Page 48 - BNE_magazine_10_2020

48 I Eastern Europe bne October 2020
used by the authorities to intimidate demonstrators, when instead of backing off the crowd of women began to advance on the officer.
One middle-aged women stepped out of the crowd and walked up to the officer holding her hand in front of his lens, forcing him to back away. Then another grabbed him from behind and ripped his mask off. When a secret service colleague tried to step in to help him they were quickly mobbed by the women and beat a retreat as the triumphant women chanted: “Get out of here!”
The badass Belarusian babushka
The now iconic “badass Belarusian babushka” Nina Bahinskaya, a 73-year- old pensioner, who has been protesting against the Lukashenko regime for years, was in the vanguard at half a dozen
clashes with OMON throughout the day.
The police have clearly been given orders not to arrest her, as she would be too potent a symbol of the state oppression. Her diminutive size and her totally ineffectual efforts to roughhouse the OMON, who effortlessly bat her assaults away like an annoying fly, would make her arrest look ridiculous.
But at the same time she has become
a hero of the revolt as she fearlessly marches into the OMON and tries to tear off their masks, shouting and scolding them all the while. As she is so small,
if she can’t reach their faces she contents herself with kicking them in the ankles. The crowds of women at her back chant “Nina!” and other women dive in to rescue her if the OMON offices are
too aggressive.
Like the rugby scrum of women that blocked a paddy wagon from leaving with its detainees, Nina blocked another by herself, standing in the road in front of it, in an image of the “tank man” from the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989, until the OMON drivers were forced to get out of the truck and physically move her to one side.
A German journalist caught up with Nina just before midnight and asked her if she was tired. “Pah! She replied.
“I'm not afraid,” she said of the OMON. “These are young men, they sell their souls to the devil. Their wives and children will never forgive them... What should I be afraid of? Death? I know that I will go from this earth,” she told Alice Bota in Minsk, adding that she was
there to “help the young people.”
"This is the first victory of a Navalny office head," Ivan Zhdanov, director
of the opposition politician's Anti- Corruption Foundation, said on Twitter. "It was in Tomsk where Navalny was poisoned."
In several dozen of the country's 85 regions, Russians voted for regional governors and lawmakers in regional and city legislatures as well as in several by-elections for national MPs.
The Kremlin was in trouble going into the elections as its proxy in the Duma, the United Russian party, had seen its popularity sink to a record low of 31% as polls opened. The Kremlin has already been struggling to contain popular protests in the Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk that are about
to go into their third month, after the popular regional governor was removed on murder charges.
The local elections have been a test for Navalny’s protest voting technique, where they promote the candidate most likely to oust the United Russia Party, irrespective of their political allegiances. That means the opposition supported candidates from the ultra-nationalistic Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
Navalny’s smart voting scores rare successes in Russia’s regional elections
Ben Aris in Berlin
The “smart voting” tactics promoted by anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny delivered a few successes in Russia’s regional elections held on September 13.
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Opposition leader Sergei Boyko, who is part of the Navalny organisation, won the seat in the Siberian region of Novosibirsk, despite an energetic campaign by the ruling United Russia Party.