Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
April 16, 2007
No Winners
Police Overreact, but Little Sympathy Felt for Dissenters’ Cause
By Dmitry Babich
The Russian media presented a wide range of reactions to Saturday’s events in Moscouring which protestors taking part in a Dissenters’ March were attacked by OMON riot police. The most indignant criticism of the OMON naturally came from the participants in the marches. State Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, whose small Republican Party organized its own meeting near Pushkin Square, the main location for the Dissenters’ March, promised to raise the issue of police brutality at the next Duma session.
“I will demand an investigation of the police action from Justice Minister Yury Chaika and Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev,” Ryzhkov said. “What happened there actually amounted to criminal actions accompanied by abuse of power. I can provide evidence against OMON myself, because I witnessed three beatings. Now I am collecting photo and video records of these events.”
Attempts by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov to create a coalition of political forces opposed to President Vladimir Putin’s rule have not been successful so far, but some representatives of the officially-recognized opposition felt an obligation to demonstrate some degree of solidarity with the dissenters. For example, the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called the police actions “inadequate” and asked the prosecutor’s office to conduct an investigation of Saturday’s events. However, Zyuganov stopped short of voicing full support for the demonstrators’ actions, seeing in them some parallels with the actions of those who brought about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
“We don’t need the orange leprosy, which is spreading in Ukraine,” Zyuganov said in an interview with the website Gazeta.ru.
As could be expected, the pro-government Duma deputies accused the organizers of the march of “extremism,” pointing fingers at Eduard Limonov. Limonov, Kasyanov and former chess world champion Garry Kasparov, the leaders of The Other Russia, were the three major co-sponsors of the march, which Putin loyalists called a paid-for provocation.
“I am against the opposition using young people who were paid for participation [in the march],” said Lyubov Sliska, deputy chairman of the State Duma, in an interview with Kommersant daily. “It is unpleasant to see how political swindlers like Kasparov, Limonov and others operate from behind the young people’s backs.”
A relatively balanced view of the events came from Arkady Murashov, one of the organizers of the anti-communist rallies of the late 1980s and early 1990s, who later served for two years as the head of the Moscow police force. Murashov, who commanded Moscow’s police during the 1993 standoff between then-President Boris Yeltsin and the Communist-dominated parliament, had to resign after supporters of the dissolved parliament clashed with police and army.
“A lot [in the Moscow authorities’ overreaction to the march] can be explained by the mutiny of 1993, which led to casualties,” Murashov wrote in a comment for Kommersant. “It was much easier to allow the marchers go, since any prohibition only attracts attention to them. By 1996, when Yeltsin was elected Russia’s president for a second time, mass street action was already in fact prohibited. If we imagine for a minute that representatives of [Garry Kasparov’s] Civic Front come to power in Russia, their attitude to the opposition will be largely the same.”