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