MOSCOW – From the frozen streets of Russia in the Far East and Siberia to the grand squares of Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians gathered on Saturday in support of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny at the largest nationwide showdown in years of the Kremlin and his opponents.
The demonstrations did not immediately pose a serious threat to President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise to power. But their broad scope and the remarkable defiance shown by many demonstrators signaled widespread weariness in the face of the stagnant, corruption-torn political order that Putin had been two of For decades.
The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country with eleven time zones, and they moved like a wave across the country despite a heavy police presence and a host of threatening warnings from state media to stay away.
On the island of Sakhalin, north of Japan, hundreds gathered in front of the regional government building and sang, “Putin is a thief!” The protests spread to the sub-Arctic city of Yakutsk, where it was located minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit and to rallies attended by thousands in cities across Siberia. Hours later, when night fell in Moscow, people threw the police down with snowballs and kicked a car belonging to the domestic secret service.
By late evening in Moscow, more than 3,000 people had been arrested in at least 109 cities, according to OVD-Info, an activist group that tracks arrests during protests.
Mr Navalny’s supporters claimed success and promised further protests over the coming weekend – although many directors of his regional offices had been arrested.
“If Putin believes the scariest things are behind him, he is very wrong and naive,” Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Mr. Navalny, said in a live broadcast on YouTube from an unknown location outside of Russia.
The protests came six days after Mr Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist, was arrested on a flight from Germany on arrival in Moscow, where he had been recovering for months from poisoning by a military-grade nerve agent. Western officials and Mr Navalny have described the poisoning, which took place in Siberia in August, as an assassination attempt by the Russian state. The Kremlin denies this.
Now facing years of imprisonment, Mr Navalny urged supporters across the country to take to the streets this weekend, despite officials not allowing protests. The Russians responded with the most widespread demonstrations the nation has seen since at least 2017 – tens of thousands in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and thousands in several cities in the east, including Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk and the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
“There was this heavy feeling that Russian public opinion was hardened in cement, as if it was stuck in a dead, hidden ball,” said Vyacheslav Ivanets, a lawyer in the Siberian city of Irkutsk who participated in the protests. “Now I feel like the situation has changed.”
Mr Navalny, for a long time Putin’s loudest domestic critic, has used his populist touch on social media and his humorous, harsh and simple language to distinguish himself as Russia’s only opposition leader with a following in a broad cross-section of society. His status among Putin critics continued to rise in recent months as he survived the nerve agent attack and then returned to Russia despite facing almost certain arrest.
This arrest on Sunday, the demonstrators said, helped spark pent-up dissatisfaction with Putin’s economic stagnation and widespread official corruption.
But Putin’s Kremlin has outlasted protests before – and there have been few immediate indications that this time around would be any different. Russia’s state media quickly made it clear that there was no chance the Kremlin would come under pressure and condemned the protests as a nationwide “wave of aggression” that could result in prison sentences against some participants.
“Attacking a police officer is a criminal offense,” said a state television report. “Hundreds of videos were shot. All faces are on them. “
In Washington, the State Department said Saturday that it “strongly condemns the use of tough tactics against protesters and journalists” in Russia. The Russian State Department countered by alleging that the United States helped “incite radical elements” to join the unauthorized protests and that American officials were facing “serious talk” with Russian diplomats.
Some protesters admitted that despite the importance of Saturday’s protests, it would take far more people to change course in national politics. In neighboring Belarus, many more people protested for weeks against the authoritarian President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko – a close ally of Putin – without removing him.
“I’m a little disappointed, honestly,” said Nikita Melekhin, a 21-year-old nurse in Moscow. “I expected more.”
The police presented a monumental demonstration of violence in the streets, but largely avoided large-scale violence. In Pushkin Square in central Moscow, the focal point of the rally in the capital, riot police, wielding batons, repeatedly pushed the crowd in an attempt to disperse them, but avoided the use of tear gas or other more violent methods to control the crowd .
They pre-arrested most of Mr. Navalny’s best employees and arrested his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, in a protest Saturday before releasing them hours later.
However, videos circulated on social media recorded notable clashes between protesters and police – an indication of a new fearlessness among some Russians and uncertainty about what lies ahead. Protesters were seen throwing snowballs at police on several occasions, despite prosecutors having requested years of imprisonment for people who threw objects at officers.
Singing “shame” protesters in Moscow also threw snowballs at a passing government car. After it stalled, people stormed and stepped on the car owned by the Russian secret service. The driver sustained an eye injury in the attack, state news media later reported.
The state news media reported that at least 39 Moscow police officers were injured in the events on Saturday. There were also videos of officials viciously beating and kicking individual protesters, including outside the Moscow prison where Mr Navalny was incarcerated.
The question now is whether the intensity of the clashes will continue to shake the Russians – or keep them from responding to the Navalny team’s call for more protests.
Opinion polls in recent months – of uncertain value in a country saturated with state propaganda where people are often afraid to speak up – have shown that Mr Putin is not a great challenge to his popularity from Mr Navalny, whose name has never been approved was appearing on a presidential election. Mr Putin refuses to speak his name publicly.
A November poll by the Levada Center, an independent and highly respected electoral organization, found that only 2 percent of respondents named Mr Navalny as their first choice when asked who they would vote if there were presidential elections the following Sunday. Fifty-five percent named Mr. Putin.
Even so, Mr Navalny’s dramatic return to Russia last Sunday – and his video report on Putin’s alleged secret palace, viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube – raised the opposition leader’s notoriety across the country.
“I’ve never been a big believer in Navalny, and yet I understand very well that this is a very serious situation,” said Vitaliy Blazhevich, 57, a university professor, in a telephone interview about why he was working for Mr. Navalny in Khabarovsk city on the Chinese border.
“There is always hope that something will change,” said Blazhevich.
Vasily Zimin, a 47-year-old partner in a Moscow law firm, trudged through mud and said he had come to protest the rampant corruption during Putin’s reign.
“How can you say, ‘I can’t take any more of this’ while sitting on your couch?” he said.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew E. Kramer reported from Moscow. Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed to the research.
