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With a week to go to Russia's parliamentary elections, police have detained a host of opposition activists and politicians at a series of protest rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg.
A few hundred metres away from where the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg 90 years ago, a group of opposition activists gathered in Palace Square to call for a new revolution against the rule of Vladimir Putin.
But these would-be revolutionaries have little support among the public and almost no access to the Russian media to put their message across. Only a few hundred people turned up to shout slogans of "Russia without Putin!" Of these, nearly 200 were detained, according to reports from the scene.
The small number of dissenters didn't stop the authorities from responding harshly. The protesters, as is usual for such events, were outnumbered by riot police, who dished out apparently random beatings.
Those arrested included Nikita Belykh and Boris Nemtsov, both leaders of the Union of Right Forces party (SPS), which is the only liberal party with even the faintest hope of breaking the 7 per cent barrier required to make it into the next Parliament.
Nemtsov had been nominated as the party's candidate to stand in presidential elections in March.
That SPS was taking part in the march at all shows how much the Kremlin has stifled mainstream political debate in the run-up to the election season. Many leading figures in SPS were members of the reformist cabinets of the 1990s, the policies of which many Russians blame for economic hardships.
Nemtsov himself was once Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, and Anatoly Chubais, another SPS leader, is head of UES, the state-controlled electricity giant. Recently, the party has become more critical of the Kremlin, but it is only now that it has started taking to the streets.
The party has reported crushing pressure from the authorities in the run-up to next Sunday's vote, with its candidates threatened and campaign material seized on suspicion that it may violate "extremism" laws.
A spokeswoman for Yabloko, the other major Russian liberal party, said that several party members running in next Sunday's vote had been beaten and detained in St Petersburg.
Notable absentees from the march in St Petersburg were the leaders of the Other Russia coalition, Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion now one of Putin's harshest critics, and Eduard Limonov, who heads the banned National Bolshevik Party. The two men were detained at a similar rally in Moscow on Sunday. Unlike SPS and Yabloko, Other Russia is not even on the ballot for the elections, having been denied registration.
Nemtsov was released, but a spokeswoman for Kasparov confirmed that the activist had been sentenced to five days in jail, for taking part in an illegal demonstration.
- Independent
