Thousands of protesters gather in St. Petersburgh on January 23
Down with the Tsar: For a New 1917 Rob Jones, Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (ISA in Russia)
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021 started with spectacular scenes as tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets, sometimes braving temperatures lower than -30 degrees Celsius in over a hundred cities across Russia. Beginning over seven time zones away in Vladivostok and other towns on Russia’s Pacific coast, they spread across Siberia and European Russia before ending up in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. After big turnouts on January 23 and 31, the latest phase culminated on the evening of February 2, the day a Moscow court sent Alexey Navalny to prison for nearly three years. The authorities acted with brutality and ruthless repression. Ten thousand demonstrators were detained, often violently, over the three protests. The vast majority were taken to emergency courts and given hefty fines; one member of Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (Socialist Alternative - ISA in Russia) was fined 200,000 rubles (around $2,700) – about ten times his monthly wage. Dozens were imprisoned on criminal charges while many known activists were forced into exile. Even participants who were not arrested are now facing
repression at work or college. Students identified to have participated have been kicked out of universities, school students have been harassed for Tik-Tok posts, and even front-line COVID workers from Moscow’s emergency virus hospitals have been fired. In the far-northern city of Archangelsk, a young school student was arrested for “organising a mass picket.” She had built four snowmen with anti-Putin placards!
Why So Much Anger?
The spark for these protests was the return of Alexey Navalny to Russia. He had been in Germany recovering from an attempt by the Russian secret police to assassinate him using a nerve agent spread into his underpants. Hundreds of supporters went to the airport to meet him, only to find that his flight was diverted to another airfield at the last minute. There he was immediately arrested for breaking his bail conditions from a previous trumped-up charge and sent to jail. This is despite the fact he had been sent to Germany with Kremlin agreement while still in a coma. The following day, Navalny released a video exposing a palace built on Russia’s Black Sea coast and apparently owned by Putin, or at least someone very close to him. This
