KHABAROVSK, Russia – Observing the masses of protesters who passed by singing “Freedom!” and “Putin quits!” As the passing drivers honked, applauded and offered shocks to those five, a sidewalk vendor selling small cucumbers and plastic cups of forest raspberries said she would also join in, if she didn’t have to work.
“There will be a revolution,” predicted the seller, Irina Lukasheva, 56. “What did our grandparents fight for? Not because of poverty or because of the oligarchs sitting there in the Kremlin. “
The protests in Khabarovsk, a city 4,000 miles east of Moscow, drew tens of thousands of people to a three-mile march through central streets for the third week in a row on Saturday. Residents demonstrated in support of an arrested and energetic popular governor in Moscow this month, but his remarkable torrent of anger, which has few precedents in post-Soviet Russia, has become a clear testimony to the discontent facing President Vladimir V. Putin. the country.
Putin won a strictly written referendum less than four weeks ago that rewrote the Constitution to allow him to remain in office until 2036. But the vote, seen as fraudulent by critics and many analysts, provided little more than a fig leaf for public disenchantment. With Corruption, stifled freedoms and stagnant incomes worsened by the pandemic.
“When a person lives without knowing how things are supposed to be, they think things are fine,” said Artyom Aksyonov, 31, who is in the transportation business and was delivering water from the trunk of his car. protesters under the oven. Sun in Lenin Square, on the protest route. “But when you open your eyes to the truth, you realize that things were not right. This was all an illusion.
Across Russia, fear of being stopped by the police and seeming hopelessness to effect change have kept people off the streets. Many Russians also say that regardless of Mr. Putin’s failures, the alternative could be worse or lead to further chaos. For the most part, protests against the Kremlin have been limited to a few thousand people in Moscow and other major cities, where authorities often crack down.
Partly as a result, Mr. Putin remains firmly in control. And independent polls show that it still enjoys a 60 percent approval rating, although the figure has been declining.
But events in Khabarovsk have shown that discontent is such that minor events can ignite a firestorm. The weekend crowds have been so large that the police have not tried to control them, even though the protesters did not have a permit, let alone a clear leader or organizer.
And with Russians massively switching from government-controlled television to the largely uncensored Internet to get their news, the state can easily lose its grip on the narrative.
Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 inhabitants near the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Chinese border, had not seen major protests since the early 1990s. That changed after July 9, when a SWAT team pulled the governor, Sergei I. Furgal, out of his car and took him to Moscow on 15-year-old murder charges.
Khabarovsk’s social media forums erupted in outrage over an arrest that seemed like a Kremlin move to remove a beloved young politician who had upset a Putin’s ally in the 2018 regional elections.
Tens of thousands of people spontaneously hit the streets on July 11 when residents called online protests, and reappeared in greater numbers on July 18. Small-scale marches through the city continued daily.
Russian journalists who have been following the protests from the beginning said Saturday’s crowds were the largest so far. Opposition activists estimated that they had turned out between 50,000 and 100,000. City officials said about 6,500 people had attended, clearly an insufficient count.
As they did on the previous weekends, the protesters gathered in Lenin’s central square next to the regional government headquarters. They marched down a main street, blocked traffic, and made a three-mile drive through the city center before returning to the plaza. Police officers casually walked down the sidewalk, without interfering.
The crowd, some of whom wore facial masks named after Mr. Furgal, looked like a cross section of the city, including working-class and middle-class residents, pensioners, and youth. The most concrete demand in their chants was that Mr. Furgal face trial in Khabarovsk instead of Moscow, but they did not shy away from challenging Mr. Putin directly. They shouted “Shame on the Kremlin!”, “Russia, wake up!” and “We are the ones in power!”
Last Monday, Putin appointed a 39-year-old politician from outside the region, Mikhail V. Degtyarev, as the acting governor of the Khabarovsk region, further infuriating residents. When asked if he would meet the protesters, Degtyarev told reporters that he had better things to do than talk to people “yelling out of the windows.”
The Kremlin seems determined to wait for the protests. Regional authorities have warned they could worsen the spread of the pandemic, announcing a sharp rise in coronavirus infections on Saturday and noting that medical equipment and staff had arrived from Moscow to help local hospitals.
One of the protesters, Vadim Serzhantov, a 35-year-old railway company employee, said he had had little interest in politics until recently. Mr. Furgal’s arrest, whom residents praise for populist movements such as reducing officials’ benefits, was a turning point, Serzhantov said.
“To be honest, I didn’t care at all,” said Serzhantov. “But this is illegal.”
