Over this past month, Russia’s mass protests in support of Alexey Navalny have brought people out in over one a hundred cities across the country.
According to independent monitoring organisation OVD-Info, the total number of people detained during the first rally on 23 January was 3,770. This figure, a record in Russia’s recent history, was quickly surpassed: on 31 January, 5,600 people were detained at anti-government protests across the country. Then, on 2 February, people who came to support Navalny at Moscow City Court were also detained en masse, as well as protests later that night in Moscow and St Petersburg.
For many Russian cities, detentions and clashes with riot police are a completely new phenomenon. Yet elsewhere - for example, Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg or Khabarovsk - the actions of the police were, it seems, less than surprising given recent violent dispersions of protests by Russian law enforcement.
