Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Moscow’s Communist Party holds an authorized march every autumn to mark a bitter anniversary of state violence, and this year it drew an unusual crowd.
On Sunday afternoon, Russian riot police detained about 60 people at an authorized Communist Party rally near Krasnopresnenskaya Zastava Square after chants against the Kremlin and demands to free political prisoners, independent rights monitor OVD-Info reported.
The breakdown of detainees cut across the usual lines of Russian opposition. Twenty-six were members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), around 30 belonged to the liberal Yabloko party, and several were unaffiliated activists, OVD-Info said.
The KPRF said about 60 of its supporters and allies were detained and that its Moscow branch was working to secure their release.
Yabloko is Russia’s only openly anti-war political force. It was excluded from September’s parliamentary elections after its candidate list was rejected, a decision upheld by Russia’s Supreme Court.
Chants shift, then detentions begin
The gathering was authorized by Moscow authorities and commemorated the 33rd anniversary of the October 1993 constitutional crisis, when President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell the Russian parliament. It drew up to 2,000 people.
Participants chanted “We want freedom,” “Down with Roskomnadzor,” “No to political repression,” “Freedom for political prisoners,” and “Down with the party of crooks and thieves”, a line long used to describe the ruling United Russia party.
According to OVD-Info, security forces began detaining demonstrators more aggressively after the chant “Down with the Tsar!” went up as the rally was winding down.
One eyewitness told the monitoring group that officers were “kicking” a man lying on the ground, and that “a woman was grabbed by the hair, she screamed.”
A banned party and a vote that reshuffled the Duma
Yabloko’s exclusion from the Duma ballot was finalized in August, when Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the party’s appeal.
Chairman Nikolai Rybakov called the proceeding “the mere imitation of a court proceeding” and said Yabloko had been “effectively disqualified from the election for standing for peace and freedom,” The Moscow Times reported.
September’s three-day vote delivered United Russia a record result. The ruling party took 57.96% of the party-list vote and 349 of 450 seats, according to the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies.
Independent estimates put the party’s real support closer to 34%, with turnout below 40%.
According to Kyiv Post, Yabloko said it had no information confirming that any of its members had taken part in the Communist Party rally. OVD-Info nonetheless listed Yabloko figures among those bundled into police vans.
Among the slogans monitors recorded on Sunday was a demand to free Dmitry Morozov, an activist from Izhevsk who was detained by the FSB on October 2 after campaigning for a separate rally against alleged electoral fraud.
Russian media subsequently reported that a criminal case on drug charges had been opened against him.
