Russians march to preserve opposition in Vladimir Putin’s stronghold

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It's 8 o'clock on a frigid Friday night, and Boris Kazadayev is guarding the row of flowers, portraits and candles that marks the spot where opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was shot dead last Feb. 27. He and four other volunteer watchmen have been here since morning, and say they'll stay until they are relieved by a night shift.

If they don't, the 73-year-old Mr. Kazadayev says "the hooligans" will come, like they have before, to try and erase all proof of what happened in this spot on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, right in front of the Kremlin walls. Several times in the last year, unknown vandals have swept up the mini-memorial on the bridge, on one occasion dumping the tributes into the Moscow River that runs underneath.

Mr. Kazadayev, a retired construction worker and a member of Mr. Nemtsov's People's Freedom Party, has no doubt that the "hooligans" are in the Kremlin's employ. "Nemtsov died because the authorities didn't need him any more. The country needed him, but the authorities didn't. He spoke too many truths."

The guarding of the bridge reflects the defensive position Russia's beleaguered opposition finds itself in across the country. Rather than taking to the campaign trail to criticize President Vladimir Putin and the governing United Russia party for leading the country into recession and wars – there are parliamentary elections later this year – Russia's dwindling band of liberals is constantly on the defensive, left trying to preserve one of the few reminders in Russia that there are some who disagree with Mr. Putin and the direction he's set for the country.

On Saturday, thousands of Muscovites – organizers hope for tens of thousands, but worry the turnout will be smaller – will march through the Russian capital, mourning Mr. Nemtsov and protesting what they see as official lack of interest in finding out why the 55-year-old former deputy prime minister was murdered.

Authorities have granted permission for the demonstration to take place near the city centre, but denied permission for the marchers to converge on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge. Some protesters say they'll try to head there anyway as soon as the officially sanctioned protest is completed, setting the stage for a potential confrontation.

"We will go with flowers after the march is over. No slogans, no flags, just with flowers," said Ilya Yashin, a prominent opposition figure who co-founded the Solidarity protest movement in 2008 along with Mr. Nemtsov and others.

The plan to proceed quietly to the bridge – which the opposition tried and failed to have renamed after the murdered politician – is an effort to avoid antagonizing a Kremlin that has shown increasing intolerance of dissent in recent years.

The official authorities may not be the biggest worry. Three of the five men charged in connection with Mr. Nemtsov's death were fighters loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of Russia's southern region of Chechnya.

The investigation never touched Mr. Kadyrov himself. But the Chechen leader has clearly taken it upon himself – with or without the Kremlin's nod – to threaten and intimidate those opposed to Mr. Putin.

Earlier this month, Mr. Kadyrov published a video on his Instagram account that appeared to show two key opposition figures, Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Kara-Murza, being watched through the scope of a sniper rifle. Mr. Kasyanov, a former prime minister and who co-led the People's Freedom Party with Mr. Nemtsov, has since been harassed at several public appearances.

When Mr. Yashin held a press conference this week to release a report linking Mr. Kadyrov to Mr. Nemtsov's murder – and warning that the Chechen leader had built a "combat-ready" private army of 30,000 men – it was interrupted by a Kadyrov supporter who threw fake U.S. dollar bills at Mr. Yashin (a reference to Mr. Kadyrov's allegation that Russia's democratic opposition are American-funded stooges). Police later tried to evacuate the hall, claiming to have received a bomb threat.

"I would say that the opposition have a feeling of being besieged," said Sergey Utkin, head of strategic assessment at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "There is no real reason [for the Kremlin] to be afraid of them, but now it looks like they are being artificially transformed into scapegoats in the public mind, so that people will have someone to blame for their troubles."

What makes the assault on the opposition peculiar, Mr. Utkin said, is how weak the country's democrats were before the recent pressure. All but one of the 450 seats in the Russian parliament, the Duma, are controlled by Kremlin-friendly parties. What independent news media still exists is kept off the airwaves in most of the country, forced to content itself with a small audience of intellectual elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Barely a word of dissent was heard as the Kremlin waded first into Ukraine's conflict – seizing the Crimean Peninsula and backing armed separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions – two years ago, before dispatching fighter jets and ground troops to Syria last fall to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Even economic recession and a weak ruble – the results of Western sanctions over Ukraine, combined with rock-bottom oil prices – have yet to dent Mr. Putin's approval ratings, which remain over 80 per cent.

Part of that has been due to the Kremlin's use of the state-controlled media to blame opposition leaders for many of Russia's troubles. Remarks Mr. Kasyanov made supporting targeted sanctions against the Russian leadership have been twisted to suggest the opposition is happy to see ordinary Russians suffer. (The most damaging sanctions are actually a countermeasure the Kremlin applied banning most Western agricultural produce, contributing to a spike in food prices in the country.)

Duma elections are due this fall, the first since hundreds of thousands of protesters, alleging that a 2011 vote had been manipulated, took to the streets in a series of demonstrations that briefly threatened Mr. Putin's grip on power. But few expect them to yield anything like political change.

The opposition "is quite depressed. [There's] not much to be happy about, and pressure is only growing. All hopes at the moment are that elections will somehow produce some breath of fresh air. But you can't be sure," said Oleg Kozlovsky, a regular participant in anti-Putin protests.

On Friday, Mr. Putin used a meeting of the country's Federal Security Service to warn that any attempts "at splitting our society" during the election period would be "quashed."

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Yashin said the opposition had to push on, if only to show they hadn't been intimidated by Mr. Nemtsov's murder.

"Nemtsov's murder was a terrorist act, a murder meant to make us scared. We must not show that we are scared," he said. "Of course, it's very difficult. We see our comrades go to prison, or close friends are killed. From year to year it gets more difficult. But it's our country and we must fight for this."