From Soviet tactics to modern Russia: December 10 and the legacy of fenced squares

The Origins of the December Rallies Tradition

On December 5, the Soviet Union celebrated Constitution Day. “Stalin’s Constitution”, adopted on December 5, 1936, and in force until 1977, formally guaranteed court transparency and the freedom of assembly. It was on this day in 1965 that the Soviet Union witnessed its first organised street protest, held at Pushkin Square in Moscow.

This rally was held in solidarity with writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been arrested for publishing their works abroad. Mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin, the author of a typewritten “civic appeal” announcing the action and distributed in Moscow universities, called it the Glasnost Rally, as the main demand was transparency in the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel.

On the evening of December 5, an estimated 50 to 80 protesters gathered at the Pushkin monument, carrying the slogan “Respect the Constitution—the basic law of the USSR.” They were met by at least as many, if not more, undercover operatives in civilian clothes.

The protest was swiftly dispersed.

In a note to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny stressed that many of the participants were “mentally ill.” Students identified at the protest were later reprimanded at Komsomol (Communist Youth League) meetings, questioned about their attitudes toward writers like Franz Kafka, and expelled “for skipping classes and poor academic performance.”

Nevertheless, a year later, dozens of people again gathered on Pushkin Square on Constitution Day. This time, they refrained from chanting slogans, and the event became known as the Silent Rally. These annual rallies on Pushkin Square developed their own traditions: at precisely 6 p.m., participants would remove their hats in memory of the victims of political repression.

In Moscow, KGB agents, police officers, and “volunteer enforcers” detained attendees by “twisting their arms, grabbing them by the hair, beating them, and dragging them to police stations.” Occasionally, as noted by the samizdat human rights bulletin Chronicle of Current Events, “outraged passersby” would intervene to protect the demonstrators.

Despite the strict censorship of the time, word about the Silent Rallies spread across the country. A preserved leaflet from the Stavropol region reads: “If you have realized your own and everyone’s lack of rights in the USSR, come to the flower garden in Pyatigorsk near the Kristall shop.”

The invention of the Fence

In 1976, the Moscow rally drew “several hundred people,” who filled much of the square. A photographer who “rode” the bronze Pushkin monument captured the scene with a flash, so “blitzes flickered over the crowd constantly.” Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, the only professional military officer among the Moscow human rights activists, “delivered a brief speech for the first time in the history of Pushkin Square rallies.”

At one point, law enforcement and vigilantes split the crowd into two groups. One of them, which included Andrei Sakharov—a nuclear physicist who had won the Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier—was “surrounded by a tight ring of operatives who began pushing, shoving, and forcing them away from the Pushkin monument toward the benches and hedges of the square.”

At 6 p.m., as protesters removed their hats, “snow mixed with mud was hurled at them.” There was no snow on the square that day; eyewitnesses claimed that vigilantes brought snow in paper bags, Chronicle of Current Events reported.

The following year, December 5 no longer served as a formal rallying date: on October 7, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR approved a new constitution, and the state holiday was moved to the corresponding date. The December rally was instead scheduled for December 10, the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sakharov supported this change.

The Chronicle wrote: “On 30 November 1977, 14 people sent a letter to the chairman of the Mossovet: ‘We inform you that the silent demonstration is postponed to Human Rights Day, i.e., December 10, at 7 p.m. We ask you to instruct the police not to allow acts of hooliganism on the square.’ ”

On the day of the rally, about 20 Moscow dissidents, identified by the KGB as organisers, were “blocked in their apartments” in the morning. Nevertheless, a similar number managed to reach Pushkin Square, where they removed their hats in an atmosphere described as “tense (with many ‘observers’) but outwardly calm.”

The following year, the authorities, convinced of the ineffectiveness of dispersals and preventive detentions, adopted a new tactic. On December 10, 1978, during the 30th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the planned protest site was preemptively fenced off.

“The Pushkin monument and the entire garden square were enclosed with a specially erected fence. In addition, a powerful compressor was placed near the monument (it ‘started working’ at about 6 p.m.). The space was filled with KGB and police officers,” reported the Chronicle of Current Events.

“The demonstration took place not in the square itself but on an adjoining section of Gorky Street, as the square was enclosed with a wooden fence ‘due to renovations.’ As became customary, the demonstrators were surrounded by police, KGB agents in plainclothes, and vigilantes,” added the West German bulletin News from the USSR, established that same year by dissident Kronid Lubarsky.

Half a century later, this simple but effective tactic was adopted by modern Russian law enforcement.

In the 2010s, portable metal barriers and municipal cleaning vehicles became fixtures in urban landscapes during protests. One striking example came on January 21, 2021, when, in anticipation of protests supporting opposition leader Alexei Navalny after his arrest upon returning to Russia, authorities shut down not only individual squares and streets but also central metro stations in major cities. Officials claimed the closures were necessary to search for “unattended items” and “fix defects.”

A review of the Chronicle of Current Events shows that many tactics and rhetorical devices used by modern Russian authorities were devised and tested by their Soviet predecessors in the 1970s. For example, refusing to approve opposition rallies on the pretext that the proposed venue is already occupied by someone else: a belly-dance competition that overlapped with a presidential campaign rally for Alexei Navalny in Samara in 2017 or a children’s circus on the same square as a protest in Chita in 2018.

The Chronicle notes that such justifications were first employed in 1979, when police dispersing a December 10 rally told detainees, “Another event is scheduled here; you’ll be informed about it tomorrow at the City Council.” By 1986, the authorities took this one step further, staging their own “event” to displace demonstrators.

“On December 10, 1986, Human Rights Day, the authorities disrupted the traditional demonstration on Moscow’s Pushkin Square,” wrote News from the USSR. “The square around the Pushkin monument was encircled by a metal fence. Half an hour before the start of the scheduled rally, at 6:30 p.m., an official anti-war demonstration with music, posters, and chanting began on the square.”

Editor: Yegor Skovoroda