Moscow – Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and at least 170 other anti-Kremlin activists were detained Saturday after hundreds of riot police sealed off Moscow’s Pushkin Square and clubbed some protesters to prevent a banned opposition rally and march.
“They are seizing people everywhere, so that any group of people that looks even the least bit suspicious is immediately arrested – not just blocked, but arrested, harshly,” said Kasparov in a cellphone interview with the radio station Echo Moskvy after his arrest.
He was freed Saturday after he was fined $38 for participating in the rally.
Police earlier broke up a demonstration outside the police station where he was being held. Protesters shouting, “Freedom for political prisoners!” were kicked and clubbed by police.
At the square earlier, lines of police, including undercover officers pointing out vocal demonstrators, quickly moved in on anyone who began to chant slogans. Some elderly women, carrying flowers and copies of the Russian constitution, were knocked down or hauled away. A number of journalists were arrested, but officials said they were quickly released.
Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia, an opposition coalition that had called on supporters to assemble in Pushkin Square despite a decision by city officials to ban any gathering by the group at that location.
“The authorities are afraid of us; they are nervous,” said former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who broke with President Vladimir Putin and is a leader of the Other Russia and a potential presidential candidate. “Why can free people not walk? Why are they beaten?”
The coalition has held a series of what it calls “dissenters marches” in Russian cities in recent weeks. All have been suppressed, sometimes violently, by masses of riot police.
Kasparov and his supporters say they plan to continue to step up their protests in the next 12 months in advance of parliamentary and presidential elections. They charge that Putin has squeezed the life out of Russian democracy and plans to stage-manage the elections to prevent a free choice.
Local authorities said they did provide a permit for the group to hold a demonstration at another location.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
