Russians protest from Moscow to Vladivostok

People across Russia turned out to protest against the government’s response to the country’s economic crisis on Saturday. And while the protestors were few in number in relation to the size of the country (a few thousand people in a land of more than 140 million), the fact that there were protests at all is noteworthy since the Kremlin has actively tried to put a lid on public rallies that they don't approve of in advance.

Moscow saw the bulk of the action with several protests going on at once - one led by chess master-turned political activist Garry Kasparov was attacked by a group of unknown masked men wielding clubs, the National Bolshevik Party (an organization banned by the Russian government for alleged ties to extremist groups) met a more formal response with a number of their members getting arrested by riot police before their rally really got started. Not to be outdone, the Communists gathered about 1,000 people to hear party leader Gennady Zyuganov call for an end of capitalism in Russia; while 5-8,000 mostly young people gathered outside the Kremlin in a government-approved counter-rally in favor of Putin and Medvedev's actions in response to the crisis.

Eleven time zones to the east, several thousand people braved blustery winter cold to rally against the Putin/Medvedev government in the port city of Vladivostok. This isn’t the first time the citizens of Vladivostok have taken to the streets recently. Prime Minister Putin’s plan to save Russian auto manufacturers by putting a hefty tariff on cars imported from abroad hit Vladivostok especially hard - the city has a thriving cottage industry in shipping in used cars from Japan. Used imports are popular with Russia’s emerging middle class who can't afford high-priced luxury models like Audis and Mercedes, but regard the domestic offerings as sub-par. Since the tariff went into effect in the middle of January, Vladivostok has seen a 95% drop in the number of cars coming in from Japan. A group of 2,000 people marched through Vladivostok, calling for Putin and Medvedev to step down.

But according to the UK's Sunday Telegraph newspaper there are signs more ominous than a few thousand protestors coming out of Vladivostok. The Telegraph reports that in December two senior officials in Vladivostok defied an order from the Kremlin to send riot police to break up an earlier peaceful protest against the car tariff. When Putin ordered the official in charge of the security forces, Maj. Gen. Andrei Nikolayev to be removed from office, he refused to go. Medvedev, the president, backed Nikolayev’s decision to stay at his post. So Putin was apparently defied not only by a senior government official, Nikolayev, but also his supposed partner in running Russia (the Telegraph claims that Medvedev’s wife, Svetlana, has been pushing him to use the economic crisis as a front for putting some political distance between himself and his mentor, Putin, who has taken personal responsibility for leading Russia out of the crisis).

So it all makes for some interesting subtexts to a collection of relatively small protests, Saturday's “Day of Dissent” had been planned by a collection of opposition groups several weeks in advance, so its not quite the same as people spontaneously taking to the streets. But it is a rare show of public anger with the government, something that has been largely absent in the past few years. It's important to note that recent polls still had more than 80% of Russians saying they support Putin and the government's economic policies. But Russia is suffering from the global economic crunch just like much of the rest of the world. And with unemployment and inflation rising in Russia, but world oil prices (the main engine of the Russian economy) not, the chances are good that the public’s dissatisfaction will grow. And the public at-large isn’t likely to be happy with the Kremlin’s choice of approved dissident groups - which we can assume is the Communist Party, since their rally was allowed to go on while Kasparov's Another Russia and the National Bolshevik Party’s were interrupted by either the police or mysterious groups of masked men. The Communists are a safe opposition front for the Kremlin since their support tends to hover around 10% in national elections, and many of their members are older people who have been with the party since Soviet times.

Saturday’s Day of Dissent likely won’t be the last for Russia in the near future. How the government responds to future actions will be key to how the country manages to weather the crisis. And if the Telegraph is right that there is a split brewing between Medvedev and Putin, then things could get really interesting...