Paul Goble
Staunton,
October 7 – Police in the northern capital arrested a group of activists from
the Free Ingria Civic Movement on Friday night, the latest indication that
Moscow is worried about the rise of regionalism in places many find it
difficult to imagine it exists and are adopting increasingly repressive
measures against it.
On October
5, a group of supporters of this movement which wants autonomy or more for the
historically Finnish section of the northwestern part of the Russian Federation
held a meeting to protest the illegal arrest of one of their number on
September 16. They displayed their flag and sang their national anthem.
The Russian
police swooped in, surrounded the group which included the man who had been
arrested earlier, and then as a video released by the group shows “illegally detained
more than a dozen Petersburg residents” (freeingria.org/2018/10/aktivisty-grazhdanskogo-dvizheniya-svobodnaya-ingriya-byli-zaderzhany-v-noch-na-subbotu-video/).
In this way, the Kremlin’s new man
in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Beglov, signaled that for him just as much as for
his predecessor Georgy Poltavenko, the Free Ingria movement is a problem that
he plans to address with vigor, the group says, suggesting that this shows the
authorities believe they have more support than many observers have concluded.
The Free Ingria partisans have taken
heart from another recent development.
On September 29, Alina Voronkova was crowned as Miss Finland 2018. Her father
is an ethnic Russian, something the Russian media have focused on; but her
mother is an Ingrian Finn (facebook.com/groups/freeingria.org/permalink/2239854169421265/).
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