On Tuesday, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow ruled to liquidate an opposition camp on the Chistoprudny Boulevard. The court satisfied a lawsuit of local residents, who complained that the protesters stamped out the grass lawns and are making too much noise in the evening. The human rights activists said that the police are not empowered to disperse the opposition camp for another ten days under the law, but the police have liquidated the camp by the morning on May 16.
On Tuesday, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow satisfied a lawsuit of residents on the Chistye Prudy Boulevard, demanding from the law enforcers to disperse the oppositionists there, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily reported. The federal television channels levelled a sharp criticism on the opposition camp on Tuesday. The oppositionists intend to move to another place, but they are not going to stop the protest action.
Right after the pronouncement of the court verdict another several hundreds of people came to the Chistoprudny Boulevard, the newspaper reported. The oppositionists convened an urgent assembly to discuss the actions in case of a forcible and anti-constitutional breakup of their action, as they take it. Politicians Ilya Yashin, Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomarev already promised to keep a camp in Moscow in some way at least until June 12 that is the day of a next opposition march.
The newspaper noted that a state-run federal television channel showed the opposition camp as a gathering of some suspicious people in a video report. The TV footage was criticising the daily life in the camp with the piles of sleeping bags of various colours and blankets looking like an ordinary dump site. One of the largest Russian news agencies reported that 40 people remained in the opposition camp and the latter are sleeping on the grassless ground left after the grass lawns and almost in the puddles. Meanwhile, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily reported that the situation looked quite decent in the opposition camp, the special opposition groups were cleaning up the camp and watching the order in the camp. They had to protect regularly the camp from provocateurs, who came to the camp with alcoholic drinks and have fierce verbal duels with the protesters, a member of this special group from Murmansk Yevgeny Vasilyev said. The newspaper source refuted the rumours that local residents hate the camp, “On the contrary, many people come and bring hot food and pillows with them.”
The Vechernya Moskva daily reported that permanent protesters in the camp spent the nights on the boulevard on the rugs under the blankets. They were keeping up the discipline on their own and were seeking to keep the territory clean. The camp had a feeding point, a library and had the debates, at which the poets and street musicians performed. The opposition camp banned alcoholic drinks, as well as the posters, slogans, appeals to violence and making too much noise after 23:00 Moscow time. The protesters in the camp settled minor conflicts themselves and had correct relations with the police.
The idea of the opposition camps is becoming more and more popular, the RBC daily reported. On May 12, the oppositionists staged a camp at the Moscow City Court. The second camp was deployed on Nikitskiye Vorota. The camp was formed overnight to May 15. Several activists came there from Chistye Prudy with the same demands as the participants of the liquidated camp had. The police thwarted the attempt to deploy a camp.
The opposition camps are already staged outside Moscow. The camp is located on the St. Isaac’s Square and numbers up to 300 people. About 40 activists came on the Lenin central square in Novosibirsk in solidarity with the Moscow action on Chistye Prudy.