While Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who has denounced gay pride events as “satanic,” is perhaps the most visible public opponent to the parades, gay rights activists find themselves faced with similar problems all throughout the country.

Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe reports:

Russian gay rights activists have gathered at St. Petersburg’s world-famous Hermitage Museum for a brief unsanctioned rally that ended with a police raid and at least five detentions.

The three dozen or so protesters held their protest in the inner courtyard of the museum, where they unfurled banners and chanted slogans in front of tourists queuing up for tickets.

One of the banners read “Peter the First was bisexual.”

“We chanted: ‘Same-sex marriages without compromise,’ ‘Equality for gays and lesbians,’ ‘Homophobia is a national shame,’ and ‘Homophobia is a disease,’” Maria Yefremenkovo, the rally’s organizer, told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “One young man treated us as pederasts, others just watched with some dismay and a few smiled.”

Using similar tactics to a gay rights protest in Moscow last month, organizers only revealed the location of the demonstration at the last moment to outwit riot police.

They say the subterfuge was needed to avoid a repeat of the violence that has marred previous attempts to hold Gay Pride parades, when police, nationalists, and ultra-Orthodox believers beat protesters.

The June 26 rally was nonetheless quickly broken up by police and five activists were briefly detained, including Yefremenkovo.

Homosexuality could be punished with prison in Soviet times. Russia has since decriminalized homosexuality but intolerance remains very widespread, with nationalists and ultra-Orthodox believers saying homosexuals should be punished or treated in hospital.

Polls have shown more than 80 percent of Russians regard homosexuality as immoral.

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has described gay rallies as satanic and vowed not to allow them in his city.

Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, made the remarks at a session of the Moscow City Police Public Council on Tuesday. As he later clarified on his radio show, the editor felt that while the Russian government’s routine prohibition of opposition events on the square is illegal, it is necessary for opposition organizers to “take a step back” if they want to reach their goal of achieving the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of assembly.

The comments come a week after police detained 170 protesters at a rally in defense of free assembly, part of the Russian opposition’s ongoing Strategy 31 campaign. Dozens of activists were beaten, and at least two were hospitalized. The rally, like the others before it, had not been sanctioned by Moscow city authorities, who said that they had already granted permission to pro-Kremlin youth activists to hold a rally in support of blood drives on the square that day.

Venediktov characterized the ongoing conflict over Triumfalnaya Square, which Strategy 31 organizers say has become their traditional meeting place, as a “mutual obstinacy” that, realistically, can only be resolved by “nulling the situation.” Since neither the government nor the oppositionists are willing to cede the square, “it simply must be given up,” he said.

Konstantin Kosyakin, a Strategy 31 co-organizer, rejected the proposal and told Kasparov.ru that the activists plan to hold their ground.

“People already automatically come to Triumfalnaya at six o’clock on the 31st of the month,” Kosyakin said. “The government is afraid that this place will become an attraction for all oppositionist and civil rights forces. Therefore, if we compromise, the people will think that we have betrayed them.”

“This government is a government of thieves and bandits, and you cannot meet them halfway,” he added.

Gazeta.ru Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin, also a member of the Public Council, told news website Grani.ru that he wholly shared Venediktov’s position. He said that if large gatherings on Triumfalnaya Square truly hinder traffic – one of the reasons Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has given as to why Strategy 31 rallies are routinely prohibited – then both Strategy 31 rallies and blood drive rallies organized by pro-Kremlin youth groups should indeed be banned.

Meanwhile, Moscow Helsinki Group head and Strategy 31 co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva also attended the Public Council session and refuted that Venediktov asked for Triumfalnaya to be closed to protesters. “It’s possible that he said something else afterwards, it’s written on the Ekho Moskvy website, but there he said that everyone needs to be put in the same conditions: ‘Either nobody is allowed, or don’t just allow [the government's] favorites.’ I’m told that it’s written on the website that he demanded that Triumfalnaya Square be closed. I heard nothing of the sort,” she said.

Denis Bilunov, executive director of the opposition movement Solidarity, said that Venediktov’s statements play into the hands of the authorities by calling for concessions by the opposition.

“We can make concessions when, for example, [Russian President Dmitri] Medvedev or Luzhkov speak unequivocally about the illegality of refusing to sanction protests on Triumfalnaya Square and begin to investigate this,” he said.

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.

Nikolai Alexeyev, founder of the Gayrussia.ru rights project and one of the event’s organizers, told Interfax on that he was told over the phone by the mayor’s office that the application for Moscow Pride had been turned down. Parades, protests, rallies, and other similar events require government sanction to be legally held in Russia; organizing an unsanctioned rally can lead to jail time.

The city did not appear to attempt to hide its flagrant violation of Russian law in banning Moscow Pride. “Contrary to the demands of acting legislation, the Moscow government did not propose any kind of alternative [locations] for holding the planned event to organizers of the march,” reads a statement on Gayrussia.ru.

Alexeyev said that he and his fellow organizers intend to file a complaint about the city’s decision with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. More immediately, he said they would appeal the decision in Moscow’s Tverskoy Court after receiving written confirmation that the parade has been banned.

“We’re going to try to get the case considered by the court before the date of the event – May 29,” Alexeyev said.

The Strasbourg Court is set to rule this year on three cases filed by Moscow Pride organizers against the city for banning their parades in 2006, 2007, and 2008. Their event was also prohibited in 2009, but 30 participants attempted to march in defiance of the ban. Five minutes after the beginning of the march, all 30 activists were arrested by OMON riot police.

Earlier, Alexeyev stated that if the Moscow city authorities refuse to sanction this year’s Moscow Pride parade, they would try to gain permission to hold it on the territory of an embassy of a Western country.

Moscow Mayor Luzhkov is famous for his vocal homophobia, routinely denouncing gay pride parades a “satanic activity.” In January, he vowed to ban what he called “the display of blasphemy under the guise of creativity and protected by the principle of freedom of speech” in Moscow on a permanent basis.

Russian gay rights advocates have suffered from strong public and governmental opposition dating back to Soviet times. In accordance with a Stalinist decree, homosexuality carried a sentence of up to five years in prison until 1993, when legislators legalized it at the urging of the Council of Europe. It remained on the list of Russian mental illnesses until 1999. While there are no laws explicitly banning homosexuality, government authorities have failed to recognize the need for anti-discrimination legislation. Public opinion remains strongly opposed to such reforms – as of 2005, 43.5 percent of Russians supported the re-criminalization of adult homosexual acts.

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.

Last week, the Moscow City Duma approved a controversial fifteen-year construction plan that will reshape much of the city’s current infrastructure. The plan has provoked fear and outrage from Moscow’s residents, architectural preservationists, and opposition groups who fear that the “Genplan” will destroy many of Moscow’s historic areas, while simultaneously failing to address basic traffic and infrastructure problems.

A diverse array of activists staged a number of protests in Moscow in the weeks leading up to the approval of the Genplan. More than 20 protesters were arrested in a flash mob outside of the City Duma on the morning of the official vote. Also, Interfax reported today that even though the measure passed easily through the politically homogeneous Duma, 30 public organizations have formed a coalition to fight against the Genplan, including opposition groups, architectural watchdogs, religious organizations, art advocacy groups, and others.

The online newspaper Gazeta.ru has published an editorial arguing that not only does the Moscow Genplan spell out a death sentence for the country’s historic capital, but it also exemplifies the endemic corruption throughout the Russian government that allows civil servants to push through projects for their own personal gain, leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.

Genplan For It’s Own Sake
May 5, 2010
Gazeta.ru

The General Plan for the Development of Moscow is not meant to solve any of the actual problems of the megalopolis; it’s written by civil servants in the interests of civil servants, and will do nothing to hinder the city government’s commercial construction plans. It is a true encyclopedia of the rules and methods that govern Russia.

The Moscow City Duma approved the General Plan for the Development of Moscow [Genplan] in its third reading. It is the primary document for urban development of the city for the next fifteen years.

The need for this plan did not come as a whim from the Moscow mayor’s office; it was required by the Urban Development Codex. But in a sense, the Genplan fails to address any actual issues. Last summer (in August, at the height of vacation season), the city authorities held public hearings on the Genplan; however, the plan did not cease to evoke sharp disagreement within society. During hearings in the Public Chamber as recently as in April of this year, several members called the document “a death sentence” for the city. Nevertheless, the Genplan was approved, and as Moscow City Duma Speaker Vladimir Platonov noted, it defends the people and helps “to get rid of scandalous situations.” “Suspending the law would have been harmful to Muscovites, since the law defends their interests,” Platonov added.

The problem is that the only Muscovites in Moscow whose interests are defended are the Moscow civil servants.

The Moscow Genplan does not resolve the issues of how the city is going to deal with traffic jams or how it’s going to preserve its historic center. On the other hand, it does nothing to limit opportunities for the Moscow authorities (the city mayor will have to be replaced at some point during the fifteen years of the formal operations in this document, for purely physiological reasons) to hand out construction contracts on opaque grounds and continue to build the city up in a way that is profitable for the authorities themselves or for their developers. It does not put any barriers in the way of having another office skyscraper appear instead of another children’s playground.

Therefore, the quality of the Genplan is generally secondary to the fact that this document fails to provide a clear legal framework for the commercial interests of the city’s civil servants, who have become the primary driving force for construction in Moscow.

Overall, not a single large city in the world, especially with an ancient history, has been developed under an officially approved general plan, and ideas by city leadership for urban development at various points in time have evoked protest from city residents (one can read Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable book London: The Biography to become convinced of as much). But civilized development in large cities stems from the fact that the city’s executive government is accountable to the population, and, in practically all foreign megalopolises of the caliber of Moscow, is directly elected. And the experts on the mayor’s public councils on urban development have to opportunity to argue with the authorities, and sometimes even prove that they’re right. As an individual region (and not a municipality), Moscow does not have direct elections for mayor. So the population can’t argue with the mayor’s office, and the mayor’s office doesn’t want to ask the population how to better develop the city in the interest of its maximum number of residents.

It’s unlikely that even passionate supporters of [Moscow Mayor] Yury Luzhkov, of his family, and of his team of bureaucrats would deny that the Genplan for Moscow’s urban development can be summed up altogether in one phrase: “What I want is what I’ll get.” Moscow’s new Genplan doesn’t create the slightest obstacle for civil servants to continue this kind of urban development policy. So, it doesn’t change the situation at its core, and thus remains something that exists only for its own sake.

The Moscow government could easily do everything that the Genplan prescribes without the document itself: the few chances for lawsuits are vanishing, and in situations like what happened with the Rechnik settlement, the federal government intervened only after two dozen houses had already been demolished, and no earlier. Furthermore, given the importance of Moscow for the country’s political stability and for performing state functions, it’s unlikely that the Kremlin, under any president and any mayor, could manage a hands-on approach to urban development disputes.

That said, we need to be aware of the fact that the blatant disregard for residents’ opinions during the process to approve Moscow’s Genplan, and the lack of barriers for contracts to be distributed amongst their own, does not differ, in essence, from the government’s decision to give oil and gas fields to individual companies without competition, or from the actions by the St. Petersburg authorities to construct a tower for Gazprom – the notorious Okhta Center. In that case, as is well known, both the Urban Development Codex and building height regulations were directly violated – but the Petersburg authorities went on with it without batting an eyelid: here we have a political order, and we have the interests of the city’s primary taxpayer – the Gazprom corporation. And in today’s Russia, at any level of the government, the interests of civil servants and the companies close to them are higher than the law, common sense, or the interests of ordinary citizens.

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 capitol. 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.

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.

Writing in his blog on Monday, Sokolov posted the text of an article he had written along with a bare-bones preface: “Tomorrow I’m bringing my letter of resignation to Izvestia. Here’s tomorrow’s rejected article.” The column criticized a proposal by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to establish a Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley in an old Moscow auto factory, following last Friday’s proposal by President Dmitri Medvedev to put it in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo. Arguing that both proposals would continue a dangerous trend of geographically centralizing scientific research, Sokolov said that research in the outer areas of the country would end up underfunded, resulting in the detriment of Russia’s entire scientific community.

Luzhkov’s proposal in particular, which would put the facility even closer to the Kremlin than the president had proposed, was the painful result of “geographical super-ultra centralization,” wrote Sokolov.

“The distance between Skolkovo (30 kilometers from the Kremlin) and the auto factory (10 kilometers from the Kremlin) would be substantial if this was all happening in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg,” said the journalist. “There, those are completely different sized distances. For Russia, spanning 4,000 kilometers from north to south and 10,000 kilometers from east to west, they are exactly the same.” The centralization, he went on, is “super-ultra because what we are facing is not just the notion of ‘nothing in circumvention of Moscow,’ but the even stronger notion of ‘nothing except for directly inside of Moscow.’ Only within the limits of direct visibility from the Kremlin, when one can observe from a pair of binoculars.”

Sokolov had been a journalist at Izvestia since 1998. He will continue to be published in the influential business publication Expert.

Having been the primary newspaper of the Soviet government since 1917 and remaining closely connected to the government since the fall of the Soviet Union, Sokolov’s case is not the first time Izvestia has been associated with censorship. Former Editor-in-Chief Raf Shakirov was fired allegedly as a result of publishing scathing photographs of the 2004 Beslan massacre. A column critical of a film celebrating then-President Vladimir Putin’s 55th birthday in 2007 was banned, according to its author Irina Petrovskaya, directly by the order of then-Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Mamontov. According to the online newspaper Grani.ru, a memo from Mamontov was leaked to the press in January 2006 in which the editor declared that Izvestia was not an opposition newspaper and should be “all-national” and close to the people. Anyone unhappy with the “new editorial politics” would be fired, he added.

The full text of Sokolov’s blog post in Russian can be found by clicking here.

Demonstrations were held in about 50 cities across the country, but even the largest in the cities of Irkutsk and Vladivostok consisted of no more than 2,000 people. Organizers in Irkutsk, which included the liberal Yabloko party, the opposition Solidarity movement, and a variety of human rights organizations, had originally projected that 10,000 people would be taking part in the demonstration.

Approximately 70 people were detained in Moscow, where several hundred people turned out for a protest on Pushkin Square that had earlier been banned by city authorities. Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front political movement, was among those detained and said on Sunday that he plans to file a criminal suit against the city authorities for causing massive disorder, beating detained protesters, and using pepper spray to disperse the crowd.

Oppositionists complained that there was no reason for the city to ban their peaceful protest, which was largely focused on calling for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to resign. One of the protesters who turned up at Pushkin Square was detained for holding a sign reading “Zhukovsky or a new Cherkizon?” referring to the controversial government shutdown of a Moscow market last summer that put tens of thousands of merchants out of work. However, when the protester showed the police his identification as State Duma Deputy Anton Belyakov, a member of the party A Just Russia, the police not only released him but put began voicing agreement that it was indeed about time for Mayor Luzhkov to go.

The most creative rally was held in Kaliningrad, where an anti-government protest of about 10,000 people had taken place in January. The stage was set for Saturday to see about 30,000 participants, when city officials relegated the protest to a sports arena instead of the open city center as organizers had wanted, on the basis that a farmers market was planned for the original location. Fearing what could happen if violence was to break out in an enclosed area, local opposition leader Konstantin Doroshok agreed to cancel the rally after holding negotiations with Kaliningrad Governor Georgy Boos. As part of their deal, a four hour question-and-answer session was held in Kaliningrad at the time when the rally was intended to occur, in which the governor and Doroshok took part.

Left on their own, however, a group of activists organized on the social networking website Vkontakte and rallied on the market in the early afternoon. Given that the governor had acquired the nickname “the Tangerine” among Kaliningrad oppositionists, the protesters held the fruits above their heads and called for Boos and Putin both to step down. Approximately 1000 people turned out for what has since been dubbed the “tangerine flash mob.”

Other rallies, consisting of between a few dozen to several hundred participants, were held in St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Yaroslavl, and other cities across the country.