From Maidan to Triumfalnaya Square

Yesterday the Russian police cordoned off Triumfalnaya Square in downtown Moscow where the opposition tried to stage a rally of protest against the rigged Duma election The Day before yesterday. The government thus tried to avoid a re-petition of the previous day’s largest antigovernment action in the center of the capital. That time 600 protesters were arrested, among them Yabloko leader, Sergei Mitrokhin, Solidarity’s Boris Nemtsov, and Other Russia’s leader Eduard Limonov. With the start of protest rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg some experts have begun to draw parallels between Triumfalnaya Square and Kyiv’s Maidan that challenged the rigged presidential campaign in 2004, although such comparisons aren’t exactly true. The fact remains that the Maidan and Triumfalnaya Square registered different political temperatures. There is also the difference between public moods and official response.

Russian authorities and foreign observers have varying views on the protest moods in conjunction with the rigged Duma election. The Kremlin’s ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, has declared that “All attempts to rock the boat and present the [domestic political] situation in a negative, provocative view are doomed. Everything is under control. Foreign analysts, specifically, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, insist that “the result of these parliamentary elections prove that Putin and his majordomo Medvedev, along with their retinues, must realize that their project known as controlled democracy is drawing to a close.”

The Day asked Gleb PAVLOVSKY, Russia’s noted spin doctor, for comment on events in Russia in the aftermath of elections. Read the interview in the next issue of The Day.