Putin Supporters to Hold 'Anti-Revolution' Rally
Supporters of Vladimir Putin Tuesday called on people to attend a "counter-revolutionary" rally in Moscow on the same day as Russia's opposition holds its third mass protest in the Russian capital.
Organizers called on "anti-Orangist forces" to mount a show of strength against Saturday's opposition rally, in a reference to Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution that ousted its old order from power and infuriated the Kremlin.
Their website anti-orange.ru. features little information beyond a YouTube clip that warns against a "bloodbath" triggered by opposition rallies.
"The United States has long used the 'Orange overthrow' scheme, paying discontented protestors money," the clip says, featuring footage from war-torn Libya and the Orange Revolution uprising.
One of the organizers of the pro-Putin rally, veterans group Heroes' Fund, expects up to 80,000 people to turn out, according to its chairman Vyacheslav Sivko.
The opposition hopes to attract similar numbers to its rally on the same day.
"We are against civil war, we are for stability," he said.
"What is happening now does not benefit the people, it's only a struggle for power," he said of two massive demonstrations in Moscow in December against Putin's monopoly on power ahead of his candidacy for a third term in the Kremlin.
The rally's symbol -- a man's fist strangling an orange snake -- was immediately recognized by bloggers as a copy of Stalin-era propaganda posters that called on Soviet citizens to report supposed spies in the 1930s.
Russian media reported earlier this week that newspapers in the Moscow region received instructions from the regional government on how to report on pro-Putin rallies, namely to show "happy faces, mothers with children" and avoid any mention of Putin's party United Russia.
Despite the attempt to distance the rally from United Russia or Putin himself, some of the groups listed as organizers have a connection to the authorities.
"Our superiors advised that we send people to this rally -- that would be 100 to 200 people," said Mikhail Kolchev, head of the Moscow branch of the Congress of Russian Societies, one of the listed organizers.
The Congress of Russian Societies is chaired by a parliament member in United Russia. It is a former party of current deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin.
Source: Agence France Presse
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