On Tuesday, the two groups handed in their applications for permits to hold rallies in defense of free assembly on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square on January 31. The city government has begun to grant permission for some of these rallies in the past few months, but not without complications.

Former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva was one such applicant, asking for a permit to allow 1500 people to attend her rally. Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov and Left Front coordinator Konstantin Kosyakin, along with the recent addition of former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, applied for a separate 2500-person permit as well as permission to hold a march after the rally. According to Other Russia member Sergei Aksenov, the larger figure was based on police estimates of attendance at previous rallies.

Until last October, Alexeyeva, Limonov and Kosyakin had worked together to organize all of Moscow’s Strategy 31 rallies. The group split apart after Alexeyeva obtained city permission to hold the October 31 rally with an 800-person cap. Feeling that this limit was illegal, Limonov and Kosyakin broke off and chose to hold their own, unsanctioned event concurrently with their former compatriot’s.

Alexeyeva spoke out against the idea of a march, stipulating that this was her “personal opinion.” Limonov and Kosyakin plan to have their ralliers march down Tverskaya Street towards the Kremlin following the rally on Triumfalnaya Square.

“It could have been done, but – first of all, this is harder to do in the winter, and secondly, after these events [the detention of participants of the rally on December 31 – ed.], I don’t know in general what’s going to happen,” said Alexeyeva.

“We need to clarify what happened at the rallies, and not announce a march,” she went on, noting that there had been no talk of a march at a meeting between all of the organizers on January 14.

“While the sanctioned rally in October went well, outrageous things have happened since then; people went to a sanctioned rally and they were detained. And I’m not just talking here about Nemtsov; about 50 people were detained in all,” she said. “It’s true that they were released afterwards, but who wants to be driven around Moscow and wind up in the slammer on New Year’s Eve night?”

Aksenov told Kasparov.ru that the idea behind the march was to “raise the level of challenges to the government,” since the 31st article of the constitution – which guarantees freedom of assembly, providing Strategy 31 with its name – also provides for the right to hold marches. In his words, “the authorities, in their turn, will have the opportunity to prove that freedom of assembly and marches exists in this country or to show the opposite.”

Still, he did not expect the application to be approved. “I’m optimistic. I hope that the government has the sense to grant us sanction, but I think that now, since it’s the first time, there won’t be any sanction,” Aksenov said.

Meanwhile, the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Russia has set about to derail both rallies by holding one of their own. Organizers of “Donor Day,” a diversionary tactic that the group has used multiple times to take up space on Triumfalnaya Square that would otherwise go to the oppositionists, are demanding priority consideration for their rally on the basis that they supposedly handed it their application first.

On a statement posted on their website, Young Russia stipulated that they would allow Alexeyeva to take up part of the square to hold her rally and falsely implied that her followers had been the cause of violence that broke out at previous events. “We are officially declaring that we are prepared to give up a part of our time for Lyudmila Alexeyeva to hold her own event under the conditions that it is peaceful and that it’s participants do not violate public order or provoke the police,” said the statement. “But we are not giving up a minute of the 31st or a meter of Triumfalnaya Square to Eduard Limonov, leader of the National Bolshevik Party, which is banned by the Russian court.”

It is worth noting that Young Russia members have previously demanded that Lyudmila Alexeyeva be removed from the Russian Presidential Council on Human Rights. In an October 26, 2010 letter to council representative Mikhail Fedotov, the group alleged that the Strategy 31 rallies she had organized constituted “extremism.”

The interview came in the wake of the March 31 iteration of the Strategy 31 rallies, a series of demonstrations held by the Other Russia opposition coalition in defense of the right to free assembly. The mayor’s office has routinely denied sanction to the rallies on the basis that the oppositionists’ traditional space of protest, the centrally-located Triumfalnaya Square, has always been reserved for other events. In a slap to the face for the oppositionists, last month’s event turned out to be a gigantic youth rally lead by the notoriously fanatical pro-Kremlin group Nashi.

Outraged oppositionists and human rights activists accused the mayor of deliberately creating conditions that could lead to a violent mob, citing the example of a tsarist-era tragedy on Moscow’s Khodynskoe Field where more than a thousand people were trampled to death when a panicked rush broke out.

Speaking to Izvestia in reference to Strategy 31, Mayor Luzhkov insisted that while the freedoms of speech and assembly “are among the main components of democracy,” they should not hinder other people’s right to normally live their lives. Therefore, when several thousand people announce that they’re planning to attend a rally on the relatively small Triumfalnaya Square, it poses a serious risk of impeding traffic, he said. How he reconciled this with the pro-Kremlin rally was unclear.

“The second issue is assuring safety for the demonstrators themselves,” Luzhkov went on. “So far, thank god, nothing at these demonstrations has happened where people’s health could suffer or where they could lose their lives.”

In reality, each Strategy 31 rally has ended with police beating and detaining scores of protesters, who are often denied medical attention after being stuffed into police buses. Ambulances routinely appear outside police stations later on to take away wounded activists.

In any case, Luzhkov admitted that outbreaks of violence were certainly possible. “There are such examples in the history of Moscow. Remember Khodynskoe Field,” he noted.

Activist Sergei Aksenov, a regular at the Strategy 31 rallies, took particular offense to Luzhkov’s appropriation of the Khodynka metaphor. “Luzhkov brought up Khodynka. But it seems that he’s intent on pounding [our] traditional place with various Nashisti and police,” he said. “The situation is becoming so dangerous that it calls, at the very least, for the attention of the Prosecutor General.”

The mayor went on to assert that the city has never actually banned the rallies, but simply required them to be held somewhere farther from Moscow’s center, “where people can feel more comfortable and safe.” Oppositionists maintain that not only is Triumfalnaya Square safe for a large number of people, but that the whole point of holding the rallies is to inform Russians about their constitutional rights, and holding them somewhere that’s not centrally located couldn’t achieve that goal.

Luzhkov disagreed. “Why do the ‘discontented’ insist on Triumfalnaya Square?” he asked. “So that arguments with the authorities become a point of conflict… ‘Look how they suppress us.’ They are not interested in the rally being sanctioned, but in it being banned. They want a scandal. But their freedom should not hinder the freedom of other people to calmly live and work, for traffic to move calmly, finally,” he concluded.

In the end, Strategy 31 organizers chose to hold their rally, unsanctioned as usual, together next to the pro-Kremlin youth rally. Most oppositionists, however, arrived with flowers to commemorate the victims of Moscow metro attacks days earlier on March 29. On the other side of Triumfalnaya Square, the three thousand young Russians danced to loud rap music and declared their faith that Russia would defeat terrorism. Regardless of the fact that Triumfalnaya Square was obviously capable of holding several thousand people and that the Strategy 31 activists, who that day numbered less than a thousand and carried no political insignia or banners, were holding what was largely a memorial for the dead, police detained between 40 and 50 of them. Many were beaten and severely injured.

While Russian law prohibits participation in unsanctioned rallies, rights organizations and governments worldwide, including the United States and the Council of Europe, have criticized Russia for failing to observe the right to free assembly and using excessive force against the Strategy 31 participants.

The rally turned violent when members of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Young Russia, which had been scattering fliers with the phrase “Western vampires were gathered here,” began to light fireworks. Blaming the provocation on opposition protesters, police began making arrests and forced remaining protesters into a nearby metro station.

Ten activists temporarily escaped from an OMON special forces bus when they managed to tip it over from the inside and crawl out the back window. According to activist Sergei Aksenov, all those detained on the buses were severely beaten by police.

The unsanctioned protest was attended by about 500 human rights and opposition activists, including members of the United Civil Front, Solidarity, the banned National Bolshevik Party, and many others. An application to hold the protest was denied by city authorities.

The square had been cordoned off early on by police forces that included twenty OMON buses and internal military vehicles. Among those detained was Eduard Limonov, a leader of the Other Russia coalition and the National Bolsheviks, as well as activist Marina Litvinovich. Limonov had been dragged along the asphalt by police, and neither he nor Litvinovich were allowed access to lawyers.

All those detained, including members of Young Russia, were released later that night. Limonov and Litvinovich face charges of police antagonism in court on Monday. If convicted, they face 15 days of administrative arrest.

Early November is a time of traditional protest throughout Russia. Police on Thursday practiced new techniques for crowd dispersal that focused on pensioners.

Leaders of the Other Russia coalition file applications to rally on Triumfalnaya Square every month with a 31st day, in reference to the 31st article of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of assembly. The previous three protests on May 31, July 31, and August 31 ended in the detention of activists.

A video of the protest can be seen by clicking here (in Russian).