Chess champion detained at Moscow march

updated 7:42 p.m. ET April 14, 2007

MOSCOW - Hundreds of demonstrators defied authorities Saturday by trying to stage an anti-government rally banned from a landmark downtown square, setting off sporadic clashes with police across Moscow and bringing a wave of arrests.

A coalition of opposition groups organized the “Dissenters March” to protest the economic and social policies of President Vladimir Putin as well as a series of Kremlin actions that critics say has stripped Russians of many political rights.

Thousands of police officers massed to keep the demonstrators off Pushkin Square, beating some protesters and detaining many others, including Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who has emerged as the most prominent leader of the opposition alliance.

Kasparov compares Russia to dictatorships
Police said 170 people had been detained but a Kasparov aide, Marina Litvinovich, said as many as 600 people were detained — although she said about half were released quickly. Kasparov, whom witnesses said was seized as he tried to lead a small group of demonstrators through lines of police ringing Pushkin Square, was freed late Saturday after he was fined $38 for participating in the rally.

“It is no longer a country ... where the government tries to pretend it is playing by the letter and spirit of the law,” Kasparov said outside the court building, appearing unfazed by his detention.

“We now stand somewhere between Belarus and Zimbabwe,” two dictatorships that have cracked down on opposition, he said.

NBC VIDEO Intimidating neighbors? April 15: Is Russia using its economic power to intimidate its neighbors? NBC’s Jim Maceda reports. Nightly News

It was the fourth time in recent months that anti-Putin demonstrations — all called Dissenters Marches — have been broken up with force or smothered by a huge police presence. Earlier protests were thwarted in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

A similar march planned for Sunday in St. Petersburg also was banned by authorities.

Turnout smaller than expected
This weekend’s marches were being closely watched as a barometer of how much of a threat, if any, opposition forces pose to the Kremlin as Russia prepares to hold parliamentary elections in December and a presidential vote next spring.

Putin, whose second and last term ends in 2008, has created an obedient parliament and his government has reasserted control over major television networks, giving little air time to critics.

TV newscasts on Saturday reported the protests, but gave as much or more time to a pro-Kremlin youth rally held near Moscow State University.

Later, police charged into a crowd of about 200 demonstrators outside the police precinct where Kasparov was being held, beating protesters with nightsticks and fists.

Kasparov and his allies mustered, by their own reckoning, about 2,000 people — far fewer than the 30,000 people who patronize the McDonald’s restaurant at Pushkin Square on an average day.

But some protesters said they were not discouraged by the small turnout or intimidated by the overwhelming force marshaled to block the rally.

Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin economics adviser who has become a Kremlin critic, pointed out that in 1968 only six people appeared in Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“This is a crime against the Russian constitution,” he said. “This country is not free anymore and the main criminal in Russia right now is the authorities.”

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