An army of police stormed the bar area in the center of Moscow this Saturday night and arbitrarily arrested more than a hundred people, men and women. The Ostorozhno Novosti news channel and other Russian media report that around 200 detainees, including some teenagers, have ended up in police stations.
It is not the first time: this raid, although massive, is a new chapter in the wave of arrests undertaken for months against boys and girls who do not comply with the Kremlin's traditionalist canons. That is, young people whose appearance, way of life or gender expression clash with the conservative values of the Russian power.
The Ministry of the Interior has called these actions “prophylactic measures,” although its agents are not only investigating the illegal sale of alcohol to minors: the authorities have pressured the detainees to sign a contract with the army and march to fight Ukraine, Ostorozhno Novosti and other Russian media have reported, as well as the NGO Idite Lesom, a Russian anti-war organization that helps prevent recruitment and participation in the war in Ukraine.
The Ostorozhno Nóvosti channel, directed by the daughter of Putin's political godfather, Ksenia Sobchak, has reported that an army of agents, accompanied by more than a dozen police vans, stormed the place this Saturday and their troops detained so many young people that "it was difficult to breathe inside the vehicles."
“They arrested everyone who was on the street,” the parents of some of those arrested reported to the Sobchak channel. “They were beaten inside the vans and subjected to electric shocks with Taser guns,” they added. Other witnesses have reported that the agents took their phones and photographed their faces and passports in the street.
The detainees have been taken to various police stations, where some have been given notifications to complete their mandatory military service, the mili. Other adults have been offered a contract with the Ministry of Defense to fight in Ukraine, a country invaded by Russia. The Russian media does not know if anyone has accepted.
The NGO Idite Lesom [Flee to the forest, in Russian] has shown the notifications photographed by some of the detainees. One, 18 years old, reports that he has health problems and will not have time to take an alternative civil medical examination to avoid the military. Another protests that he was given a citation that does not appear in any electronic record even though he extended his military service to finish his graduate studies.
Russian authorities have not clarified how many people the police have detained and have only generically summarized the pretexts for the arrests. “The agents carried out preventive operations in the city center with the aim of maintaining public order and preventing and repressing administrative infractions, including those related to the consumption of alcohol in public,” states the statement from the Ministry of the Interior.
In addition to the suspicious irregularity of these so-called “preventive operations”, it is very rare to see a bottle on the streets of Kitai-Gorod. All establishments have security guards at their doors who not only very strictly prevent drinks from being taken outside, but also veto, sometimes completely arbitrarily, access to the interior.
This mass arrest is part of a Kremlin campaign against Russian youth that goes beyond its standards. In summer, a channel close to the security forces, Baza, and other media close to power began to broadcast information that in the central neighborhood of Kitái-Górod there were “massive fights,” eight-year-old children drinking vodka, and daily neighborhood complaints, although the bar area remained just as quiet. The police presence intensified and the arrest of young people who were dressed “non-formally” began, according to the definition of the authorities themselves. That is, they wore alternative clothing, they dyed their hair colors or, in the case of men, they had long hair.
This persecution is part of the Kremlin's ideological campaign against everything it considers “non-traditional” to differentiate itself from the West, with which it claims to support a hidden war in pursuit of “traditional values.”
Precisely, Sobchak was one of the protagonists of a turning point in this crusade. The daughter of Putin's political mentor and also the mayor of Saint Petersburg, Anatoli Sobchak, participated in a private party for the Russian elite called Almost Naked at the end of 2023. The leak of photos of her scantily clad attendees sparked the outrage of Russian ultranationalism in the middle of the war.
The Kremlin then intensified an arbitrary persecution of everything it considers “informal.” It started with LGTBIQ and swinging parties until it came to persecute alternative young people and Halloween this year: last Sunday, November 1, the police fined people for being in costume. The reason is that Putin's justice has declared any symbol that he considers part of a supposed "international satanic movement" extremist, which includes, in theory, even the covers of some rock groups.
