MOSCOW – From the frozen streets of Russia’s Far East and Siberia to the great square of Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians rallied in support of captured opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny on Saturday in the largest nationwide showdown in years between the Kremlin and its opponents.
The protests did not immediately pose a serious threat to President Vladimir V. Putin’s power grip. But their broad scope and the remarkable defiance shown by many of the protesters indicated widespread fatigue with the stagnant, corruption-ridden political order that Putin had put forward for two decades.
The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country of 11 time zones, and they moved like a wave across the country, despite a heavy police presence and a drumming of threatening warnings on state media to stay away .
On the island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan, hundreds gathered in front of the local government building and said, “Putin is a thief!” The protests spread to the subarctic city of Yakutsk, where it was minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and gatherings attended by thousands in cities across Siberia. Hours later, when the evening in Moscow dawned, people the police pelted with snowballs and kicked to a car of the domestic intelligence agency.
Late last night in Moscow, more than 3,000 people were arrested in at least 109 cities, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that monitors arrests during protests.
Mr. Navalny’s supporters were successful and promised more protests next weekend – although many directors of its regional offices were arrested.
“If Putin thinks that the most frightening things lie behind him, he is mistaken very badly and naively,” said Leonid Volkov, a top assistant to Mr. Navalny, on a live broadcast to YouTube said of an unknown place outside Russia.
The protests took place six days after Mr. Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist, was arrested on his arrival in Moscow on a flight from Germany, where he had been recovering from poisoning by a military nerve agent for months. Western officials and Mr. Navalny described the poisoning, which took place in Siberia in August, as an assassination attempt by the Russian state. The Kremlin denies it.
Mr. Navalny, who now faces a year-long prison sentence, urged his supporters across the country to take to the streets over the weekend, although officials did not approve protests. Russians respond with the widest demonstrations the country has seen since at least 2017 – in the tens of thousands in Moscow and St. Petersburg and in thousands in each of several cities in the east, including Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk and the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
“There was a serious feeling that Russian public opinion was hardening in cement as if it were stuck in a dead, hidden ball,” said Vyacheslav Ivanets, a lawyer in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, who took part in the protests. . “Now I feel the situation has changed.”
Mr. Navalny, long Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, used his populist touch on social media and humorous, tough and simple language to emerge as Russia’s only opposition leader to command a broad-based cross-section of society. His status among Putin’s critics has increased further in recent months as he survived the nerve agent attack and subsequently returned to Russia, although he was almost arrested.
The arrest on Sunday, protesters said, helped escalate discontent over economic stagnation and widespread official corruption among Mr. Putin to unleash.
But the Kremlin of Mr. Putin had exceeded protests before – and there were few immediate indications that this time would be different. The Russian state media quickly made it clear that there was no chance that the Kremlin would turn under pressure, and condemned the protests as a nationwide ‘wave of aggression’ that could lead to imprisonment against some participants.
“Attack on a police officer is a criminal offense,” a state television report said. ‘Hundreds of videos have been recorded. All the faces are on them. ”
In Washington, the State Department said on Saturday that it “strongly condemned” the use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists in Russia. Russia’s foreign ministry has denied the allegations in a statement issued Friday stating “Similar, baseless allegations concerning Russia’s intelligence have been made more than once. Came.
Some protesters acknowledged that, despite the importance of Saturday’s protests, it would take much larger numbers to change the course of the country’s politics. In neighboring Belarus, many more people protested for weeks last year against the authoritarian president, Alexander G. Lukashenko – a close ally of Mr. Putin – without upsetting him.
“I’m a little disappointed, honestly,” said Nikita Melekhin, a 21-year-old nurse in Moscow. “I was expecting more.”
On the street, the police presented a monumental display of power, but largely refrained from large-scale violence. On Pushkin Square in central Moscow, the focus of the protest in the capital, police using the baton have repeatedly urged the crowd to try to disperse it, but avoid using tear gas or other violent crowd-control methods. .
They have most of mr. Navalny’s leading collaborators were pre-arrested and his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, detained during a protest on Saturday before being released hours later.
Yet videos circulating on social media have captured remarkable clashes between protesters and police – an indication of a new fearlessness among some Russians and of the uncertainty about what lies ahead. In several cases, protesters can be seen pelting police with snowballs, although prosecutors in recent years have demanded lengthy jail time for people throwing objects at officers.
Singing “shame” protesters in Moscow too snowballs thrown at a passing government car. After it came to a standstill, people crashed into the car, which belongs to the Russian domestic intelligence agency, and it started kicking. The driver sustained an eye injury in the attack, state news media later reported.
State news media reported that at least 39 law enforcers in Moscow were injured during the events on Saturday. There were also videos of officers maliciously beating and kicking individual protesters, including outside the Moscow prison where Mr. Navalny is locked up.
The question now is whether the intensity of the clashes will cause the Russians to galvanize further, or will ultimately prevent them from heeding the call of the Navalny team to record more protests.
Opinion polls of recent months – of uncertain value in a country saturated with state propaganda and where people are often afraid to speak out – indicated that Mr. Putin has no serious challenge to his popularity of Mr. Navalny, whose name has never been allowed to appear in a presidential election. Mr. Putin refuses to give his name in public.
In a November survey by the Levada Center, an independent and highly respected voting organization, it was found that only 2 percent of the respondents Mr. Navalny was named as their first choice when asked who they would choose if a presidential election were held next Sunday. Fifty-five percent said Mr. Called Putin.
Nevertheless, Mr. Navalny’s dramatic return to Russia last Sunday – and his video report on Putin’s alleged secret palace, which has been viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube – heightens opposition leaders across the country.
“I have never been a big supporter of Navalny, and yet I understand very well that this is a very serious situation,” Vitaliy Blazhevich, 57, a university lecturer, said in a telephone interview about why he Mr. Navalny in the city of Khabarovsk on the Chinese border.
“There is always hope that something will change,” he said. Blazhevich said.
Vasily Zimin, a 47-year-old partner in a Moscow law firm, struggled through drowsiness and said he had come to protest the rampant corruption during Mr.
How can you say, ‘I can take no more of this’ while sitting on your couch? he said.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow. Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed research.