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Mounting Discontent in Russia Spills Into Streets
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: February 12, 2005
MOSCOW, Feb. 11 - A month ago a small crowd of elderly men and women briefly blocked the highway to Moscow's main international airport to protest changes in pension benefits. It seemed insignificant then, but in retrospect it seems to have been the first stirrings of something long considered dead, or at least dormant, in Russia: the public protest.
In Beslan, relatives of those killed in the siege of Middle School No. 1 last September blocked the main highway across the North Caucasus for three days in late January to protest the pace of the government's official investigation into the terrorist attack. On the island of Sakhalin in the Far East, ecologists joined local villagers in blocking roads leading to new oil and gas projects to protest their effect on the environment and local tribal cultures.
In the last week alone, people representing liberal parties assembled near the Kremlin in Moscow to denounce the end of direct elections for governor and in St. Petersburg to protest the exclusion of political opponents from the city's official television station. On Thursday, transportation workers took to the streets in those cities, and a dozen others, to rail against the rising cost of gasoline, among other issues.
"There is calm before the storm, and it is the beginning of the storm," said Anatoly Zykov, 55, a bus driver from the Moscow region who joined some 200 others outside the government headquarters known as the White House. "God forbid there should be bloodshed, but everyone is sick and tired."
An axiom here holds that Russians are politically passive, but the protests unfolding in cities across 11 time zones is challenging that, while raising questions about public support for the country's course under President Vladimir V. Putin.
NYTimes Article
