the hall he had rented was abruptly closed for “urgent repairs” the day of the meeting.

Andrei Pivovarov, leader of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian People’s Democratic Union (RNDS), was convicted on September 15 of organizing an unsanctioned rally and “insubordination to the lawful demands of a police officer.” He has been ordered to pay a 2000 ruble fine (about $65) and must spend 14 days in a criminal detention facility.

The rally was part of the Russian opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign, which is dedicated to the right to free assembly guaranteed under Article 31 of the Russian constitution. Pivovarov was among organizers of an August 31 rally at St. Petersburg’s Gostiny Dvor, attended by about 700 people. Several dozen rally participants were detained, including Pivovarov and other prominent local opposition leaders.

Pivovarov and the RNDS are planning to appeal both of Wednesday’s convictions. The organization began holding a series of protests outside of Pivovarov’s detention facility that same day.

The RNDS is convinced that Pivovarov’s sentence “was not based on the law” and is an attempt by the authorities to frighten the opposition.

“In my view, this is an extremely inappropriate measure,” said Olga Kurnosova, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the United Civil Front. “I’ve already said multiple times that I don’t understand in general why they detain people at Gostiny Dvor. Nothing happens there that violates the public order.”

Activists participating in Strategy 31 rallies throughout Russia are routinely beaten and detained by the dozens.

“This measure is an act of intimidation,” Kurnosova concluded.

A truckload of 100,000 copies of the report, “Putin. Results. 10 Years,” were confiscated by St. Petersburg police on June 15, after the driver of the truck was reportedly found to lack the proper documents to bring a heavy cargo truck into the center of the city. Now, as of July 1, the activists working to distribute the self-published report have authorization to take the copies back, as no evidence of “extremism” had been found within their contents.

Meanwhile, a number of activists detained on June 18 for distributing the document on Vasilievsky Island, where the International Economic Forum was being held at the time, have been called in by police “for questioning,” said Kurnosova.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is a forty-eight page analysis of the actions and policies of the former president and current prime minister, with topics ranging from corruption and crumbling infrastructure to population decline and the collapse of the pension system. The report’s authors, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov, say they intend to distribute the document all over Russia, and have printed one million copies to that end. However, aside from the 100,000 confiscated by St. Petersburg police and released yesterday, another 100,000 were taken by Federal Security Service agents on June 17. The authors have issued a call for Russian citizens to print copies in samizdat fashion to distribute on their own.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, May Day events in Moscow that had been sanctioned by the city government included five demonstrations, three processions, and eleven rallies. One of the processions was organized by the opposition movement Solidarity, which counted members from a variety of other opposition groups and public organizations among its 500 participants. Prominent figures in the procession included United Civil front leader Garry Kasparov, former Deputy Prime Minister and Solidarity cofounder Boris Nemtsov, and former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky. Participants carried posters, political insignia, and a gigantic Russian flag spanning several meters in length while chanting “Russia without Putin,” “Moscow without Luzhkov,” “Putin is Brezhnev, Putin is Stalin,” “We need the Other Russia,” and “Putin must go,” among other slogans.

Although a smoke bomb was set off at one point during the procession, the police did not move to detain anyone. Protesters believe that a provocateur set off the bomb. Despite that, the procession successfully made its way to Moscow’s riverside Bolotnaya Square, where the event ended with a cultural festival. Police detained several people on the square without explanation, including Andrei Moiseyev, co-leader of Solidarity’s Moscow branch and one of the event’s organizers. Moiseyev was escorted away by police together with a reproduction of a painting by artist Dmitri Vrubel, entitled “The Kiss of Putin and Brezhnev” that he was holding. Also detained were artist activist Pyotr Verzilov, his wife, several musicians, and event co-organizer Sergei Davidis. Police gave no explanations for any of the detentions.

Elsewhere in Moscow, at least five thousand people turned out for a demonstration held by the Communist party. In addition to the Communists themselves, members of the Left Front, the National Bolsheviks, the anti-fascist group Antifa, and anarchist organizations also joined the protest.

The liberal opposition group Yabloko also held a demonstration in Moscow, with approximately 1200 participants. Chief among speakers at the event was Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin, who warned against allowing Prime Minister Putin to return to the presidency in 2012. “We need a new president who won’t rob the people of their rights and freedoms – who will fight not against the opposition, but against corruption,” he said to the crowd.

Another protest dubbed the Day of Anger was held in Moscow by the opposition group Left Front. A wide variety of oppositions, human rights advocates, environmental activists and social justice advocates came together to express their collective grief with Moscow’s ruling elite – in particular, Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Governor Boris Gromov.

Controversy had surrounded plans for the Day of Anger all last week. Left Front leader and event organizer Sergei Udaltsov had said on Wednesday that the city had sanctioned the event, but the mayor’s office denied this the next day. It remained unclear up to the end whether the rally had really been officially sanctioned or not – a vital factor, since participating in an unsanctioned rally in Russia is punishable by law, and many unsanctioned rallies end with participants being beaten and/or arrested by the police. In any case, the rally went on, but Udaltsov was detained at the end. The official reason cited by police was that more people had taken part than Udaltsov had indicated on the application for sanction. According to Left Front press secretary Anastasia Udaltsova, the unofficial version for Udaltsov’s detention, as told by several police officers, was that “representatives of the Moscow government would like to have a chat with him.”

In the city of Kaliningrad, approximately three thousand demonstrators took part in a rally of various opposition groups. According to Kasparov.ru, what began as a traditional May Day demonstration evolved into an anti-government rally. Participants brought signs to the event reading “Peace, work, May – no work, no housing,” and held up tangerines, which have become a symbol of public protest in the city in recent months. Following that, however, protesters began chants demanding for the federal government to resign.

In St. Petersburg, a procession planned by democratic opposition groups was banned by city authorities. Olga Kurnosova, executive director of the pro-democracy group United Civil Front, said that the reason involved the slogan that the protesters had planning to use, which called for St. Petersburg Governor and Putin favorite Valentina Matviyenko to resign. Supposedly, the slogan did not correspond with the slogan written on the application to hold the rally that was filed with the city. Therefore, the procession was banned altogether. Despite that, about seven hundred oppositionists held a stationary demonstration where the procession was supposed to take off from.

A photo gallery of the various events in Moscow is available here at Grani.ru.

As Kurnosova told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper, the charges stem from an incident on October 5, 2008, when the opposition activist was returning by train from Astrakhan to St. Petersburg.  Kurnosova, who was on her way home from a regional conference for the political opposition, was apprehended and searched on the train.  Police found a can of black caviar in her bags, and decided on the spot that the caviar had been poached illegally, and was therefore contraband.  Kurnosova had received the can as a gift from members of the United Civil Front in Astrakhan.  The activist was then held in a temporary detention facility for nearly two days, before being released on a promise not to leave town.

Since that time, Kurnosova has been called back to Astrakhan several times for questioning.  The activist, who is also a member of the political advisory council of the Solidarity opposition movement, was first charged with smuggling in April, although prosecutors did not launch a case at that time.  On May 16, an investigator from Astrakhan came to St. Petersburg to officially accuse Kurnosova a second time and move forward with taking the case to court.

Kurnosova believes the charges are a politically motivated scare tactic, and should not hold up in court.  The opposition leader believes prosecutors may try to give her a suspended sentence, which could be converted into a real one at some point in the future.

If convicted, Kurnosova would face up to two years in prison.

The demonstrators, who came together for an opposition demonstration known as a March of Dissent in the city, carried flags and shouted slogans like “shame on the authorities”, and handed out leaflets. Protestors called for the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and said the authorities should be changed, and not the Russian constitution. The meeting took place in the Chernyshevsky Gardens, and was sanctioned by city authorities.

Police were present at the event as well, but did not interfere with the demonstration. Activists also noted a heightened presence of police in the city center.

As the event went on, around 10 young men arrived at the meeting, bearing signs that said “Free Khodorkovsky,” “Obama,” and “We are for a nuclear-free Russia.” Other protestors took their signs and identified them as instigators.

Speakers at the meeting warned that “in the near future, pay and pensions will be delayed, there will be mass layoffs and growth in prices,” and blamed the economic crisis on “irresponsible policies” by former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

According to St. Petersburg police, 60 demonstrators were arrested, mostly in the center of the city and not at the main protest.

One of the event’s organizers, Olga Kurnosova, reported that her home had been surrounded by squad cars since early morning. Kurnosova, who heads the local branch of the United Civil Front party, became ill during the day and called for an ambulance. The ambulance was stopped and questioned by the officers as it arrived. At the moment, Kurnosova is in a clinic ward, with three officers from the UBOP organized crime squad standing by.