Above: Moscow police try to hold the riot

Riot police arrested protesters on Monday who held an unauthorized rally against the election of Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow. Medvedev is a known protégé of President Vladimir Putin.

300 riot police wielding batons hauled protesters to their buses (see picture above) – as other protesters light flares while shouting: “Fascists! Fascists!” (see below). Protesters were clearly outnumbered in the clash as it only took a while before the police drove away with two busloads of detainees.

Below: Flares on Moscow riot

“It is my duty to come down here and express my opposition after these pre-planned and falsified elections,” says a 50 year old lady named Yelizaveta as riot police arrested other protesters around her. “Now they are dragging us away one by one.”

Some of the detained were Nikita Belykh (one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces party), and Lev Ponomaryov (a prominent human rights activist).

Russian opposition leaders could not believe that Medvedev won with a record 69.7 percent of the total 109 million votes. They called for action in the streets to protest the election.

One of them was former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who attended another rally St. Petersburg where about 2,000 activists shouted “Revolution, Revolution” and “Russia without Putin.” He was poised to run for office but in December dropped his bid saying authorities were obstructing his campaign.

“We need to ensure that this regime is recognized as illegitimate,” said Kasparov.

“The authorities have stopped paying any attention even to the formalities of democracy,” he said, confirming criticisms by international observers that the election was not fully democratic; other independent opposition candidates like himself were also barred from running.

“We think there is not freedom in this election,” said Andreas Gross of the Western monitoring group. Together with a delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, they cited media bias and the government’s failure to register some candidates as some of the faults in the recent election.

One of the critics, Andrei Buzin, said: “Russia’s new political system, born in 1989, is now in a state of degradation and has been thrown back to Soviet times. We’ve now come to a point whereby it’s not election commissions that prepare and hold elections, but the executive power, as it used to be the Communist Party in Soviet times.”

Even in St. Petersburg where the rally had official permission, opposition leaders were still detained. One of them was Maxim Reznik who headed the Yabloko opposition party in St. Petersburg.

The opposition is planning to combine in an assembly of opposition parties before Medvedev’s presidential inauguration on May 7.

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