The opposition gained approval from Moscow city authorities to hold the protest outside at 11 am, but police began making detentions before the event even began. Members of the Yabloko and Other Russia opposition parties were among the detainees.

“Eighteen people have been detained, including myself… We didn’t violate any laws. We had one sign and flyers. We advertised that citizens could come to a rally agreed to by the authorities that was starting at 11 am,” Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin told Interfax. Also detained was Yabloko member Galina Mikhaleva, who had held a solitary protest outside the Duma.

Mitrokhin said he was held in a police station for five hours and charged with violating the order of holding a mass event. Mikhaleva stands accused of holding three posters at once during her solitary picket, and also for handing out flyers and “calling out slogans.” Mitrokhin wrote on his Twitter account that “it was written in the protocols that Galina Mikhaleva has four hands.”

One activist from Other Russia was arrested after trying to fasten a bicycle lock around the Duma’s entrance.

Sergei Davidis from the Solidarity movement was also detained. “Those impudent cows detained me in a solitary picket outside the State Duma. I stood there with a poster saying ‘the amendments on rallies are a crime!'” he wrote on Twitter.

According to Left Front activist Anastasia Udaltsova, at least 23 oppositionists were arrested. The arrest monitoring site OVDinfo.org puts the number closer to 70.

Opposition protests continued elsewhere on Tuesday. Later in the day, activists began a “peaceful stroll” while wearing the white ribbons that have come to symbolize the protest movement. Also, 30 protesters formed a human chain across the street from the State Duma. Two police vans pulled up after twenty minutes, and according to Interfax police detained “several suspicious citizens” who were all wearing symbols of the “white movement.”

While three of the four parties in the State Duma – A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia – all oppose the new law, the majority faction and party of power, United Russia, supports it in full and it is therefore expected to pass.

A meeting by the Duma’s upper chamber – the Federation Council – is already planned for Wednesday, where the law is also expected to be passed. If it is then immediately signed by President Vladimir Putin, it would go into effect in time for a massive opposition march planned for June 12. However, because of Tuesday’s “filibustering” by the non-United Russia factions, the process may be somewhat delayed.

“We’re currently formulating a suit in this regard,” Grigory Yavlinsky told journalists on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Yavlinsky received an official notice from the commission (TsIK) that he would not be allowed to run as a presidential candidate in the upcoming March election.

According to the TsIK, about 25 percent of the signatures on Yavlinsky’s petition had been falsified, well above the 5 percent permitted by Russian law. However, the party insists that the rejection was politically motivated.

On January 24, the newspaper Vedomosti reported that a source in the presidential administration said that Yavlinsky’s rejection was a “surprise” to the Kremlin. In addition, an anonymous source in the TsIK said that the number of bad signatures collected by other presidential candidates was about the same as Yavlinsky’s – this likely due to the difficulty of collecting 2 million signatures in the one-month time limit and the inability of candidates to oversee the work of all of their signature collectors.

According to political analyst Mikhail Tulsky, only 100,000 signatures were needed to run for president in 1991. In 1996 the number rose to 1 million, but candidates were given 3 months to collect them. It rose again to 2 million in 2004, with 7 percent falsified signatures allowed. Since 2007, that number dropped to 5 percent, and the length of time to collect them dropped to a month. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who has recently successfully completed the registration process, denounced it as “dishonest” and “degrading.”

In a press release issued Friday, the Yabloko party said that it had sent a packet of documents testifying about fraudulent results at eight areas in Moscow. “The data results issued by Yabloko’s observers in these areas significantly differs from the official results,” the statement asserted.

Party members noted that observers were included among the plaintiffs and that the complaints had been sent to seven different district courts. They plan to submit even more documents next week.

The lawsuits come following the largest protests Russia has seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. Despite widespread anger among Russian citizens at alleged blatant electoral fraud, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has downplayed protesters’ complaints.

On Thursday, the Federation Council dismissed a European Parliament resolution calling for a review of electoral results and for jailed oppositionists to be released as “legally untenable.” The president made no comment, saying that the resolution “means nothing” to him.

The opposition leader made the remarks during a debate on Saturday with Yabloko bureau member Aleksei Melnikov on whether oppositionists should boycott or participate in the elections.

During the debate, Kasparov accused Yabloko of cooperating with the Kremlin and not acting as a truly oppositionist party.

“Just like [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov and [LDPR leader Vladimir] Zhirinovsky, you pretend that you’re an alternative. The Kremlin has financed you for eight years. The Kremlin agrees to your candidate lists. You know all of this,” Kasparov said.

In response to the question of where Yabloko gets its funding, Melnikov insisted that the party has “one source – citizens and business. And we’ve done this work for many years. Nine percent is from business donations,” he said.

Melnikov called on Russians to go out to the polls on the December 4 election day, while Kasparov called on potential voters to go out into the streets and protest against the fact that the elections are sure to be neither free nor fair.

Kasparov was among a group of leading oppositionists to sign a declaration in early October to boycott the Duma elections. As the declaration reads: “Under the current conditions, we feel that the December 4 parliamentary elections will be illegitimate. We call on citizens to boycott these shameful ‘elections’ in any rational way.”

Amidst numerous reports of ballot stuffing, censorship, destruction of campaign material, and – most commonly – fraudulent usage of absentee ballots, more candidates from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party won their campaigns than any others. The most successful runners-up included candidates from the Communist Party, the Kremlin-loyal A Just Russia party, and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

Yevgeny Shevchenko of the Patriots of Russia opposition party said that the winner for city with the most absentee ballot violations was Chelyabinsk, where a whopping 40,000 such ballots were issued.

An example from regional Yabloko party leader Igor Yermolenko in Samara helps to demonstrate why committing fraud with absentee ballots in Russia is disturbingly simple. Speaking to the Kasparov.ru news portal, Yermolenko said that a group of people at one Samara polling station left with 40 blank absentee ballots despite only handing applications for 19. The regulations for recording how many ballots were taken was ignored altogether.

Grigory Melkoniants, head of the independent Russian electoral watchdog Golos, confirmed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the elections were as dirty as in March.

“We recorded a whole series of violations on all levels of the elections, from the moment the campaign began to the counting of the votes, from buying votes to ballot-stuffing,” said Melkoniants. He added that the organization had video footage of people being paid for their votes.

Other startling violations included forcing university students to sign off on a list that they had voted for United Russia candidates and driving busloads of voters to multiple polling stations.

Despite the violations, some of Russia’s opposition parties were able to achieve relative success in some regions. According to Central Electoral Commission head Vladimir Churov, candidates from Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, and Right Cause won 167 mandates in Sunday’s elections. That number is markedly higher than the 27 mandates won by candidates from those parties in regional elections last March.

Boris Nemtsov, co-leader of the opposition movement Solidarity and one of the founding members of the newly-formed coalition For Russia Without Tyranny or Corruption, remarked on his blog about United Russia’s overall success in the elections:

“Every nation is befit of its government. Therefore, either our nation consists of traitors and thieves, or the elections weren’t actually elections,” he said. “I’m convinced that the second hypothesis is much closer to the truth than the first one.”

Gennady Gudkov, State Duma Deputy from A Just Russia

In conditions where there’s hydrochloric acid in the pool, it’s going to be difficult to win, considering that our opponent is swimming with paddles in clean water, and we’re in a pool of hydrochloric acid. With the kind of administrative and bureaucratic support that United Russia has, it’s going to be difficult to compete with the party in power. The elections are very dirty – dirtier than in March. In Chelyabinsk, for example, federal employees are being forced to vote in several different areas. We’ve been informed about this.

We’re counting on victory in the municipal elections of a number of outer-Moscow cities and on good results in several regions. If the elections were even a tad bit honest, United Russia would have joined the opposition long ago.

Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko Party Leader

It’s difficult to make predictions in our electoral process. I think there’s going to be ballot-stuffing in United Russia’s favor everywhere. How many will be stuffed, nobody knows. If it’s too few, then the governors, mayors, and regional administrative leaders will be risking their posts.

During the March campaign, we had good results in Tula in the Tverskaya region. There’s a positive trend, but there are no grounds at all to say that the elections will be honest. There’s going to be massive absentee voting in Chelyabinsk.

Boris Nadezhdin, Political Council Member of Right Cause

In the places where our tickets had good chances, they were removed [from the ballots]. This happened, for example, in Kazan and Kostroma. We have tickets left in Magadan and Chelyabinsk; I’m counting more on Chelyabinsk. Because first of all, a very scandalous campaign is going on in Chelyabinsk, and secondly, we are participating alongside Yabloko, and that means the chances of either party winning decrease considerably.

Andrei Andreyev, State Duma Deputy from the Communist Party

Currently I’m in Magadan, working on the elections. The electoral campaign is extraordinarily dirty and cynical. Magadan television, and the channel MTK in particular, is heaping utter garbage onto the three parliamentary parties besides United Russia.

Ilya Yashin, Solidarity Bureau Member

It wouldn’t be right to talk about the chances of the candidates, since this country has long since ceased to have elections, and instead there’s an appointment process reminiscent of elections only in appearance.

Candidates from the non-systemic opposition can participate in elections in order to hurt the government’s reputation, but they can only achieve success in the case that the system malfunctions – as happened, for example, in Tver and several other regions.

Yevgeny Shevchenko, Representative of the Patriots of Russia:

We see the chances of our regional branches in participation in the elections positively, since they accomplished very good work. However, the news from the regions gives some cause for alarm. We are cautious about the fact that party tickets were taken off the ballots for unsubstantiated reasons. We have fewer complaints than in previous years. Clearly, the regional authorities have finally listened to the president and have begun to create the conditions for competition in the regions, but there is lawlessness in the municipal elections in a whole swath of regions.

Sergei Ivanov, State Duma Deputy from the LDPR:

I see the chances for the LDPR in the elections as very good. We’ve been up against the administration’s resources since 1989, and we always find our voters.

Aleksandr Khitshteyn, State Duma Deputy from United Russia:

I can only say what work I do, and I’m in charge of elections in Samara. I’m convinced that United Russia candidates will get the majority of the mandates in city duma elections. As far as the elections for mayor are concerned, I’m convinced that Dmitri Azarov will win – what’s more, in the first round. The campaign has been sufficiently calm. Naturally, what’s unpleasant is the use of administrative resources by the current mayor, Victor Tarkhov.

The four activists, who hailed from the liberal Yabloko party, wore shirts reading “Save Baikal from the TsBK,” referring to the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which environmentalists say is killing the world’s largest freshwater lake.

The small group unfurled a wordless banner picturing the lake in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, and was surrounded by police after taking only a few steps. After the police succeeded in taking away the banner, the activists argued that they had every right to hold their protest and demanded to speak to Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev. Ten minutes later, however, all four had been detained and brought away for processing at a police station.

Russian federal legislation prohibits rallies or protests from being held without receiving government sanction, which rights activists say is a violation of the country’s constitution. In addition to that, it is entirely forbidden to hold any kind of gathering, protest, or march on Red Square without the express permission of the president himself.

Despite grave environmental concerns, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a decree in mid-January to change the environmental laws previously prohibiting waste from being dumped into Lake Baikal to allow the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill to resume suspended operations. Saturday was the final day to sign a petition calling on UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova to defend the lake, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While supporters of the mill say that it will bring much-needed jobs to the region, critics insist that not only does the decree violate Russian law, but it also “obstructs the environment-safe economic development of the town of Baikalsk and the whole Baikal region.”

Regional police have taken startling measures to suppress outrage about the mill, including by bringing armored vehicles and least one tank to a large protest and by seizing computers from environmental activists.

More photographs from the protest can be found on Ekho Moskvy’s website by clicking here.

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 the news site Fontanka.ru, the bus in question belongs to a private company that lacks a contract with the city and is basically bankrupt. A group of activists paid for advertising space on the side of the bus and put up a collage featuring Stalin’s face instead of an ad.

Viktor Loginov, who headed the movement to place the collage, says that his group only “fulfills the wishes of veterans.” He specified that the adorned bus will run for two weeks in honor of Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations commemorating the end of World War II.

Memorial Director Irina Filge said that “the public demonstration of Stalin’s image – with the obvious goal of glorifying this historical figure – is leading to a schism in society.” Far from fulfilling anybody’s wishes, the picture not only inflicts moral trauma onto victims of the dictator’s repressions, but is offensive to veterans of the war and survivors of the Leningrad Blockade, the director added.

The bus did not last long before unknown persons vandalized it on Wednesday, painting over Stalin’s face but leaving the rest of the bus untouched. The bus, however, was quickly cleaned off and put back into service on Thursday.

At the same time, RFE/RL is reporting that city authorities are refusing to display anti-Stalin posters reading “For a motherland without Stalin.”

Yevgeny Vyshenkov, the deputy director of the Journalistic Investigations Agency that helped prepare the anti-Stalin poster, told RFE/RL that the company responsible for placing posters in St. Petersburg said the issue should be discussed by the city’s Media Committee.

Committee officials have said that the anti-Stalin poster cannot be placed in public places due to some “discrepancies” in the poster’s colors.

Also on Thursday, Ekho Moskvy radio reported that members of the liberal opposition party Yabloko are asking Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to officially denounce Stalin in a public address. The president has spoken out against the Soviet leader’s crimes before, but his most noticeable statements were in the form of a video blog. Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin said that such an address would only have value if done officially and directly to the nation, not through the internet or in an interview.

Both controversies come on the heels of the public release of documents directly implicating Stalin in the 1940 Katyn massacre in World War II, in which the Soviet secret police executed close to 22 thousand unarmed Polish army reservists. As the Telegraph puts it: “The sight of Stalin’s signature on what amounts to a collective death warrant quells decades of debate on the massacre and gives the lie to claims by die-hard Stalinists that their idol did not personally sanction the killings.”

Stalin’s legacy has been a divisive topic in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, but particularly so in recent months as the country has prepared to celebrate the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II. Veterans groups, human rights organizations, and oppositionists alike have criticized a number of initiatives to use Stalin’s picture as part of national celebrations. The most notable debacle was in Moscow, where a city design committee issued plans to erect informational posters complete with the dictator’s portrait in chosen parts of the capital. The plans were eventually dropped after criticism from both rights organizations and the Kremlin itself, but not before Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov promised to make Stalin’s image a fixture of future city celebrations.

Russian human rights advocates worry that any continued glorification of Stalin could lead people to forget that the dictator was responsible for the estimated 30 million lives lost as a result of repressions and widespread famine in the 1930s and 40s. “Stalin was a criminal, and his regime, which killed millions of people, is utterly disgraceful to publicize,” former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva said last March in reference to the Moscow poster plans. “It’s the same as glorifying Hitler in Germany.”

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.