Arrest and custody, Russian-style
Police custody, violence, trials and imprisonment have been all to common features on the Russian protest landscape since December 2011. A grassroots monitoring project called OVD-info has kept realtime data on the arrests
Right from the birth of Russia’s protest movement in December 2011, our organisation, OVD-Info [‘Police-Info’] has collected realtime data on the nature and number of political arrests in Moscow. During the period 4 December 2011 to 31 December 2012 we recorded 5169 such cases. But our data are not just dry statistics; they are, more importantly, the stories of the people detained who have told us how arrests are made and what subsequently happens at the police and in the court.
Political arrest
Readers who are not perhaps completely up to date with political life in Russia might well be surprised to learn that protests in Moscow take rather a different form than in other European countries, the US or the Middle East. All the demonstrations we have monitored have been emphatically peaceful: Moscow protesters simply don’t hurl Molotov cocktails, smash neighbourhood shop windows or turn cars over. Despite their peaceful nature, however, the meetings rarely end without arrests. Helmeted police in bullet-proof vests and armed with truncheons (and sometimes tasers) regularly treat the demonstrators as though they were at the very least enraged football hooligans.
All arrests at public street demonstrations with a political theme in the widest sense of the word (we include defence of social rights or sexual minorities in this) are considered political if the arrest contravenes the law, i.e. if basic human rights or procedural rules have been flouted. These arrests take different forms, depending on the mood of the police. On 5 March 2012, for example, after an opposition rally protesting about the rigged presidential elections, the police were very rough (according to evidence given by witnesses), using tasers and submission locks. One of the 250 detainees on that day recounts:
‘They didn’t mess about. A gloved hand grabbed my face from behind and started feeling my mouth. My neighbour shouted a warning and I turned my head away, but the hand got hold of…my hat. Yes, that’s the police submission lock. My hat came off and I tried to turn and get it, but received a blow on the chin. No answer to that! I took a few steps forward, but a riot cop appeared from nowhere and tried to knock me over. He got hold of my clothes and grabbed my camera. It was trampled by the crowd which was being corralled. I was tasered in the knee from behind. It was so unexpected that I fell over.’... Read more:
