Anger on streets for Russia's May Day

The Australian

Jeremy Page,

Moscow

3may05

TENS of thousands of communists, trade unionists and opposition supporters marked May Day with protests over the Kremlin's moves to overhaul the Russian welfare system and tighten its grip on power.

Although it was Easter Sunday, the main festival in the Orthodox Church calendar, protesters from across the political spectrum took to the streets all over Russia in a sign of escalating civil unrest. The rallies began in the eastern port of Vladivostok - where demonstrators carried a poster saying "Oh, if only comrade Stalin were here now" - before spreading to the Siberian cities of Omsk and Krasnoyarsk.

In Moscow, 20,000 trade unionists marched to demand that the minimum wage be brought up to the cost of living. About 5000 communists with pictures of Lenin and Stalin and hammer-and-sickle banners also marched down the main avenue to the Kremlin. Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, praised Stalin for securing the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany - the 60th anniversary of which Russia will celebrate on May 9.

Most of the city centre had been closed as part of a massive security operation for the Victory Day celebrations.

Riot police fought activists from the National Bolshevik Party and the Red Youth Avant-Garde group. Sergei Udaltsov, a leader of the group, said trouble started when four members were arrested for defacing portraits of President Vladimir Putin. "Four people were detained. After this a fight broke out and they started beating old people," he told Russia's national television network NTV.

Hundreds of liberal opposition activists carrying banners saying "For Russia Without Putin" marched to Lubyanka - the infamous home of the KGB - to protest against the Kremlin's monopoly on power.

Many also carried pictures of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon expected to be jailed this month on charges of tax evasion and fraud.

"We know how to defend our motherland. We know how to defend our authority. We know how to defend our ideals," Irina Khakamada, the liberal opposition leader, told a rally, "but we still haven't learnt one thing: we still don't know how to defend ourselves."

In St Petersburg, demonstrators from the city's liberal Coalition of Citizens' Protest scuffled with police who arrested five members as they tried to enter Palace Square.

Thousands of supporters of the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party, which dominates parliament, also rallied in Moscow in an attempt to shake off its image as a Kremlin puppet.

State-controlled television dedicated much of its coverage to United Russia supporters carrying banners saying "Together We Can Defeat Corruption", "We Believe in Ourselves and in Russia" and "The Working Man Should Not Be Poor".

In eastern Germany, violence broke out between neo-Nazi demonstrators and police after dozens of people were detained in Berlin over clashes between hooligans and authorities.

The Times, AFP