Fresh protest actions by motorists roll across Russia.
Over the weekend Russia was swept by protests against the rise of car import duties. The authorities took every measure to prevent a repeat of large-scale protests a week earlier. For example, an OMON unit from the Moscow area was flown in to control the demonstrators. The OMON force clubbed all demonstrators indiscriminately. However, the protestors did not confine themselves to economic demands and carried some political slogans, including the resignation of the Government. In Vladivostok the protest actions against the lifting of customs duties for imported foreign cars were brutally suppressed. It will be recalled that last weekend about 3000 people took to the streets to block traffic on the main roads and tried to seize the local airport. Up to a hundred thousand people in Vladivostok would lose their jobs as a result of Premier Vladimir Putin's decree which comes into force on January 10, the organizers of the protest claim. This time the authorities did their best to prevent large-scale actions. The local TV channels ran in advance a recorded speech by Primorye Governor Sergei Darkin who urged people "not to give in to provocations" and not to take part in the actions of "certain political forces which try to get political mileage from speculating on people's interests". Kommersant's sources in the regional government say that Moscow had ordered the Governor to prevent large-scale unrest. The leaders of the local Interior Affairs Directorate and the Prosecutor's Office issued a television appeal warning that participants in unsanctioned street actions "will inevitably be prosecuted".
On Saturday about 500 people turned up in the city's central square. The protest was unorganized and nobody made speeches. The songs "What do you dream about, of the cruiser Aurora?" and " The Internationale" were played through the loud speaker. The protestors carried banners "UR are Blood-Suckers," "Our patience is running out," "The Government must go." The police said the action was illegal and demanded the crowd disperse; when the crowd refused, it was pushed out of the square. Twenty two people were detained. On Sunday when about 300 people came to Vladivostok's central square, the police acted even more brutally. The picketers stood silently, without banners and even danced peacefully around the Christmas tree to placate the police. However, it was to no avail. The members of the Moscow commando unit Zubr specially brought in to disperse the demonstrators, ran out of the buses and started grabbing everyone they could get hold of. Those who offered resistance were beaten with clubs.
The camera crews of national channels - VGTRK, Channel 5, Channel 1, TVTs and NTV were also detained. Nikolai Unagayev, a cameraman working for the Japanese TV company NHK, had his camera smashed. "The OMON were brutal. I told them I was a correspondent working on assignment for my channel. But I was thrown into a van head first. The van was crammed full of people. We were taken to the police precinct. The police there were more polite, they gave us tea and quickly set us free," said ITAR TASS photographer Vladimir Sayapin. The OMON units from the Moscow Region detained local Parliament deputy Nikolai Markovtsev. "They took away my camera and dragged me to the van. They only let me go after a local police officer who knew me personally interfered," Mr Markovtsev said. "It was an action of intimidation ordered from Moscow. I saw that the OMON stopped even cars on Korabelnaya Embankment down the street from the central square, dragged out their drivers and bundle them into the vans," he said. The organizers of the protest actions in Vladivostok who planned the next rally on December 28 have already announced that they have called off their plans.
Protests against the rise of duties took place in other Russian cities, including Kazan, Belgorod and Yekaterinburg. In Astrakhan there was no rally, but the city was covered in leaflets with the slogan "Damn the duties." In Moscow about 20 protestors who were staging an authorized picket on Bolotnaya Square and drove along the Garden Ring with their headlights and emergency lights on were detained. In Novosibirsk about 200 people staged a rally. The most common slogan was "Raise living standards, not duties." In Omsk about a hundred motorists drove to the central city square and tooted their horns for 15 minutes. In Krasnoyarsk about 500 motorists staged a protest. As on the previous weekend they staged a "funeral procession" driving through the city's main streets and displaying stickers on the windows which read: "Putin, fight the oligarchs, not the people." and "We don't want to drive trash. Raise quality, not prices". In St Petersburg picketers displayed slogans "Vladivostok, we are with you", "Stop scaring people with higher duties". "Why should I pay to boost our car industry?" wondered one picketer who was standing by the side of a truck holding a banner: "Mr President. Sack Putin's unpopular government. In the US an average car costs $16,000-$17,000. Here it costs $26,000. We don't earn more than they." "We have been deprived of television and the press, leave us the last toy a man can enjoy," people from the crowd shouted. "Don't treat the government as a father, treat it as a normal hired officials." In Kaliningrad about 300 people staged a rally. To secure official permission for the rally, the organizers ingeniously titled it as a "picket in support of the President's anti-corruption programme." Speakers addressing the crowd through bullhorns, said: "the budget gets 200,000 roubles from each car imported into Russia. No domestic-made car can bring the treasury that much."
The most imaginative protest action took place in Khabarovsk. Its organizers bought a 40,000 rouble white Zhiguli car which they initially planned to burn on an empty lot before sending what remained of the car to Vladimir Putin. Later they changed their mind. They painted the words "A gift to Putin from the people of Khabarovsk" in red on its side and took the car to the railway station where they encouraged everyone to write a message to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev with a marker. Within a short time Zhiguli was daubed with insulting captions, the most innocent of which were "Vova, drive it to your heart's content," "Let it serve you long". The picketers left the Zhiguli at the headquarters of the local branch of United Russia where they staged a protest action in which about 2000 people took part. Protesters chanted "Putin resign" and called for a representative of United Russia, but no one came out to face them.
Ivan Tyazhlov