I raised my phone to take a photo as riot police suddenly began detaining protesters, but before I could get the picture a pair of thick arms grabbed me. A trooper in a black helmet and flak jacket was barrelling me toward a police van.

“I’m a foreign journalist,” I kept repeating in Russian. “Open your legs wider,” was all he said as he pushed me face-first up against the truck and started patting me down.

Thousands of people came out on Sunday afternoon to a march called by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has announced his intention to challenge the president, Vladimir Putin, in next year’s election. In Moscow and other Russian cities, they were demanding answers to Navalny’s allegations that the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, had secretly accrued an extravagant property portfolio of mansions, country estates, yachts and even an Italian vineyard with money given to him by some of Russia’s wealthiest men.

I was held for five-and-a-half hours and released, but many others weren’t so lucky. Police said 500 people were detained in Moscow, but legal watchdog OVD Info said more than 1,000 were actually taken in, and at least 120 spent the night behind bars. Navalny was sentenced on Monday to 15 days in prison.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny jailed after protests Read more

The charges against me were cancelled after the foreign ministry intervened, but hundreds of others will be forced to challenge charges against them in Russia’s often Kafkaesque court system or face fines or compulsory labour.

“We don’t believe in the justice system of our country, we think it will stand on the side of the regime and not the people, that’s one of the reasons we went out yesterday,” said freelance journalist Vlad Varga, who was detained with me. He said he and others were looking for a lawyer to fight the charges in Russian court and potentially the European court of human rights, arguing that police had abused their powers.

Moscow authorities refused to approve Sunday’s rally, yet thousands of people attended anyway. It was the biggest unsanctioned action I have seen since the 2011-12 street protest movement. The turnout had police and officials on edge.

When Navalny showed up, he was almost immediately detained and put in a police van that turned down a narrow side street. I followed hundreds of people who walked after it. “Let him out!”, “Shame!” and “Putin is a thief!” they chanted as squads of riot police shoved protesters and parked cars aside to clear a way for the van.

Once the van had gone, the bulk of the crowd trickled back to Tverskaya. I stayed to talk to one man who said the police had kicked his feet out from under him. Suddenly a nearby riot police officer yelled: “Let’s get to work,” and a group of them began grabbing people, including me.

Inside the vehicle, I showed officers my Russian foreign ministry accreditation and said I was there doing my job. When I began filming them, they seized my phone. Among the three young men and one young woman detained with me, I had seen a student, Denis Samokhalov, quietly filming events on his phone. Another man, engineer Anton Nikitin, had been lecturing a line of riot police that they were serving as cannon fodder for a corrupt regime.

Over the next two hours, the minibus drove around Tverskaya picking up more people, including a 15-year-old whose nose appeared to have been broken by what he said was a police jackboot. Varga, one of the first to land in the police van, advised the others on their legal rights as we lurched about.

Seventeen of us were taken to a police station on the outskirts of Moscow and marched into a small auditorium. I got my phone back. A long table of officers seated under a portrait of Putin whispered to each other as they struggled to fill out reports with the charges against us. “Maybe you are accused of killing Kennedy,” the lieutenant in charge told me sarcastically when I asked on what grounds they had detained an American journalist.

Some officers began making unlikely claims of incriminating evidence against us; one falsely said I had been shouting protest slogans. Like most others there, I was eventually charged with “holding an unsanctioned rally”, an administrative offence stipulating a fine or compulsory labour, and released.



I’ve witnessed many unfounded arrests and farcical trials in more than six years reporting in Russia. But I was still shocked at how roughly police detained several peaceful demonstrators and a foreign journalist in this instance, even though there was no threat of rioting or violence. The charges filed against many of us were dubious at best.

“Do you think things are changing?” my father later asked me over the phone, worried about a crackdown on the foreign press. That isn’t likely. But what Sunday’s mass arrests made clear is that after the patriotic euphoria over Crimea, the Russian government is again worried about a growing anti-corruption movement ahead of the presidential election. Many of the people arrested with me were in their late teens or 20s, a new generation of protesters.

An engineer named Albert Komissarov told me he had just been passing by when he was detained on Sunday. Next time he would come to march himself, he said: “There was excessive, unfounded violence today. The regime is trying to intimidate everyone, not just those who fight against it.”