Chess champ leads anti-Putin protest From correspondents in Moscow 31oct05
FORMER world chess champion Garry Kasparov yesterday accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of destroying democratic freedoms at a 500 strong rally against political repression.
"Today in Russia Putin has re-established the most horrible aspects of our past," Kasparov told the protestors gathered at the Stone of Solovki, the memorial to the victims of political repression, in Lubyanka square.
"The Government is conducting a policy aiming to destroy all democratic freedoms," Kasparov said on the day of remembrance for political prisoners of the Soviet era.
The protestors held up posters of current allegedly political prisoners including Yukos oil founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, serving eight years jail in Siberia for "tax evasion" in a trial widely seen as politically motivated.
Europe's democracy and human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe said in June that Mr Putin's parliamentary and electoral reforms would undermine democracy in Russia while local activists described them as a "constitutional coup".
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