Georgy Sarkisyan, a leader in the regional branches of both the United Civil Front and Solidarity opposition movements, was first arrested on June 30. At the time, police blamed the activist with attempting to steal a cell phone – a charge that Sarkisyan and his representative, civil rights advocate Dmitry Krayukhin, dismissed as a “provocation.” On July 1, Judge Svetlana Sandulyak sent word to local police that the files submitted on Sarkisyan’s arrest were not in order. Beginning on the evening of July 5, police repeatedly attempted to enter the oppositionist’s apartment, and detained him on Tuesday morning as he tried to enter a taxi. While the police told Sarkisyan that they had a subpoena to bring him to court, they failed to present a copy of any such document.

Later that day, Judge Sandulyak convicted the opposition leader of “hooliganism,” although what exactly this accusation entails was never clarified to either Sarkisyan or Krayukhin.

According to the rights activist, Judge Sandulyak is guilty of grossly violating the oppositionist leader’s rights. Sarkisyan was not informed until very late of the precise time and place of the judicial proceedings, and thus was unable to present witnesses in his defense. Moreover, the prosecution’s case includes obvious contradictions and inconsistencies that the judge seemed uninterested in clarifying, he said.

“The case materials speak of one place where an offense to the law occurred, and witnesses from the prosecution speak of a different place, but this does not in any way worry the judge,” said Krayukhin.

The rights advocate also said that Judge Sandulyak “made strange inferences.” For example, she took Sarkisyan’s testimony that he was walking along one street as evidence that he committed a crime on an entirely separate one.

Georgy Sarkisyan has recently proven to be a thorn in the side of Orel’s local government, due to his offer of consultational and organizational support to a group of merchants who began to be evicted from the city’s central market in May. The evictions came despite a promise from the mayor during his electoral campaign two months earlier not to do so. On July 1, when 700 market pavilions were officially closed, six merchants began staging a hunger strike that is still going on today.

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.

On Wednesday, the Tverskoy District Court in Moscow handed down the sentence to 56-year-old Sergei Makhnatkin, finding him guilty of assaulting a police officer during a December 31, 2009, rally that was part of the opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign in defense of free assembly. In the yearlong history of the rallies, he is the first person to receive an notable term of confinement.

Makhnatkin’s supporters insist that he had nothing to do with the protest. According to United Civil Front representative Aleksandr Khatov, the now-convicted man was detained when the rally was broken up by police. “He was just a passerby on his way to Red Square in order to meet the New Year there,” said Khatov. “But then he saw that police had seized a woman and were dragging her towards a bus.”

Makhnatkin came to the defense of the elderly woman and, as a result, was detained and put in a police bus with nine other rally participants. There, Khatov went on, the man was handcuffed to his seat and beaten in front of all those present.

70-year-old Raisa Vavilova, the woman who Makhnatkin tried to help, testified as a witness for the defense during the trial. She told the Interfax news agency that Makhnatkin had never previously appeared at any demonstrations by the extra-systemic [those denied the right to operate in the political system - ed.] opposition. “He was an accidental passerby who stood up for me when I was detained on Triumfalnaya Square. They thought he was one of us,” confirmed the elderly woman.

According to Khatov, Makhnatkin testified that the incident with the police officer took place in the police bus where he was put after being detained. There, said the defendant, a policeman attempted to choke him. The court ruled, however, that the officer did not use any violence against Makhnatkin, as an examination had found no signs of trauma on his body, and the officer, meanwhile, had a broken nose.

“He couldn’t have hit anyone, because he was handcuffed to the seat,” said Khatov. “Maybe he turned clumsily while he was being beaten.”

Makhnatkin turned out to be the only one of the 60 people detained at the rally who met the New Year in police confinement; all others had been let out before midnight. After being released, the man filed a complaint with the police department demanding that the officers who beat him be punished.

On June 1, Makhnatkin was summoned to a police station where, he was told, he would have a chance to identify his assailants. Instead, said Khatov, police wanted to fingerprint the Tver resident. When Makhnatkin refused, he was arrested and sent to a pretrial detention facility.

In response, Makhnatkin declared a dry hunger strike – no food, no water – which Khatov says the man has now sustained for eight days. While dry hunger strikes are known to sometimes last as long as a week, most people cannot survive more than three days without water. When the trial began on June 8, his supporters found that he looked quite ill and feared for his health.

The verdict handed down today noted that the court considered only the police officers to be credible witnesses, dismissing all those on the side of the defense as persons of interest.

“It’s notable that the testimony from defense witnesses was not accepted for consideration,” Anastasia Rybachenko, an activist with the opposition movement Solidarity, wrote on her blog. “The judge felt that she couldn’t trust them, since they entirely refute the testimony by the prosecution’s witnesses – police officers.”

While prosecutors asked Makhnatkin to be sentenced to the full five years allowed by Russian law, the court, according to Gazeta.ru, took “all circumstances of the case” into consideration and ruled that it was possible to hand down a lighter sentence.

Makhnatkin’s lawyers do not plan to appeal.

“He was given a state lawyer who didn’t even show up at the verdict reading,” said Rybachenko.

Renowned rights activist and Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva said that the defendant had turned down legal aid that rights advocates had offered him.

“We sent Makhnatkin a lawyer. For some reason, he turned him down; it’s possible that he didn’t understand that it was free aid,” Alexeyeva said on Ekho Moskvy radio. “He’s something of a strange man, this Makhnatkin.”

“Not only does he not deserve two and a half years, but those police officers who fabricated this case deserve punishment,” she added.

Alexeyeva explained that police at the rally had taken Makhnatkin “for one of [National Bolshevik Party leader and Strategy 31 co-organizer Eduard] Limonov’s guards and was very glad that a guard of Limonov allowed himself to hit a police officer,” she went on. However, “when it became clear that he had nothing to do with Limonov, it was already too late.”

Alexeyeva said she would work to ensure Makhnatkin’s release.

“The man is innocent and we are going to get him released,” she said.

Solidarity bureau member Sergei Davidis said that his movement is looking into getting Makhnatkin a lawyer to appeal the court’s verdict.

Speaking to Ekho Moskvy, former Deputy Prime Minister and Solidarity bureau member Boris Nemtsov denounced the case as a show trial.

“This is an act of intimidation; it is aimed at making it so that the people who more and more gather on the 31st date become afraid of winding up in prison,” he said. “It is a show trial, done so that all the rest who plan to come out on July 31 in Moscow and St. Petersburg, stop.”

Russian police detained as many as 170 protesters on Monday evening in Moscow, as more than 1000 opposition activists gathered for the ninth iteration of the Strategy 31 rallies, a series of protests in defense of the constitutional right to the freedom of assembly. Activists and observers present at the rally say that the violence used by the police against protesters was even more brutal than it has been in previous Strategy 31 events, resulting in dozens of injuries and at least two hospitalizations.

Despite repeated appeals by opposition organizers, the Moscow city government refused to sanction the May 31 rally – an ongoing trend that has been criticized by human rights groups and governmental bodies in Russia, Europe, and the United States. Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, which the organizers have made their traditional meeting place, had been occupied since earlier in the day by a group of pro-Kremlin youth organizations holding a rally in support of blood drives. Additionally, the entrance to the square from the adjacent metro station had been cordoned off by police.

Such was the scene when Strategy 31 protesters began to arrive for the 6:00 pm rally. According to the Kasparov.ru news site, a young man wearing a shirt indicating that he was involved with the blood drive rally grabbed a poster reading “down with the illegal government” out of the hands of one of the protesters. At that point, the crowd began loudly chanting, and police then began to make detentions.

Eyewitnesses noted that particularly harsh measures were used against participants of the rally. Police dragged protesters, including young women, along the ground and shoved them into buses waiting nearby. They also broke journalists’ cameras and fired pepper spray into the crowd, regardless of the fact that pregnant women and children were present.

Police went about the detentions and general brutality despite the presence of observers from the European Parliament, Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, reappointed by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in 2009, and Moscow Human Rights Ombudsman Aleksandr Muzykantsky. The police, in fact, attempted to detain Lukin before realizing who he was.

Editor-in-Chief of the New Times magazine, Yevgeniya Albats, was also detained, but was quickly released after she began reporting live from the scene, presumably by cell phone or through other reporters present.

Two of the three Strategy 31 organizers, former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva and writer Eduard Limonov (both of whom have been detained at previous rallies), were surrounded a ring of personal guards and reporters during Monday’s event. The police, however, violently detained the guards for no apparent reason. At the same time, people in the same blood drive rally shirts as the previously mentioned young man attempted to provoke fights with those surrounding the organizers.

Kasparov.ru reports that police detained at least 140 people in all, while Interfax reports the figure as closer to 170. Among those detained were Solidarity bureau member Ilya Yashin, Oborona coordinator Oleg Kozlovsky, Forum.msk news site Editor-in-Chief Anatoly Baranov, Sergei Aksenov of the Other Russia coalition, and Konstantin Kosyakin, the third Strategy 31 organizer. Numerous other journalists were also arrested. Reporting from one of the police buses, Solidarity member Nadezhda Mityushkin said that activists were being severely beaten, Kozlovsky in particular.

The detainees were split up and taken to several different police stations, where the situation for many began to deteriorate. Writing on their microblogs, a number of the detained activists said that OMON riot police held them in hot buses for more than an hour and refused to give them water. An ambulance was eventually called for one Solidarity member who became sick after being kept in one for “several hours.”

The most scandalous case appears to be that of Solidarity activist and Gazeta.ru journalist Aleksandr Artemev, who was hospitalized after police allegedly crushed his shoulder to pieces. The incident allegedly occurred when police ordered detainees off of one of the police buses, before following to violently shoved them back in.

Kasparov.ru reports that doctors have diagnosed Artemev with a comminuted shoulder fracture; as a result, he will have to spend ten days in the hospital.

Artemev noted that he came to the Strategy 31 rally as a civil activist, not as a journalist, and that he did not present his journalist credentials to police upon being detained.

The activist also said that he plans to file suit against the police, and that he has several witnesses as well as video footage of the incident.

Mikhail Mikhailov, editor-in-chief of Gazeta.ru, told Kasparov.ru that the incident was “monstrous.”

“The horror of it is that the police officers used violence against a person who possesses a passport as a citizen of the Russian Federation, and at that did it openly, fearing nothing,” said Mikhailov.

Colonel Aleksandr Khavkin, head of the Zamoskvoreche police station where Artemev was injured, denied that his officers were at fault.

Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk of RIA Novosti, who also heads the Public Council of the Moscow City Police, told Gazeta.ru that what happened to Artemev was “outrageous” and promised that the council would invite him to give his side of the story.

Solidarity Executive Director Denis Bilunov said that once inside one of the police stations, the detained activists were held for five hours before being interrogated by men presumed to be Federal Security Service (FSB) officials.

Kasparov.ru reported Tuesday morning that most of the detainees were held by police overnight, and that by this afternoon some had still not been released. The majority are being charged with participating in an unsanctioned event (punishable by up to a 1000 ruble/$32 fine) and resisting a police officer (up to 15 days in detention).

Opposition activists also held a Strategy 31 rally in St. Petersburg. Police detained between 50 and 100 of the 500 gathered on Gostiny Dvor after the crowd began to shout “We need a different Russia” and “Russia will be free.”

Elsewhere in the city, 1500 oppositionists gathered for a “March of Dissent,” also dedicated to defending the constitutional right to free assembly. According to United Civil Front’s St. Petersburg branch leader Olga Kurnosova, OMON riot police initially attempted to block the march before backing down in the face of the insistent protesters.

Yury Shevchuk, leader of the rock band DDT and outspoken Kremlin critic, had asked Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Saturday whether or not the march would be allowed. The prime minister then responded that it would be allowed if participants acted legally and did not, for example, hold the march near a hospital. The media followed to take his words as an official sanction of the march, although Putin’s press secretary refuted this the next day.

Additionally, in an interview with Gazeta.ru published on Sunday, Shevchuk said that he had received a call from the Russian White House before the meeting and was asked not to pose any “harsh questions of a political character” to the prime minister, because “the prime minister is very tired and you don’t need to irritate and upset him.”

Solidarity bureau member and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov took part in the March of Dissent in St. Petersburg, and commented on the situation in Moscow on his blog:

The situation in Moscow is markedly worse. More than 100 people have been detained, including our colleagues Ilya Yashin and Oleg Kozlovsky. Yashin was holding a Russian flag, Kozlovsky was holding nothing in general. They were held in a scorching hot bus, and are now waiting in the stations. This is a question of the dialogue between Shevchuk and Putin the other day. There are no hospitals on Triumfalnaya Square or Gostiny Dvor, nobody besides the OMON officers themselves blocked traffic. Nobody held banners or used megaphones. Nevertheless, there are more than 100 detainees. A classic example of hypocrisy and lies. Say one thing, think another, do something else.

Of course, having met with Putin, Shevchuk held his March of Dissent spectacularly. And decent people are grateful to him for that. But with Putin, like always – spite, an attempt to deride a distinguished rock musician, and a pathological fear of his own people.

In addition to the events in Moscow and St. Petersburg, several other Strategy 31 rallies were held on Monday all across Russia, including in the cities of Tomsk, Voronezh, Vladivostok, Omsk, and Krasnoyarsk.

A video of the proceedings in Moscow can be seen by clicking here (note: the music that comes on halfway through was from the blood drive rally organizers).

Correction – June 9, 2010:  This story originally reported that the event held by pro-Kremlin youth groups was a blood drive. It was, in fact, a rally in support of the idea of a blood drive; no blood was donated at the event. The article has been corrected to reflect as much.

The majority of the rallies took place on Saturday, and came in the wake of two explosions in the Raspadskaya coal mine in Russia’s Kuznetsk Basin on May 8 that left 67 miners dead. In one protest, about 150 opposition activists gathered on Moscow’s Chistie Prudy to stand in solidarity with the miners and demand a governmental response to their grievances. They asked for an objective investigation of the May 8 explosions, punishment for those guilty for the tragedy, and monetary compensation to miners for lost work time.

The Moscow protesters also demanded a stop to the persecution of miners and residents of Mezhdurechensk, a town close to the Raspadskaya mine where riot police arrested approximately 28 people in on May 14 during a protest made up of relatives of miners killed in the accident and their supporters. Criminal charges have been filed against some of those protesters for blocking off a railroad, a move they took out of desperation to draw attention to their grievances.

A rally meant to take place in Mezhdurechensk on Saturday, however, fell apart after an increased police presence intimidated miners into staying off the streets. Former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky, famous in Russia for his work exposing corruption in the country’s police forces, had arrived in the city to support the miners. At the designated time on Saturday, he told the Kasparov.ru online news site, approximately 70 journalists came to the local government building where the rally was supposed to take place. Only an hour later, however, did ten miners arrive and tell Dymovsky that the rest of them had been frightened away from coming to the protest. The police presence, which included officers brought in from other nearby towns, dispersed the ten miners after half an hour.

On Monday, opposition leader Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front issued a press release saying that another rally in support of the Kuznetsk Basin miners would be held in Moscow on May 25. “To this day,” reads the statement, “virtually none of the miners’ demands have been satisfied. Despite the fact that the participants of the demonstration [in Mezhdurechensk on May 14] have been released, the criminal suits against them have not been dropped.”

The organization commented on Saturday’s failed Mezhdurechensk rally by noting that local police and police brought in from other areas scared the population into submission, and referred to an apparent plan by the police dubbed “The Fortress” to intentionally stifle protests.

For more on the Raspadskaya mine explosions and their aftermath:

• Who to Blame in Russia Mine Deaths? – The Wall Street Journal
• Mine Director Replaced After Rebuke From Putin – The New York Times
• Russia’s mine accident relatives ‘targeted by gangs’ – BBC News

The demonstration would be the ninth iteration of the Strategy 31 rallies, named for the 31st article of the Russian constitution that guarantees freedom of assembly. The rallies have been held, despite lacking official sanction, for the past year on the 31st of each month with that date in Moscow and other cities across Russia.

“I received a call from the mayor’s office and was told that there is going to be some kind of big cultural event on Triumfalnaya Square on that day.” said Alexeyeva. “We’re being turned down for the ninth time,” All previous rallies have been turned down for similar reasons, but Strategy 31 organizers insist that the city is working to intentionally deny them access to Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, since its central location gives the rallies relatively high visibility.

Alexeyeva was adamant that rally organizers maintain their constitutional right to hold the rally on the square and would not move it to a different location, as the city has repeatedly proposed. Since these alternative sites would render the rallies virtually invisible to the general population and confuse people who wanted to take part as to where they were going to be held, Strategy 31 organizers have continued to insist that the event be held on Triumfalnaya Square.

“We’ll come to Triumfalnaya Square on May 31 all the same,” said Alexeyeva. “But it won’t be a rally. We’ll come with signs with the number ‘31′ in defense of the 31st article of the constitution,” most likely meaning that the oppositionists don’t intend to carry political insignia to the square. In that case, the event would not constitute an actual rally that would require government sanction to be held legally.

Alexeyeva added, however, that she still expects the police and OMON riot forces to beat and detain event participants as they have during all previously Strategy 31 rallies. The 82-year-old Alexeyeva herself was detained during last December’s New Years Eve rally, prompting an outcry from rights groups and federal representatives in Europe and the United States. “They’ll probably start seizing us again,” she said on Wednesday. “I want to discuss the developing situation with the leadership of the Moscow City Police.”

Strategy 31 co-organizer and opposition leader Eduard Limonov added that Moscow city authorities are currently trying to organize a meeting with rally organizers. He said that he does not believe, however, that the city is prepared to make any concessions and is simply trying to save face. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has expressed disdain for the Strategy 31 movement and has given conflicting statements on why his government continually rejects their applications to hold rallies on Triumfalnaya Square.

Saving face may very well be on the minds of the city administration this time around. International pressure has been mounting against both federal and city authorities in Russia and Moscow ever since Alexeyeva’s arrest made global news out of the brutal treatment of opposition protesters by the police. And for the May 31 event, Strategy 31 organizers have invited a delegation from the European Parliament and the editors-in-chief from more than a dozen large Russian media outlets to observe the proceedings.

News also broke on Wednesday that the St. Petersburg authorities have similarly refused to sanction a Strategy 31 protest in that city on May 31, also on the basis that another event had already been planned for the oppositionist’s chosen site. Organizers of the rally, which included the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council, the Petersburg branch of the United Civil Front, the liberal opposition party Yabloko, the opposition movement Solidarity, and a number of youth democratic advocacy groups, also said that they intend to hold the rally anyway.

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.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sums up the primary controversies over the bill:

Russian media sources say the law would allow the FSB to warn citizens that their behavior could create conditions that could lead to a crime — even in cases where there are no legal grounds to hold them criminally responsible. It also provides for fines against citizens who disobey FSB officials or in any way hinder their work.

According to an explanatory note posted on the State Duma’s website, the law is necessary due to a sharp rise in extremist activity. The note cites figures from the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor-General’s Office claiming that extremist crimes rose by 30 percent from 2007 to 2008.

The note also criticized the media for propagating “individualism, violence, and mistrust of the state’s capacity to protect its citizens, effectively drawing young people to extremist activities.”

Ilya Ponomarev, a lawmaker from the Duma faction of A Just Russia, calls this hyperbole, saying that the government’s figures on extremist activity are inflated.

“They often label absolutely normal social activists as extremists,” Ponomarev says. “And when the authorities are faced with a real threat to public safety they are helpless. Neither preemptive warnings nor fines will solve this problem.”

There is no shortage of examples of the Russian authorities using accusations of extremism as an excuse to stifle dissent. Federal officials routinely harass protesters, conduct raids of homes and offices, hinder legal forms of protest, and in some cases will block opposition websites, not to mention the torture accusations from Amnesty International.

Speaking to the newspaper Kommersant, Lev Levinson of the Russian non-governmental Institute for Human Rights said that the bill would shift responsibilities currently held by state prosecutors to the police, a move he said was both unnecessary and dangerous. “This is precisely what the fight against dissent is apparently turning into,” he said. “That today the chekisti (referring to the FSB) don’t have the authority to issue warnings doesn’t mean in the least that there aren’t feasible ways to prevent crime.” Levinson added that while prosecutors act as a sieve to prevent abuses when issuing warnings about extremism, the FSB would not.

All in all, said Levinson, the initiative would “untie the hands of FSB officers,” and abuses by the agency can consequently be expected to grow.

In a statement responding to the Moscow metro bombings, Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front reminded readers of the steps taken over the past ten years by the Russian government in the name of fighting terrorism and extremism, pointing out that, given the bombings, they have not been ideally effective.

The tragic events that occurred in Moscow on March 29, 2010, could be appropriated by the current government for an even larger infringement of the rights and freedoms of citizens of the Russian Federation. The apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk in the fall of 1999 triggered the beginning of a second military campaign in Chechnya and immediately provided Vladimir Putin with the necessary ratings for victory in the 2000 presidential elections. As a result of the terrorist attacks in the Dubrovka Theater in October 2002 and in Beslan in September 2004, elections for governors and regional leaders in Russia were abolished. And today, after the events of March 29 in Moscow, it is obvious that these measures did not increase the safety of Russia’s citizens in the least.

No matter how much this new bill might look like a continuation down that same path, any opposition to the bill is unlikely to keep it from passing given that United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party lead by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, holds an overwhelming majority in the State Duma,.

The United Civil Front, a Russian pro-democracy social movement lead by Garry Kasparov, has issued a statement in response to Monday’s bombings on the Moscow metro. The attacks were the worst the city has seen in six years, leaving at least 39 dead and wounding more than 100. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin quickly promised “to destroy the terrorists,” and reports surfaced late Wednesday that Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has taken responsibility for the attacks.

The government has come under criticism from an uncharacteristically wide range of sources for failing to live up to its promises to protect its citizens. Rights activists and oppositionists fear that the government will use the attacks as an excuse to impose further infringements on civil liberties, as has been the pattern over the past ten years.

Don’t Believe Putin
March 31, 2010

Compatriots!

The issue of citizen safety has once again become as sharp as ever before. However, the safety of Russia’s citizens has not depended on the citizens themselves for already the past ten years. The political regime established in Russia does not allow Russian citizens to influence the government through lawful means – with elections for local and federal authorities. As a result of the destruction of democratic freedoms, those very institutions of power have been destroyed, including the independent courts and the police.

The tragic events that occurred in Moscow on March 29, 2010, could be appropriated by the current government for an even larger infringement of the rights and freedoms of citizens of the Russian Federation. The apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk in the fall of 1999 triggered the beginning of a second military campaign in Chechnya and immediately provided Vladimir Putin with the necessary ratings for victory in the 2000 presidential elections. As a result of the terrorist attacks in the Dubrovka Theater in October 2002 and in Beslan in September 2004, elections for governors and regional leaders in Russia were abolished.

And today, after the events of March 29 in Moscow, it is obvious that these measures did not increase the safety of Russia’s citizens in the least. Regardless of the loud proclamations sounded over the course of the ten years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, neither he nor his team has succeeded in coping with terrorism on the territory of the Russian Federation. All of the pathos-laden talk about the necessity to reform the security agencies rings as hollow as ever before.

Instead of providing safety to the residents of Moscow and other Russian cities, the security forces have spent these years breaking up peaceful demonstrations of discontent where the government’s actions, including the failed federal policies in the Caucasus, are criticized.

Therefore, we call upon our compatriots not to succumb to the provocations organized by the Russian intelligence agencies, and not to forget the main cause of the troubles that have befallen our country. Any announcements by the government about the tightening of any kind of regulations on public order or attempts by Kremlin-controlled media outlets to distract citizens from the essence of the problem should be taken as the Putin regime’s routine bloody publicity spin. But all of this already happened at the beginning of the last decade. Now the time has come for society to fight against terrorism and the political extremism of the government.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

People’s Democratic Union (RNDS) representative Yelena Dikun told Gazeta.ru that the former prime minister, who became an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after being dismissed by the then-President in 2004, said that Yabloko has responded with “fundamental agreement” to his proposal to create a political coalition. Kasyanov had said earlier that the goal of such a coalition would be to present a unified list of candidates from the democratic opposition to run in the 2011 parliamentary elections.

“The RNDS and Yabloko are now working on coordinating a joint political statement,” said Dikun, without commenting further on details of the negotiations.

Yabloko’s leadership, however, immediately denied the announcement. “I refute the idea that we’ve given our agreement; there wasn’t any,” party leader Sergei Mitrokhin told Gazeta.ru. “There’s an appeal from Mikhail Kasyanov, and we haven’t refused to discuss it. There’s an ongoing electronic correspondence, I have all the letters saved – why Kasyanov took it as a “fundamental agreement” to create a coalition, I don’t know.”

Mitrokhin stressed that creating a political coalition was a gradual process: “It’s not possible to race through this – that would bring about something frivolous,” he said.

The Yabloko leader did say that such a coalition would not succeed if the two parties remained separate. “[A coalition] would be possible as a fraction within Yabloko; there are no other methods in the current situation,” he said, adding that creating a unified list of candidates for the elections was impossible by “hooking on from the outside.”

Declining to comment on Mitrokhin’s statement, Dikun said only that “I confirm my statement.” Konstantin Merzlikin, a deputy representative from RNDS, said that negotiations were indeed still ongoing, but were focused on determining what political platform the coalition would be based on. “It’s important to us that the coalition begin its work long before the elections,” he added.

Regarding Mitrokhin’s statement that the RNDS may have to become a fraction of Yabloko, Merzlikin responded that it was too early to say. “We are discussing the possibility of creating a coalition,” he stressed. “Whether or not this process will develop into a merger, time will tell.”

In addition to Yabloko, Kasyanov had issued the February 4 appeal for unification to the opposition movement Solidarity and Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front. Solidarity co-leader Boris Nemtsov, also a former prime minister, said that while his party was declining the offer, “the unification process is very important – but it will not be simple to do.”

“Until now, Yabloko has not been seen in any of the processes for unification,” Nemtsov elaborated. “We will be glad if Mikhail Mikhailovich’s effort works out, but for me personally, it’s hard to believe.” Nemtsov’s former party, Union of Right Forces, held unsuccessful negotiations for several years to unify with Yabloko.

Nevertheless, Solidarity was more than ready to welcome Kasyanov into their ranks. “Our doors are open to him,” Nemtsov said. “Almost all the RNDS members besides him belong to Solidarity. We’ve told him a thousand times – come join us.”