8 Protesters Detained at Strategy 31 Rally

By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 1, 2012 (Issue # 1720)

Eight protesters were arrested during a Strategy 31 protest in St. Petersburg Tuesday, in the first rally in defense of the right of assembly since stricter rally restrictions were passed into law in the wake of mass protests against electoral fraud.

Maria Shariya, an activist with The Other Russia, held a sign reading “I don’t give a damn about your fines” and gave a brief speech while a policeman spoke over her using a megaphone, warning protesters to stop.

“Russian residents will soon have no money to pay their fines, to pay their taxes, to pay for the education of their children,” Shariya shouted, trying to speak louder than the officer with the megaphone, who was threatening people with possible detentions and charges.

“Putin and his gang themselves are pushing people to protest against them, we can’t tolerate it anymore.”

As soon as she finished, she sat on the ground with seven other activists, who locked their arms together, and went on to chant, “Freedom of assembly — everywhere and always.”

Within seconds, the group was surrounded by the OMON riot police, who pushed the public and journalists aside, while another group of policemen started to separate the protesters from each other and carry them to an unmarked bus, holding them by their arms and legs. The activists continued to shout slogans such as “We want a different Russia” and “They don’t know what they’re doing” until they were all put on the bus and taken to a police precinct.

Unlike at previous rallies, there were no mass detentions in which large groups of people were surrounded by police, and no preventive arrests of activists approaching the usual Strategy 31 rally site near the Gostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt.

The police did not arrest three older protesters — two men holding anti-Kremlin posters, and artist Yelena Osipova, who stood with two paintings she had made in support of the imprisoned women of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot, currently on trial in Moscow.

Several hundred came to the site, but most simply stood there, although an occasional copy of the Russian constitution or a white ribbon — a symbol of the movement for honest elections — were seen in the crowd. Some people applauded the police officers’ warnings by way of protest.

Early this month, Strategy 31 organizers in St. Petersburg said they would boycott “illegal rulings of the authorities,” and would be guided exclusively by the regulation of the Constitution.

According to The Other Russia, Strategy 31 organizers chose to drop the practice of applying to City Hall for a permit. The protesters reasoned that such applications had “lost all meaning” as the Constitution’s Article 31 — which guarantees the right of assembly — has been “effectively abolished.”

“No assembly of this type has been authorized since the time the Strategy 31 campaign started in St. Petersburg in January 2010,” the opposition party said in a statement.

City Hall officials explained that the maintenance work that always takes place at the rally site at 6 p.m. on the 31st day of the month was a “pure coincidence.”

But more frequently City Hall confined itself to “you will get in the way of pedestrians” and suggested that the rally be transferred to the remote Polyustrovsky Park.

The other reason cited for not applying for a permit was that under the new law on public assemblies — in effect since June 9 — signing a rally application endangers the organizers themselves. They can face hefty fines, from 10,000 to 20,000 rubles ($310-$620) or up to 40 hours of compulsory community service if they go ahead with an unsanctioned rally.

According to The Other Russia’s local chair Andrei Dmitriyev, the eight detained activists will be taken to court on Wednesday after being held in police precinct 76 overnight. He also said that the police claimed an activist ripped an officer’s uniform while being detained.

As usual, the protesters were charged with violating the rules of holding a public assembly and failing to obey police orders.

The organizers of a Strategy 31 rally on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad in Moscow, however, applied to the authorities to hold a sanctioned rally and were refused authorization.

In Moscow, the police arrested around 50 people, including author and The Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov, who founded the Strategy 31 campaign in the Russian capital in July 2009, Limonov’s press secretary Alexander Averin said. According to Averin, up to 500 people took part.