From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 5/2/2006 4:33 AM
Russians march against poverty
Web posted at: 5/2/2006 2:34:31
Source ::: AFP
Russian members of the Red Youth Avant-garde (AKM) leftist organisation shout as they march in central Moscow. Tens of thousands of people marched through central Moscow to celebrate May Day.
MOSCOW: More than a million people took part in May Day demonstrations against poverty across Russia yesterday, police estimated according to the ITAR-TASS news agency, called out by pro-government unions and communists nostalgic for the old days of the Soviet Union.
In Moscow, where there was a major security presence, organisers put the number parading in bright sunshine at 60,000.
About 25,000 trade-unionists and backers of the pro-government United Russia party marched peacefully through central Moscow calling for a “social state,” holding balloons and flowers, a police spokesman, Viktor Biryukov, was quoted by ITAR-TASS as saying.
A minimum monthly salary of 1,100 rubles ($40)“is a disgrace. We must ask our government what it plans to do to remedy this situation,” Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, a United Russia supporter, told demonstrators.
“Russia is the only country in the world where those who work are poor,” declared Sergei Mironov, Speaker of the Upper House of the Russian Parliament and close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
For their part, the communists and their allies — up to 30,000 according to the organisers, 6,000 according to the police — marched to condemn the “miserable life of the workers”. Carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin, participants chanted “Putin resign!” and “Our homeland is the USSR”, and held up banners reading “Stop the Arbitrary Laws of the Oligarchs against the Workers” and “The Break-up of the USSR has Condemned the People to Poverty”.
Ivan Klyuchenko, a 17-year-old starting university this year, said: “Our industry is in ruins and wages are pitiful. A lifetime of work is not enough to buy a room in a Moscow suburb”.
“Retired people live in misery, communal charges go up all the time,” said one woman of 68 who did not give her name.
According to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov: “Soviet power is the greatest success of the workers. Today our chief aim is to re-establish the (Soviet) Union”.
Ultranationalist militants, in particular those from the Movement against Illegal Immigration, infiltrated the communist parade with calls for “Russian order or war” and “immigrants out”, according to Moscow Echo radio. Demonstrations took place in many Russian towns and cities. At Vladivostok in the Far East, some 30,000 marched in support of Putin’s “national projects” (education, health, housing and agriculture). The communists could only rally 200 sympathisers. In Khabarovsk, another major far eastern city, 25,000 turned out, in Volgograd in the south-west there were 10,000 marchers and at Gudermes in Chechnya, several thousand people demonstrated. May Day remains a popular date in the Russian calendar, recalling the massive demonstrations of the Soviet era.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World%5FNews&subsection=Rest+of+the+World&month=May2006&file=World_News2006050223431.xml
