'We have to fight for our rights': is Russia ready to defy Putin?

By Dilip -
On the terrace of a recently renovated market hall overlooking Moscow’s Trubnaya Square, lounge music beats played as well-dressed customers drank from bottles of craft beer or cradled glasses of Aperol spritz. Below them, as the concrete glowed in the last rays of sunshine, hundreds of riot police chased groups of young people through the square and into neighbouring streets, roughly bundling those they caught into waiting police vans. A booming voice from a loudspeaker on one of the police buses cut through the music on the terrace, threatening the protesters with arrest.

The scene – played out last Saturday as police met a protest about opposition access to the Moscow local elections with the largest number of arrests in recent Russian history – was a striking distillation of the contradictions of life under mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who in recent years has offered Muscovites an impressive programme of urban beautification while keeping extremely strict limitations on political freedom.


The protests are the biggest the capital has seen for nearly a decade. The issue of independent and opposition candidates being barred from standing in September’s elections to the Moscow city parliament is relatively niche, but a broader, more existential discontent has coalesced around it. This Saturday, central Moscow was again thronged with protesters, who turned out despite the knowledge that they risked arrest, court cases and prison terms... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/04/moscow-protests-police-crackdown-putin-russia

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