Moscow is preparing for Maidan. More than 40 thousand men and a thousand artillery pieces in major Russian cities have been displayied to repel large-scale public events. And not to make the same mistakes of the Berkut in Ukraine. Meanwhile, a St. Petersburg court has put on trial Piotr Pavlensky.
He is an artist. He is the one who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square and has sewn his mouth to protest against the arrest of Pussy Riot. But its installation last February could cause him more pain than nails and needles. In February last year, Pavlensky set fire to a pile of tires in front of the Church of the Savior on Blood, St. Petersburg. The installation reproduced the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev in those days. Police arrested and charged him with vandalism, a crime punised up to 7 years in prison. The work of Pavlensky was called “Freedom”.
Maidanphobia
Russia is afraid of the Maidan. Well, the Kremlin fears that popular demonstrations on a large scale can jeopardize its power. There is no other reason why the Interior Ministry has to engage 40,000 servicemen – largely of internal security forces, the Vnutrennije Vojska, better known simply as VV – for 9 days in six regions of the country. This was the huge drill just ended, Zaslon-2015.
The spokesman of the internal forces, Vasily Panchenkov, clearly said it to Ria Novosti. “The operations were based on events that occurred recently in one of the neighboring countries. The goal is to protect public order and public safety, anti-terrorism and extremism. In order to create conditions close to real events, the attributes of those events were used, up to burning car ties and stones and bottles being thrown at servicemen.”
Panchenkov also said that during the exercises, the men of VV have “practice various scenarios of developments, including the use of the full arsenal of special means with which employees of the interior troops and law-enforcement bodies are equipped”.
Internal danger
The situation is paradoxical. Panchenkov clearly referred to the revolution of Euromaidan that just over a year ago led to the dismissal of Yanukovich in Ukraine, undermining a power that did appear strong until the day before. Official sources and the media controlled by the establishment in Russia have described the events as a neo-Nazi coup that led to a junta coup led by extremist parties and nationalist. Showing fear of a similar event in Russia, is like the Kremlin admitting the presence of neo-Nazi internal threat that could put the State in danger. Nothing more implausible.
But in the nerve center of Moscow is well known that Eurmaidan was primarily a popular movement that has demanded – and obtained, by force – a change at the top. After Bolotnaya, after the big march for Nemtsov, the Kremlin knows that this is not impossible. That is why the authorities are afraid of even a couple of burning tires in St. Petersburg.
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He is an artist. He is the one who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square and has sewn his mouth to protest against the arrest of Pussy Riot. But its installation last February could cause him more pain than nails and needles. In February last year, Pavlensky set fire to a pile of tires in front of the Church of the Savior on Blood, St. Petersburg. The installation reproduced the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev in those days. Police arrested and charged him with vandalism, a crime punised up to 7 years in prison. The work of Pavlensky was called “Freedom”.
