‘Enough is enough’: Tens of thousands rally in Moscow to protest election results

MOSCOW—For high school principal Vasily Vogin, it is sickeningly familiar.

First there was the flurry of video clips this week showing widespread corruption during vote counting for Russia’s Dec. 4 parliamentary election.

Then there was the fallout: the arrest of influential and critical bloggers; the groups of fifth-grade children shepherded into political rallies supporting the ruling party; and finally, the news high school students were ordered to attend classes so they could not attend a weekend rally calling attention to the voting debacle.

“Disgusting,” the 56-year-old Vogin said, snarling. “What’s next? Are we going to have May Day parades again like we had during the Soviet Union? That’s the way we’re going.”

Vogin was among tens of thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets in what was the largest political protest in the Russian capital since the fall of communism in 1991.

Young and old alike, many wearing white ribbons as a symbol of their frustrations over growing corruption in their country, packed a square near the Kremlin in Moscow’s downtown Saturday afternoon. For hours, the throngs waved Russian’s white, red and blue national flag, chanted slogans such as “We are for free elections” and hoisted banners with messages like “The government tricked us.”

Leaders of the protest urged people to remain peaceful and reminded them to use cameras and cellphones to record everything they saw. Attendees were also reminded the government had probably planted plainclothes officers among them.

Political analysts say the turnout will surely embolden government critics, who had expected about 30,000 people to turn up. Police put the attendance at 25,000; organizers claimed up to 150,000. At one point, there were so many people on a bridge near the protest site that authorities warned it was in danger of collapsing.

“The next time we will be marching through Red Square,” yelled Andre, an unemployed 40-year-old who declined to provide his family name. “Enough is enough.”

Russia has been awash in allegations of vote rigging in recent days and charges of pervasive corruption for many months.

The United Russia party, led by President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, officially secured 49 per cent of the vote in last week’s election, although critics say United Russia really had about 25 per cent support without the voting shenanigans. Some bloggers and journalists have suggested voting results were tampered with in regions such as Chechnya, where United Russia purportedly won 99 per cent of the vote even though the area is a restive one where people have battled for independence.

Some experts predict Medvedev and Putin will now adjust the recent vote results.

“I think they’ll throw people a bone, they can’t just ignore this,” says Evgeni Minchenko, director general of the Institute of International Political Expertise. “It’s not a very big problem for the government. Maybe they will end up with 220 seats instead of 238. It’s okay, they can still form a coalition government.”

Katya Filatova, 28, walked through the wind-swept streets and light snow and said she was going to protest because she’s sick both of corruption and of government-controlled media.

Filatova said she was an observer during the Dec. 4 election and watched speechless as organizers stuffed ballot boxes right in front of her.

She said state-backed TV channels have yet to cover Russia’s latest political scandal, although the government-run channel NTV did cover the protests and noted they were the country’s largest in a decade.

“It’s insulting,” Filatova said, moving out of the way of a man moving through the crowd with a large sign that urged people to write “Putin kaput” on currency notes. “People went to the streets in Egypt and Tunisia and it led to change. It can happen here, too.”

Maybe not, several expects said.

“There’s a big difference between Russia and these Arab Spring countries,” Minchenko said. “The first is nuclear weapons. The second is that young people in the Arab countries do not have perspective in their lives. The young people here can be very successful. They are not so desperate or aggressive as they might be in Egypt.”

Minchenko was one of several political analysts who said they were surprised that there were no arrests or fights at Saturday’s rally.

“It was a very polite police today, and that’s unusual,” he said.

Putin and other Russian leaders did their best to thwart organizers of protests on Saturday in Moscow and in other smaller cities throughout Russia.

Government officials have mocked critics.

“I read hysterical comments on Facebook and Twitter, then I step outside and see absolutely calm peaceful Moscow,” said Robert Shlegel, a United Russia member of parliament.

Throughout the week, newspapers and bloggers have had their websites either shut down or attacked by spamming websites.

On Thursday, Pavel Durov, a founder of the social website VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, reported that the Russian secret police had demanded that his site ban an online protest group.

Durov refused to do so and instead published a copy of the police order. He was subsequently ordered to appear at a prosecutor’s office and could face criminal charges.

Several Russians who attended the protest said they hope it pressures their government to seriously address the country’s corruption woes.

In Transparency International’s annual rankings of corruption, with the first-place nation being the least corrupt, Russia ranks 154 in a survey of the 178 countries. Russia, said to be one of the world’s most attractive emerging markets for investors, is tied with Cambodia, Guinea-Bissau and the Central African Republic.

Corruption is said to be so rampant here that the Russian edition of Esquire recently estimated the cost of one road built for the Winter Olympics in Sochi was so high that it could have been paved with nine inches of foie gras.

Vogin, the principal, said he was disappointed that the protesters seemed to lack an identifiable leader, which may doom their effort. Nevertheless, he insists the government is struggling to maintain control of the country.

“They’ve lost their good name, they’ve lost the support of the people,” he said, wind whipping through his grey hair. “All they have to do now is lose their power, and if they do that, they’ll probably end up in jail. That’s why they’re so afraid. That’s why they’re bringing schoolchildren to rallies.”

Origin
Source: Star