Liberals in Moscow failed to combine celebrations with arrests
Moscow police disrupted the liberal holiday “Free Election Day” today without arresting any of its participants. The event was initially planned by municipal deputies of the Krasnoselsky district as a provocation.
They decided to hold a political rally under the guise of a local holiday, thus avoiding the need to coordinate it with the mayor's office. The Moscow government considered these actions illegitimate, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
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This did not upset the deputies at all, most of whom represent liberal political forces. They nevertheless decided to gather the people and provoke a dispersal of the “holiday”, which surprisingly coincided with the nomination of Alexei Navalny for president.
About 500 people gathered in Lermontovsky Park in the center of Moscow, a significant part of which were journalists. The “celebration” consisted of a speech by deputy Ilya Yashin, which lasted about 20 minutes.
“The most important thing is that we didn’t ask anyone for permission, we didn’t ask for sanctions from the mayor’s office,” Yashin explained the significance of the moment.
They listened to him inattentively. The main participants in the “holiday” were young people who usually attend Navalny’s rallies. They were not interested in the problems of local self-government that Yashin spoke about. They looked at the policemen, of whom there were quite a few, and periodically shouted out hopefully: “Now the vintilovo will begin.”
But “vintilova”, that is, there were no arrests. The flow of Yashin’s words dried up, the “holiday” had to be curtailed. Out of desperation, the young people went to accompany their leader to some building with a sign saying “sales office.”
“If it weren’t for you, I would definitely have been arrested,” Yashin said at parting, either with gratitude or with annoyance.
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