Reaction to light

On the 14th of February Navalny’s team decided to organise an event of a new format – “Love is stronger than fear”. Everyone who wanted to protest police brutality and arrests of Navalny and other political prisoners was encouraged to go with lights and candles into their yards at 20:00 on Valentine’s day. It is not possible to learn how many people participated in the event, though one thing is clear – police did not detain or beat up anyone, unlike during the previous protests in January and February 2021.

Margarita Zavadskaya was interviewed about the 14th of February protest by Current Time TV (Настоящее время). Doctor Zavadskaya said that the event could be counted as successful – it allowed the neighbors to get to know each other and create the new social links together with “normalisation” of the protests, which was made safe again. This is important for future protests, and the plans of Navalny’s team to resume the mobilisation later in Spring seem plausible; however, according to Margarita, it is too early to expect that there will be large protests after the Duma elections in September 2021. It is highly unlikely that the authorities would allow prominent opposition leaders to take part in the election, and this would decrease the initiative of protesters to go to the streets against electoral fraud.

Ongoing Russian protests are inevitably compared to the Belarusian ones. Margarita Zavadskaya, however, warns not to think of them as similar phenomena – in Belarus, a much higher share of the population engaged in protest activity, and the level of protest brutality there outraged not only the opposition but also the Belarusians at large. The Belarusian regime lost its popular support, while in Russia, the status quo is still supported in general.

You can watch the full interview embedded below, 08:30-24:40: