A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered the police to break up a week-long occupy protest that spontaneously emerged on a scenic square after strongman Vladimir Putin’s swearing in for a third Kremlin term.
The city district court said it was acting on behalf of local residents who complained of too much noise. A judge ordered the authorities to immediately “liquidate” the camp and clear the area.
The small but daring action — not seen in any Russian city since Putin’s domination began in 1999 — tested the limits to which the ruling elite was willing to put up with a form with dissent now popular in much of the West.
The rallies swelled to a few thousand as people finished work but shrank to just a few dozen activists overnight.
But they comprised the many facets of an untested protest movement that arose in the wake of disputed parliamentary polls in December and is now looking for energy with Putin’s controversial mandate officially underway.
The sit-in referred to itself as “Occupy Abay” — a reference to the massive statue of the 19th century Kazakh poet Abay Kunanbayuli that sits at the top of a leafy boulevard in Moscow’s upscale Chistye Prudy district.
Its mostly younger supporters tried to get round the city’s strict and at times arbitrarily enforced rules on holding protests by calling their action a mass public “stroll”.
“The opposition refuses to end their ‘stroll’ despite the court ruling,” activist Semyon Zapolsky-Makarov wrote in an Internet chat room popular with sit-in members and their supporters. The court’s decision followed days of state television reports in which people claiming to be local residents complained of their neighbourhood going to ruin.
