![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Twenty-eight hundred of these-in fifty-six different cities-were on Sunday, February 27th, on the seventh anniversary of the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. OVDInfo, an organization that tracks political persecution, has documented about sixty-four hundred detentions since Thursday, in more than a hundred cities. In the center of town, police buses have been parked for days, apparently on reserve in case of a larger operation. Occasionally in Moscow, you might see a clump of police officers in riot gear and a prisoner bus parked on the side of the road, its engine off-which means that the people inside are getting very cold as the bus slowly fills up. From most appearances, Moscow is a city at peace.Īnything that disrupts this appearance-whether it’s a person standing alone with a sheet of paper that says “No to War” or the small group that gathered and stood silently in Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Saturday night, or the thousands who have attended antiwar marches around the country since last Thursday, the day that Russia began its large-scale invasion of Ukraine-is intercepted by police quickly and brutally. You will not see bomb shelters in the grand Soviet-era subways, bombed-out apartment buildings, or charred tanks. Some of those restaurants have giant televisions, and you may see sports competitions, music videos, and news channels on them, but what you will not see is what dominates television screens elsewhere in the world: the images of the war in Ukraine. You will see gleaming arrays of luxury goods, messengers scurrying with cubic backpacks, and restaurants that fill up late in the day and stay full well into the night. Take a walk through Moscow these days, and you will see giant, gaudy light displays-entire galleries and faux building façades composed of light bulbs. ![]()
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