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Moscow authorities approve this year’s first protest action of opposition

The march will be held on January 13 in protest against the law banning adoptions of Russian children by US families

On Wednesday the Moscow city authorities approved this year’s first street action of the opposition dubbed as The March Against Scoundrels. The march will be held on January 13 in protest against the law banning adoptions of Russian children by US families. Protesters will march along the traditional route from Pushkin Square through boulevards to Sakharov Prospect.

The march will differ from previous actions held in 2012 by its format, the Kommersant business daily wrote. “We in every possible way emphasize that this is not political, but general civil action that will put forward its concrete demand – to lift the ban on adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans,” said Sergei Davidas, a member of Solidarity party, which is included into the organizing committee. “Moreover the Opposition Coordination Council acts as one of the organizing structures.”

However, there is one more demand protesters plan to put forward and it is rather difficult to call it apolitical. “We also plan to demand dissolution of the State Duma that adopted this law,” Davidas said.

The Novye Izvestiya daily noted that the opposition plans to toughly criticize all parliamentarians, senators and the president, who adopted and signed this law and will also demand dissolution of the State Duma and the Federation Council. They believe that “in its current form the parliament simply discredits the country.”

Along with this Novaya Gazeta is now collecting on its website signatures in support of dissolution of the lower house of parliament. It has already collected 92,000 and plans to increase their number to 500,000. The idea to collect this number of signatures appeared soon after MPs ignored over 100,000 votes of Russians against the ban on adoptions that Novaya Gazeta had collected earlier.

The idea to carry posters with photos of those who voted for the anti-adoption law evoked contradictions among the action’s organizers, the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily wrote. “These are 420 MPs, 143 senators and one president,” opposition leader Boris Nemtsov wrote in his blog. “We have an idea to hold an auction to get the right to carry the portrait.”

Many opposition members found this initiative unsuccessful. “The idea of the march will be fully discredited. Instead of bringing our thought to the society we will have to make excuses and explain that organizers had no plans to tread down the portraits of Lakhova and Zheleznyak,” another opposition leader Ilya Yashin said.

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