Police in Regions will Avoid Provoking Protesters and May Even Join Them; Those in Capitals Won’t, Former Ivanovo Officer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 5 – A police lieutenant in Ivanovo Oblast was fired after he posted a video in which he expressed his support for the Navalny protesters and his opposition to the repressive moves that Moscow has ordered against them, and another policeman, this time in Kursk did the same thing and suffered the same fate.

But in reporting these developments, the Tallinn-based Region-Expert portal notes that “it is indicative that not a single representative of the Moscow or St. Petersburg police has decided to speak out in a similar way,” despite there being more police in those cities than elsewhere (region.expert/police_dissidents/).

In an interview with Radio Liberty, Sergey Rimsky, the officer from Ivanovo, explains why this is so and says that “the police could go over to the side of the people only in the regions,” something more likely to happen as demonstrations spread beyond the two capitals (svoboda.org/a/31086107.html, reposted at region.expert/police_regions/).

Rimsky says that Russia is far more diverse than Belarus and therefore expecting the police to follow one pattern is wrong. That is especially true in its non-Russian republics which may vote overwhelmingly for Putin but where, as in Ingushetia, “entire battalions” of police “have gone over to the side of the people.”

If confrontations between the powers and the people intensify, he continues, “the regions will play a veery important role.” The police in Moscow and St. Petersburg won’t go over to the people, but some police elsewhere will do what they can either to avoid engaging in hyper-repressive means or even breaking with the regime.

In Ivanovo, he says, there were Navalny protests on both January 23 and January 31, “but we did not make a single detention.” Fines were imposed on the meeting organizers, but “everything went peacefully, people came out, spent a couple of hours and dispersed. No one drove them away; the police stood on the perimeter.”

This shows that “in their majority in small cities – and we have some 400,000 residents – the police are not ready to engage in harsh actions for one simple reason: here the social links [between them and the population] are closer.” A policeman knows that if he attacks someone, that individual or his friends may come after him later.

According to Rimsky, “in Moscow there is no such feeling because there are a large number of people from elsewhere.” OMON units, for example, have a minimum of a third of their uniformed personnel from elsewhere. These people live apart from the population in barracks and do not feel themselves part of society. They are thus “’occupiers.’”

He argues that “the regions will decide everything in this country, including at the elections. We in principle have seen this in Shiyes, in Ingushetia, in Yekaterinburg and in Khabarovsk.” The police may not go over massively to the protesters even there, but they will behave differently than they do in Moscow – and that will make a big difference.

Police beyond the ring road, Rimsky concludes, “will simply occupy a neutral position and try not to interfere in all this.” That is what an increasing number of will do if the protests continue and spread.