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bne February 2021 Eastern Europe I 61
Around 100,000 people met opposition activist Alexei Navalny's call for mass protests, but is it enough to start a revolution?
MOSCOW BLOG:
Has Navalny started
personal liberty and safety? Put more simply: are average people willing to take a beating by the police for what they believe in?
There is a calculus to violence that
the Kremlin understands very well. Some violence will intimidate the population, as most people are not prepared to literally risk their necks for a change in the political system. But
if the authorities go too far then that changes, and once inflamed by moral outrage the revolutionary movement becomes unstoppable, as Ukraine has demonstrated twice.
In March 2015 I met up with Nikolai Alekseev, one of the leaders of the Russian gay rights movement who came directly from a court hearing where he had just been fined RUB15,000 ($50) for organising an unsanctioned rally. We went to join the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was on the street handing out his newly released economic manifesto that laid out an alternative
to Putin’s regime. Nemtsov was killed shortly afterwards.
Alekseev had been fighting a running battle with then-mayor Yuri Luzhkov, trying to get permission for a gay pride march in Moscow that the homophobic mayor had been blocking for years.
“The city has always refused permission on the basis that the venue we wanted to use was already booked,” Alekseev told me in a café near the Chistye Prudy metro
a revolution?
Ben Aris in Berlin
The sun comes up again over a Russia that has been changed by the nationwide protests on January 23 as up to an estimated 100,000 people answered anti- corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s call to demonstrate in the biggest protests Russia has seen since 2011.
But has anything changed? Did Navalny start a revolution? Will the same amount of people hit the streets next week,
as the organisers are calling for? Has
a Belarusian style protest started that will continue for months and lead to the ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin?
One thing that can be said immediately is that Navalny has been promoted. Putin’s claim last month that he is
a “nobody” is clearly no longer true,
if it ever was.
Navalny is now a national celebrity in the way he was not before. Ordinary Russians respect his anti-corruption
work, but until now did not take him seriously as a politician.
Despite the dramatic footage of street fighting and the shocking brutality of the OMON – an officer kicked an old woman in the stomach in St Petersburg, who is now in hospital suffering from concussion as well – these protests
“One thing that can be said immediately is that Navalny has been promoted. Putin’s claim that he is a “nobody” is clearly no longer true”
are probably not enough to radicalise the Russian population and start a revolution similar to those in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Georgia.
The key question to ask is: are the Russian people now prepared to put their demands and anger before their
station in the heart of Moscow. “So this year at the first session of the court we put in an application for every day of the year as soon as the court opened. They still refused to give permission.”
Eventually Alekseev did manage to organise a small rally by publicly
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