In an interview with the paper published on August 30, the prime minister spoke of the opposition using notably dirty language and said that the actual goal of participants in the opposition’s Strategy 31 campaign “is to get bludgeoned upside the head.”

Noting that permission must be obtained from city authorities to hold large rallies, Putin said that Russian oppositionists act in a way that says “we’ll do what we want, and we’re going to provoke you so that you bludgeon us upside the head. And, dousing ourselves with red paint, we’ll say that the anti-people government is acting disgracefully and is suppressing human rights.”

In June, Russia’s presidentially-appointed human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, came out with a statement that the idea that rallies require sanction from the government to be held legally is actually completely false. All that the law requires, he said, was for event organizers to give the city a declaration of their intended actions.

While Strategy 31 organizers routinely apply with the Moscow city authorities for permission to hold their rallies, it has never once been granted. Ralliers who gather despite the lack of sanction are routinely beaten by riot police and internal military forces, a trend that has drawn criticism from governments and rights organizations across the globe.

The prime minister insisted that he was unaware of Strategy 31 until his scandalous meeting with Kremlin-critical rock musician Yury Shevchuk in May, and that the decisions to disperse the rallies and to close Triumfalnaya Square (where the rallies are always held) for construction were taken without his knowledge. “I give you my honest word as a party member,” he declared in an expression harking back to Soviet times.

The decision to close Triumfalnaya Square in order to build an underground parking garage was announced in mid-August. The abrupt decision took oppositionists and Russian civil society on the whole by surprise, and many have denounced the project as an excuse to put an end to the Strategy 31 protests. According to city officials, the square will be not be reopened earlier than 2012. Despite this, Strategy 31 organizers intend to continue their rallies, with the next event scheduled for tomorrow – August 31, 2010.

While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

The event is planned to be held on August 22 on Pushkin Square, and the mayor’s office had initially agreed to the event. However, a press release from the mayor’s office on Thursday stated that the organizers had only submitted the paperwork to hold a rally, not a concert.

Organizer Mikhail Shneyder was told by the city’s bureau for event management and safety that there’s no way to hold a rally and a concert at the same time. “You’re announcing all over the place that you’re holding a rally-concert, but that kind of format for an event does not exist. You will not be allowed to hold a concert and set up a covered stage,” Shneyder quoted the bureau as saying.

“I know that that kind of format doesn’t exist,” the organizer explained in response. “The law stipulates just a rally, but it’s for us to decide who is going to appear at our rally and how; if we want, we’ll call on a Buddhist and he’ll arrange 20 simultaneous chess matches.”

Regardless of any legal ambiguities, the organizers plan to go on with the show. Scheduled to be present are the groups DDT, OtZvuki My, Televizor, Padla Bear Outfit, and Barto. Journalist Artemy Troitsky agreed to host the event.

Yury Shevchuk, leader of DDT and an outspoken Kremlin critic, said the band had already purchased tickets to Moscow and was coming to the event for certain.

“Leap frog between the Moscow authorities – that’s a normal affair,” Shevchuk told Kasparov.ru. “We’re going to Moscow with an acoustic lineup and we’ll see there whether or not they’re going to let us play. That’s the kind of weather we have nowadays – either hot or cold.”

Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the movement to defend the Khimki Forest, insisted that the Moscow authorities had no legal right to ban their event. “I don’t know a single law that would ban setting up a stage for a rally. The authorities’ quibbles are entirely baseless,” she said.

“Let them not allow the people to hear Shevchuk and demonstrate to everyone that they are inflexible and unpopular politicians,” the activist went on. “We have been supported by musicians of the very highest caliber, and a smart civil servant wouldn’t think to bother us.”

The felling of the Khimki Forest began this past July. An expressway from Moscow to St. Petersburg is planned to take its place. Ecologists and activists have spoken out strongly against the project, insisting that it violates the law.

A group of youth activists attending Seliger 2010, a summer-long camp that was founded as a training ground for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi but is now run directly by the federal government, erected a row of 13 plastic heads on sticks. Each head has a hats bearing Nazi symbols and a picture of a different Russian public figure, including former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, musician Yury Shevchuk, and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The installation was originally thought to be organized by Nashi itself, but was later found to be the work of a smaller pro-Kremlin youth group called Stal (“Steel”). According to the group’s LiveJournal page, Stal is a “patriotic movement created for the unification of thinkers and prepared for decisive action for the sake of its country, for the sake of Russia, of youth.” They also call themselves “the weaponry of Russia.”

According to Ekho Moskvy radio, Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin is deeply enraged by the installation. He said that it would be hard to do more damage to Russia’s reputation and that the organizers should be severely punished.

Russian bloggers immediately pointed out that the installation violates a federal law banning the public demonstration of Nazi symbolism.

Members of the Public Chamber, a federal body meant to foster dialogue between civil society and the government, called for a full boycott of the camp.

“I am deeply outraged that our best human rights advocates and well-known public figures – Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Nikolai Svanidze – are compared to Nazis,” said Alla Gerber, Public Chamber member and president of the Interregional Holocaust Foundation. “The authors of this installation are irresponsible hooligans, absolutely insane people who don’t know what Nazis are.”

Nashi defended Seliger 2010 for allowing different youth movements to express different points of view, Stal’s being no exception. In a statement posted on its website on Wednesday, Nashi said that the camp’s administration “does not subject participants’ statements to censorship, does not participate in the preparation of installations, does not pay for art objects that delegations bring along.”

Lyudmila Alexeyeva told Ekho Moskvy that public figures would do best to ignore such incidents, and thus she does not plan to file suit for slander against the installation’s organizers.

“Things like this don’t offend me,” said Alexeyeva. “And really, if they originate with Nashi, then excuse me, who is there to be offended by – those who make do without any human qualities, decency, or intelligence? Let them amuse themselves in this ugly fashion. Put up a caricature of an old woman who already looks sufficiently morose. If my grandchildren did this, then I would explain to them that good children don’t do this. But here I’m not going to explain anything.”

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 prime minister made the remarks at a meeting on Saturday with representatives of Russia’s cultural elite, including notable actors, poets, and musicians. He said that government officials should not “cover up” with the restrictions that exist in current legislation to deny protesters the right to hold their events. Doing so, Putin said, would create the conditions in which it is impossible to exercise free speech.

“If I see that people are coming out not just to make a scene, but to say something concrete, practical – I have to say thank you,” he told those gathered.

Yury Shevchuk, lead singer of the band DDT and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, asked the prime minister whether or not the opposition-lead March of Dissent planned to take place in St. Petersburg on Monday would be allowed. In response, Prime Minister Putin appealed to the same principle most commonly used by local governments in banning anti-government events: “The organizers of large demonstrations – dissenters and non-dissenters – must not forget that there are other people as well… If you decide to hold a ‘March of Dissent’ – forgive me for being too harsh – let’s say, near a hospital, where you’re going to be bothering sick children – who in the local authorities would let you hold this march there? And they’re right to ban it!” he said.

Shevchuk also raised the issues of freedom of speech and lawlessness within among federal security operatives and government officials. He asked the prime minister whether or not the country would experience any kind of liberalization, and if its citizens would ever be able to stop fearing the police. In response, Putin reiterated his position that the police are too heavily criticized, saying that one should not “smear everybody with the same black tar,” since “there are all types of people” working in the country’s police forces.

More particularly, the prime minister asserted that “the police are a mirror of all society.”

On Sunday, however, after the Russia media began widely reporting that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was declaring that opposition demonstrations could be legally held on May 31 without fear of backlash by the authorities, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov was quick to clarify that this was definitely not the case.

“Right now many people are reacting ecstatically to the discussion…and are distorting its meaning. We even hear calls to go to protests since Putin allowed it, and that nobody would be touched,” apparently in reference to the fact that most unsanctioned protests in Russia are brutally suppressed by riot police. Peskov went on: “Nothing of the sort, Putin didn’t allow anything, because he cannot allow anything, the local authorities do that. Putin said that everything should be in the framework of the law.”

Peskov said that Putin basically meant that citizens certainly do have the right to protest, but that other citizens who don’t wish to protest have the right, for example, to not be caught in the blocked traffic that could theoretically happen as a result of a protest.

“And to discuss this more conceptually,” Peskov continued, “Putin said that, without question, there cannot be order without democracy, but there cannot be democracy without order, and everything should be strictly within the framework of legality.”

Putin’s spokesperson went on to effectively marginalize Shevchuk’s comments by saying that the discussion was “full” and that the singer’s concerns were “by no means” a primary topic. “A very wide spectrum of issues were discussed, they casually drank tea, with no kind of protocol, and there were questions about rare medicine for patients ill with cancer, and questions about cultural education and questions about culture and everything else,” Peskov said.

He went on to relate the following anecdote: “There was an interesting incident, Shevchuk said a toast in honor of the tea, he took a glass and said that he would very much like for our children to be live in a free society, a freely democratic country, and that, unfortunately, he still did not entirely see this in the country where we live right now. Everyone joined into this toast, and Putin said in conclusion that, in fact, as is the toast, such is the drink. At the time, there was water in everyone’s glasses. Such a curious moment,” Peskov said.

Whatever Putin’s comments, opposition rallies are set to take place today all throughout Russia, unsanctioned though they mostly are, The primary ones are part of the Strategy 31 initiative, in which protests are held in defense of the 31st article of the Russian constitution guaranteeing freedom of assembly. As each of the preceding eight rallies have ended with scores of activists detained and beaten by police, organizers have invited the editors from some of Russia’s largest media outlets and deputies from the European Parliament to take part as observers.

As the Sobkor®ru news agency reports, the 100TV channel’s editorial offices were apparently concerned with nature of Televizor’s recent lyrics.

Televizor, which came out of the Soviet underground of the mid-1980s, describes itself as “one of the predecessors of Russian neo-romanticism and electronic funk.” The band, led by Mikhail Borzykin, was supposed to appear on the “100 Percent Sound” show, in a live musical performance.

While many of the group’s songs have nothing offensive about them, the group has never shied away from political themes and strong-mouthed lyrics. Their early recordings include songs titled “Your television is speaking with you,” and “Your dad is a fascist.” The band’s most recent album, Megamisanthrope, takes jabs at religion, war and materialism. Televizor’s latest songs have taken a sharp political edge, criticizing repressive authorities and imperialism. Borzykin is an active member of the opposition, and has performed at several demonstrations, including the March 3rd, 2008 March of Dissent in St. Petersburg.

“The songs of Mikhail Borzykin could not be aired, but not for political, but rather ethical reasons,” said Andrei Radin, the lead editor for the 100 TV channel. He explained the channel’s concerns for letting Televizor on the air, noting the “barefaced, explicit obscenity, and even unmentionable language” of Borzykin’s songs.

The singer himself said that “we were told that ‘now there’s such a situation, that we cannot allow this to happen.’”

Another television channel is apparently unhappy with Yury Shevchuk, the front-man of one of Russia’s most famous rock-bands, DDT. According to the North-West Political News Agency, the Kultura (Culture) TV channel has a standing order not to air any of Shevchuk’s songs. This year, he was also replaced at an annual commemorative concert for folk artist Bulat Okudzhava.

Shevchuk, who took part in the March 3rd March of Dissent in St. Petersburg, also performed at a concert after the mass-demonstration. Speaking during the protest, he explained that rock music in Russia and St. Petersburg most of all represents freedom. In a later interview, he added that he decided to march because “there was no other choice left.

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Televizor Official Site

DDT Official Site