MOSCOW: Supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny rallied across Russia on Saturday, heeding his call to pressure authorities into letting him enter the presidential race with a wave of demonstrations on President Vladimir Putin’s 65th birthday.

The rallies came as Navalny himself is serving a 20-day jail term for calling for an earlier unsanctioned protest. The largest rally in Moscow was markedly smaller compared to the previous demonstrations in the Russian capital staged by Navalny earlier this year.

Navalny’s headquarters called protests in 80 cities, and rallies numbering from a few dozen to a few hundred people were held in many regions. Most were not sanctioned by authorities, but police have refrained from breaking them up, only detaining a few people.

Several hundred protesters, most of them young, gathered on Moscow’s downtown Pushkinskaya Square, waving Russian flags and chanting “Russia will be free!” and “Let Navalny run!” Police warned them the rally wasn’t sanctioned and urged them to disperse, but let the protest continue for hours without trying to break it up.

The unusual police restraint probably reflected a desire to avoid a crackdown on Putin’s birthday.

Escorted by police, mostly teenage protesters later walked down Moscow’s Tverskaya Street toward the Kremlin, shouting “Putin, go away!” and “Future without Putin!” Police lines blocked them from approaching Red Square and they walked back.

The authorities’ decision to refrain from disbanding the Moscow rally and allow people to march with anti-Putin slogans contrasted with the response to previous Moscow rallies called by Navalny, when police detained more than 1,000 demonstrators.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2017