Dozens of Russian artists with brooms in hand carted their most expressive works across the boulevards of Moscow on Saturday in a show of exasperation at Vladimir Putin's return to a third Kremlin term. Several thousand Muscovites joined them in a second such intellectual walk in a week. More than 10,000 had supported a group of writers last weekend on a quiet stroll along the very same streets.
"I got a call from the authorities" with a request to cut the walk short, said organiser and former Sakharov Museum director Yury Samodurov. "But I refused," he told the Interfax news agency. Russia's nascent protest movement is busy seeking new strategies to maintain its relevance under Putin's new term while at the same time avoiding the violent confrontations with police that have estranged them from some supporters.
Putin has already shown he intends to give no quarter by naming a once-unheralded tank plant worker who threatened to beat up Moscow protesters on state TV as his official envoy to the Urals. Police for their part have been making dozens of daily detentions for most of the past week as they disperse young activists from squares and other gathering places they had been trying to use for Occupy-style sit-ins.
Some protest leaders such as the whistleblower Alexei Navalny are completing 15-day jail terms while the Kremlin-controlled parliament is planning to radically raise fines for shows of civil disobedience and unapproved rallies. The 25 or so of Moscow's more well-known contemporary artists who organised Saturday's event were careful not to mention Putin directly at any point in the past week.