On August 3, the gentrified streets of central Moscow were filled with angry youth protesting the removal of independent candidates from elections to the city parliament. Yet police quickly moved to break up the demonstration. When a group of protesters attempted to flee the state forces, they were forced into a cul-de-sac. Some people managed to find their way into an office building. Others defiantly stood their ground, only to be violently detained by masked cops in full riot gear.

Recent weeks have seen similar protests each Saturday in the Russian capital. Some have been “sanctioned” by the authorities and attracted large crowds. The biggest one to date, on August 10, was attended by 60,000 people. Most Saturdays, however, the protests are “unsanctioned,” and are brutally broken up the riot police and the National Guard. Though the protests are strictly peaceful, they are met with overwhelming force. The result has been about 3,000 short-term detentions, several hundred administrative arrests of up to thirty days, and thirteen people charged with taking part in “mass riots” (a crime incurring up to eight years in prison).

If Russians are sometimes imagined passive in the face of authoritarian rule, in fact clashes have spread across the country. In the northern Arkhangelsk region, locals have camped in the woods for many months protesting the construction of a landfill that would spell disaster for the local ecosystem. In Ekaterinburg, a large city in the Ural mountains, citizens succeeded in a drawn-out battle with the Russian Orthodox Church, which wanted to build a cathedral on the site currently occupied by a public park (characteristically, the Church colluded with local tycoons; the cathedral was part of a large development that included offices and luxury apartments). Tower crane operators in Kazan staged a strike over pay and safety conditions. In what became a citywide protest, they were joined by activists protesting the construction of a waste-burning plant as well as homebuyers defrauded by the local developers.