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.

In a move that was both practical and symbolic, activists had prepared 50 thousand copies of the Russian constitution to hand out to police charged with manning the event. Renowned rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was detained in a New Year’s Eve protest despite being 82 years old, had signed each copy with the phrase “in kind remembrance.”

None of the officers present turned down their copy of the document.

A wide variety of opposition movements were represented at Saturday’s rally, and many made speeches chronicling their clashes with police violence and abuse of authority.

“I very much love the police that protect me, but I rarely see them,” said writer Viktor Shenderovich. “More often, I see the cops that beat and murder.” He stressed that the necessity for drastic police reform is a result of Russia lacking free elections, a free press, and free courts.

Referring to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s stated goal of wiping out corruption, White Ribbon movement representative Lyubov Polyakova pointed out that whistleblowing officers, such as Aleksei Dymovsky, had been poorly received when responding to the president’s call. “Look what they’ve done to them!” she said. “You don’t want to get rid of corruption; you say that we’re rocking the boat.”

“Yes, we’re rocking your rotten boat, which you, like beetles, have already completely eaten through,” Polyakova concluded.

Major Dymovsky was detained not long after posting two videos on YouTube in November that detail corruption in the Novorossiysk police department.

Sergei Davidis, coordinator of the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, appealed to the officers themselves. Remarking that the rally was calling for rights for the officers, he asked whether they really wanted to work for such paltry salaries and extort bribes to get by, and whether they really, after all, wanted people to hate them.

Solidarity movement member Anastasia Rybachenko stressed the importance of new methods for hiring law enforcement officers. “People who enter the police force intend to get police batons and power,” while others join simply to avoid Russia’s mandatory draft, she said. With the Internal Ministry scraping the bottom of society’s barrel and paying officers next to nothing, it follows that the resulting police force is less than ideal.

Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s federal designate on human rights issues, was noted among those present at the rally.

A resolution taken at the end of the demonstration called for the management of the Internal Ministry to be fired, that political persecution of whistleblowing officers be put to a stop, and that police force not be used in political investigations.

Two groups of counter-protesters attempted to disrupt the rally. Some cast leaflets into the crowd that were printed to look like hundred dollar bills, reading “these dollars are payment for the collapse of the police in Russia.” Members from one group were detained.

While the Russian police have long been notorious for their violent abuse of authority, they came under particularly harsh criticism after Major Denis Yevsyukov killed three and wounded dozens more in a Moscow supermarket while drunk late last April. With the renewed wave of media attention to police abuses that followed, prominent government and public officials began calling for the Internal Ministry to be dissolved. Last December, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the Ministry to be extensively reformed, and in a January 24 statement said that the number of police personnel “needs to be reduced and wages should be raised.”

In the meantime, scandalous incidents of police brutality show no signs of slowing.

Solominsky was detained after an apparent clash with police on October 9. A group of men in plain clothes, believed to be officers of a regional St. Petersburg police department, had blocked off access to the Khasansky market complex. When Solominsky asked them for official identification, he was beaten into a concussion, thrown into a car without police license plates, and taken to the 13th Police Precinct.

Although the beating was captured on video, prosecutors have refused to initiate criminal proceedings against the police. Instead, a suit was brought against Solominsky, charging him with “public insult of a representative of authority.” The charge carries a sentence of 6 months to 1 year of remedial labor. Police have placed Solominsky under house arrest.

“Petersburg authorities, obviously,” he says, “have decided to deal with the oppositionists who have long annoyed them.”

Signatories of the petition include writer Vladimir Bukovsky, politician Boris Nemtsov, political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, Right Cause member Boris Nadezhdin, journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, Cato Institute senior fellow Andrei Illarionov, Yabloko member Yevgeniya Dilendorf, Solidarity executive director Denis Bilunov, Solidarity member Sergei Davidis, and many others.

According to the petition, Solominsky had previously been detained for distributing books written by Bukovsky, a Soviet political dissident, and for organizing an “unsanctioned” rally of businessmen.

Police abuse is notorious in Russia. A recent study estimated that 1 in 25 people are tortured, beaten, or harassed by law enforcement officials in Russia each year. An activist in the city of Voronezh claims he was abducted and tortured by police on October 31 as a result of his participation in opposition activities.

As Solidarity press-secretary Olga Shorina reports, the last candidate to be pulled from the ballot was human rights activist Sergei Davidis, who was running in Moscow’s Western District. The local electoral commission invalidated 913 of the 4185 signatures he collected, well over the allowed 10%, and rejected his registration. An official from the commission clarified that the problem was not in the signatures themselves, but in the date written next to them. An expert analyst had found that the handwriting of the dates did not match the signatures.

Ivan Starikov, a board member of Solidarity, was removed in a similar manner, the Kasparov.ru online newspaper reports, citing the candidate. In Starikov’s case, some 600 of his 6000 signatures were invalidated, because signatories wrote down “Moscow” and not the specific district of the city where they live. The electoral commission had not voiced any similar concern when Starikov had turned in a sample list of signatures.

Starikov said that officials admitted to him that he could not be registered due to an “order from above.” He vowed to challenge the official decision, which should be issued on September 4th, and said he would protest against the commission’s illegal actions.

Two other candidates, Ilya Yashin and Igor Drandin, had 100% of their signatures rejected. In Yashin’s case, local commission member Konstantin Sdobnov said there were “gross violations” and “improper execution.” He did not specify what exactly was wrong with Yashin’s signature lists.

Drandin said the commission had invalidated “all 104 percent” of his signatures.

The Moscow City Duma elections will take place on October 11th, and the nomination process has been closed. Six political parties have submitted party lists, and 142 candidates have registered for the 17 single-mandate districts.

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Opposition leader and Solidarity board member Boris Nemtsov commented on the news in his LiveJournal blog:

It was just reported that my friends from Solidarity – Ilya Yashin, Ivan Starikov, Sergei Davidis and Igor Drandin- were removed from the elections. Removed on absolutely absurd pretenses. If the cowardly and thieving regime thinks that in doing so it has won, it is deeply mistaken. The battle will continue. In the streets. Watch for developments.