SRN:
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Russians staged what a monitoring group called the country’s biggest political protest for eight years on Saturday, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow’s city legislature.
Police rounded up scores of people after the demonstration in Moscow and at another rally in St Petersburg, and detained a leading opposition figure before it began. But the response from the authorities was milder than the previous week when more than 1,000 protesters were detained, sometimes violently.
The White Counter monitoring group said up to 60,000 people had attended the Moscow rally, describing it as the biggest in Russia for eight years. Police put turnout at 20,000.
A month of demonstrations over elections for the Moscow city legislature have turned into the biggest sustained protest movement in Russia since 2011-2013, when protesters took to the streets against perceived electoral fraud.
Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared “down with the tsar!” and waved Russian flags. They are demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month after they were not allowed onto the ballot.
“The authorities have become brazen. It’s time to defend our rights,” said Natalya Plokhova, a recruiting consultant. read more
Rachel Maddow and msNBC involving and meddling themselves into foreign elections. How funny and rich in irony and vitamins and vegetals.
I don’t know what those people are protesting about. The weather in Moscow is lovely this time of year and their system doesn’t appear to be any more corrupt than ours.
/Sarc
When is the American protest scheduled to start, we need one???
Are they singing our National Anthem too?
Protest against the government in both Moscow, and Hong Kong. Probably wont end well. Big-gov in every political system will use its power to be brutal once it has made to decision to so do. With the Chinese probably having the longest historic tradition of greatest brutality.
In the mid-70’s, China dealt with protests like this in a way that required mass graves. I saw several of them on satellite imagery during that time.