2,000 St Petersburg Women and Men Take To Streets in Protest
In St Petersburg Saturday there were 2,000 Russian women and men protesting against the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin. They broke through police lines and blocked the main streets of the city shouting “Freedom!” and carrying orange flares.
The crowd broke up after about an hour but not after the police, dressed in riot gear and carrying truncheons, fought with the protesters and detained about 100 of them. St Petersburg authorities had forbidden the protest because of the disruption they feared it would cause.
The protesters went ahead and marched down Nevsky Prospect after going through several police lines before being stopped by a line of hundreds of police in riot gear and armored jeeps. The march was held to protest the Kremlin’s increasingly tight control of power and to show their support for fair presidential elections in 2008.
Usually anti-Kremlin protests in Russia only consist of a few hundred protesters and the police are able to contain them. St Petersburg has one of the largest opposition organizations in the country however. Overall in Russia, the anti-Kremlin opposition is the minority - most Russian women and men approve of Putin.
According to organizers of the protest, about 5,000 people participated and there were hundreds of people detained. A city police spokesman told a different story, saying two to three thousand people were involved with only several dozen detained.
