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Protests in Instagram
Max Streltsov
It began peacefully with a marching band and Muscovites waving placards lampooning Mr. Putin and his government. But the situation became chaotic when protesters tried to break through a column of riot police officers.
The result was a prolonged confrontation. The police in full riot gear charged into the crowd, dragging out people they suspected of pelting them with bottles and chunks of asphalt, and beating some brutally with nightsticks. On the other bank of the river, a large crowd cheered when protesters snatched helmets from officers and threw them into the water, and chanted, “Shame, shame, shame.”
Since Monday, the police have been arresting any people they think even remotely resemble antigovernment demonstrators, sometimes just because they are wearing white ribbons or even white T-shirts. In response, protesters in Moscow have adopted new tactics, “dilemma protests” and flash mobs, to avoid the mass arrests.
In Moscow, protesters following Aleksei Navalny, the anticorruption activist, have sat in parks, sung in public or simply walked in groups. Typically, Mr. Navalny posts his location from an iPhone, and invariably hundreds of Muscovites show up to join him. When Navalny clambered onto the pedestal of a monument in a park as a makeshift podium, the topic was not politics.
He roused the crowd with this peculiar rallying cry: “We are just going for a walk!”
On Wednesday, a court sentenced Alexei Navalny and another protest leader, Sergei Udaltsov, to 15 days in jail for disobeying a police order.