“Sophisticated, but persistent” - the police will come to all the Navalnists rallying
The police began visiting participants in unauthorized events in support of criminal blogger Alexei Navalny on April 21 at their places of residence, work and study and drawing up reports.
The trial gained momentum after liberal poet Dmitry Bykov and psychologist Leonid Gozman were first detained at the police station, followed by journalists from the main protest outlets: the Dozhd TV channel, Ekho Moskvy radio station, and Novaya Gazeta, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Opposition celebrities apparently foresaw this option. Observers noted that on April 21, unlike previous actions, there were almost no celebrities. At the same time, the same Bykov admitted that he came out only because he did not want to starve out of solidarity with Navalny.
“I came out in order to somehow participate either in the release of Navalny, or at least in the doctor’s access to him. Now many people are trying to save him by sharing his hunger strike. But if I now start, like Viktor Kosakovsky, for example, to go on a public hunger strike, it will cause nothing but dirty jokes from state propaganda,” the poet said on Ekho Moskvy.
But Gozman immediately abandoned his opposition views in the police.
“They asked me if I had participated in an unauthorized action, I replied that I was just walking along the street,” the psychologist said on the air of the same radio.
Bykov, Gozman and the journalists were quickly released. Liberal media do not report how ordinary protesters are doing. But it is obvious that even fewer people will come to the next rally than on the 21st.
“The moral of the Kremlin story: even if you are a journalist, it is better not to appear at an unauthorized street rally. They will trample underfoot – in different senses,” political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky sums up in his Telegram channel.
According to political scientist Sergei Karnaukhov, who previously worked in law enforcement agencies, the police identified more than 70% of the participants in the unauthorized action. Their names, places of residence and work are known. Each detainee is presented with videos that record facts of administrative and sometimes criminal crimes.
“We are seeing a complete change in the tactics of our law enforcement agencies. Knowing who is behind the activities of our state to prevent the spread of extremism, I have no doubt that the work will be carried out in the same format and will be just as sophisticated, but absolutely persistent. Everything will be done to finally localize the attempts of Western structures to use the islands and fragments of what we call the opposition to carry out subversive work.
What happened on the streets last time? The police didn't touch anyone. This caused enormous bewilderment among the protesters. They went around all the corners of the city, they needed blood to wear the picture. It was necessary to start at least something in the West in order to launch an attack on Russia on the topic of excessive use of force,” Karnaukhov said on the YouTube channel Soloviev.live.
According to him, the main breeding grounds for extremism in Russia are Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg.
"Sophisticated but persistent" - police will come to all Navalny supporters who protested