Kremlin: Child Protesters Were Paid

Emily Tamkin
Updated
Russian officials trot out an old tactic to minimize protests

On Sunday, thousands across Russia came out to protest peacefully against corruption. Many were quite young. Over 1000 were detained. Photos showed children being dragged into police vans and brought into court.

On Tuesday, the Kremlin came up with a reason for why kids were protesting against Russian corruption: they were paid.

“We cannot respect the kind of people who knowingly mislead minors — children, in fact — with the promise of some monetary award just to make them take part in an illegal rally,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov. This was perhaps, as the Moscow Times notes, an allusion to the fact that, ahead of the protest, organizer, activist, and presidential candidate Alexei Navalny promised to win compensation from the European Court of Human Rights for those arrested during Sunday’s protest. (Navalny himself received a 15-day sentence from a Moscow court. Eleven of those working for his Anti-Corruption Foundation were jailed, too.)

But perhaps it was also Peskov’s attempt to respond to the fact that Sunday’s protests were notable for the sheer number of young people — teenagers — who came out to protest against corruption. A fifth grader even gave a speech in Moscow. Unlike their parents and grandparents, these kids didn’t live through the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or the wild west days of the 1990s. They grew up on the internet, not on state television. They did not grow up watching Putin purportedly save Russia.

And while the state may well find a new way to respond to them yet, Peskov’s response — that outside forces and finances must have been at play — is not a new tactic. It’s the same excuse the Kremlin seized on to respond to the 2011 protests against electoral fraud.

Back then, the Kremlin blamed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, Russian officials dismissed the current U.S. state department, which issued a statement urging Russia to allow peaceful protests.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he recalled the “batons and tear gas and whatever” that police in Europe and the United States wielded to tame protests. This, even though the U.S. State Department is helmed by Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson.

Photo credit: VASILY MAXIMOV/AFP/Getty Images