Hundreds of people have been detained in Russia on the day of a “revolution” announced by a popular nationalist blogger.
Moscow police said they had detained 263 participants of an unauthorised rally on Sunday. OVD Info, a group that monitors arrests, later said at least 376 people had been detained in Moscow and 36 in other cities.
On Sunday afternoon, riot police had begun searching people near the Kremlin and putting many of them into police vans, although none of them were shouting slogans or holding signs. State news agency TASS reported that authorities had confiscated guns, knives, brass knuckles and clubs from some of those detained.
Photographs and video shared on social media showed that many of those arrested were teenagers and 20-somethings. One was seen playing Pokemon Go in a police van.
Vyacheslav Maltsev, a nationalist YouTube blogger and former member of the Saratov regional parliament, has long declared that a revolution against Vladimir Putin would start on November 5 2017. Mr Maltsev fled abroad after a criminal case for extremism was opened against him in July, and his Artpodgotovka (“Artillery bombardment”) movement was declared an extremist organisation last month.
On Friday, the Federal Security Service said it had detained members of a “conspiratorial cell” Mr Maltsev’s Artpodgotovka movement in the Moscow region who were planning to set government buildings on fire and attack police. Mr Maltsev said on Saturday more than a hundred of his followers had been rounded up around Russia.
|Also on Saturday, dozens of participants in the Russian March, an annual nationalist gathering, were detained in several cities.
Tensions have been high ahead of the centennial of the Bolshevik revolution on Tuesday, which the Kremlin has tried play down but which the communist party plans to celebrate.
Several of those detained on Sunday later told local media they were not followers of Mr Maltsev. Among them were volunteers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who has been holding campaign rallies around Russia despite being barred from running in the March presidential election. Several libertarians who had been attending a reading of texts by economist Adam Smith were also arrested.
Some of those detained said they were being charged with refusing to obey a police officer, while others were reportedly charged with assaulting police.
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