Updates on Protests in Russia

News agencies reported fewer than 100 people were detained during demonstrations around Russia on Saturday, a far smaller number than were arrested in earlier anti-Kremlin protests after last Sunday’s parliamentary election.

Protest organizers and speakers in Moscow said they would give the Russian government two weeks to satisfy their demands, which include releasing protesters arrested this week, the ouster of Vladimir Y. Churov, who runs the Central Election Commission, and a new round of parliamentary elections. Activists have promised to hold another large-scale protest on Dec. 24.

With protests winding down, The Lede is signing off for the day. Check the homepage of nytimes.com for further coverage and analysis.

At the rally in Moscow, some demonstrators noted at least one small helicopter flying overhead.

The citizen journalism site Ridus said it had been snapping photos from a remote-controlled helicopter to provide aerial photography, in what was the latest example of so-called drone journalism, a phenomenon noted by The Lede last month.

The site posted images captured by the craft from high above the crowd, which could assist those seeking to estimate the number of protesters who attended the rally. Estimates have ranged wildly from tens of thousands to more than 100,000.

(In a brief paragraph introducing its photographs, Ridus writers also said that their helicopter had been unsuccessfully fired on by “a flare gun”; that report could not be verified.)

Not to be outdone, the news agency Ria Novosti said it also deployed a remote-controlled helicopter and posted the following video of its staff operating the machine from a location near the protest:

The Russian blogger Alexey Navalny may have been in jail during the large-scale protest on Saturday that he helped to spark, but a message from him reached the crowd in Moscow anyway.

At the demonstration, the journalist and government critic Oleg Kashin read from a letter said to have been written by Mr. Navalny. As my colleague Ellen Barry reports, Mr. Navalny’s writing on Twitter and his blog helped channel the anger of many Russians after last Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

Since he was arrested at a protest on Monday night and jailed for 15 days, Mr. Navalny’s blog and Twitter account have been updated by his wife — as she explained in a post earlier this week. His letter to the protesters was published on his blog and linked to from his widely-followed Twitter account. (My colleague Robert Mackey posted video of Mr. Navalny at Monday’s protest — leading chants of “Putin’s a Thief!” and then being arrested — on The Lede on Monday night.)

Here is Mr. Navalny’s message to protesters on Saturday, translated into English by The Times:

It is easy and pleasant to struggle for one’s own rights. And it’s not at all fearful. Don’t believe all this nonsense about unavoidable disorders, fights with the police and burning cars.

Everyone has the only one and the most powerful weapon that we need: dignity, the feeling of self-respect.

It’s simply important to understand that this feeling could not be put on and put off as a velvet jacket. It cannot be turned on with a button in your kitchen full of your friends and turned off when you talk with an official, policeman or member of electoral committee.

There ARE people with dignity. There are many of them. Dozens of them are sitting on tattered mattresses next to me. And I know, thousands of them are now at the Revolution and Bolotnaya squares in Moscow and in other cities of the country.

There are no repressions or clubs. There are no detentions or arrests for 15 days. All this is rubbish. It’s impossible to beat and arrest hundreds of thousands, millions.  We have not even been intimidated, for some time we were simply convinced that the life of toads and rats, the life of speechless cattle was the only way to win stability and economic growth in reward.

The palaver wisps away and we can see that the cattle-like silence was a gift to only a fistful of swindlers and thieves who became millionaires. This pack and their media valets go on convincing us that the electoral fraud in favor of the party of swindlers and thieves is a prerequisite of availability of hot water in the tap or cheep mortgages. We have been being fed with this for 12 years. We are fed up. It’s time to shake off the torpor.

We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes and we have the power to uphold them.

All people of dignity must feel solidarity with each other. No matter where they are at the moment, out in the square, in their kitchens or in a jail cell. We feel our solidarity with you and we know that we shall triumph. It simply cannot be otherwise.

We say: One for all and all for one!

Outside of Russia demonstrators gathered on Saturday in solidarity with the protesters in Moscow.

In London, the Guardian reports that hundreds attended an anti-Putin rally. A Facebook page organizing the demonstration included pictures from the protest.

Another protest was being organized in New York for Saturday at noon outside the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side.

Small rallies under the same banner of “Fair Vote for Russia” have been held for days in several global cities and organizers have compiled photos and descriptions from the various protests on their Web site.

Here’s the state broadcaster Channel 1’s six-o’clock news report on the protests. The report, in Russian, makes no attempt to hide images of the huge crowds that gathered across the river from the Kremlin.

While there was no mention of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin in the report, the journalist calls the protests the largest in a decade and notes that many in the crowd shouted, “We need new elections.”

Another state broadcaster, NTV, also reported the protests on the evening news.

My colleague Michael Schwirtz reports from Moscow that the protest there has officially ended.

Underscoring the peaceful nature of Saturday’s protest, Russia Today, the state-financed broadcaster, said on its live blog that no emergency medical services had been called upon during the protest in Bolotnaya Square though several ambulances were on standby.

State television in Russia had avoided covering protests and accusations of election fraud throughout the week. A Tuesday report, which did not mention opposition protests but focused instead on pro-government demonstrators, spread quickly online in Russia as a prime example of what many considered blatantly slanted coverage.

But as my colleague Glenn Kates notes from Moscow, that appeared to change on Saturday as the protests wound down. He said that by 6 p.m., local time, the state broadcaster Channel 1 was showing straight-forward coverage of the protests, reporting on demonstrators anger over what they described as claims of election misconduct.

A journalist from the Moscow Times, Nikolaus von Twickel , said that small crews from the state broadcaster had covered the protests but kept a low profile to avoid any potential confrontation with the crowds.

Permission is not often granted to protest near the Kremlin. One group that took advantage of the opportunity Saturday for a rare, sanctioned public rally was Russian Civic Union, a nationalist movement.

It was a relatively small group, striking a sour note on an otherwise celebratory occasion. Several hundred young men in black balaclavas, their pant legs tucked into boots, marched under flags depicting the Russian imperial eagle.

They chanted a “A Russian government for Russians!” One flag proclaimed “We’re Russian – God is with us.”

Roman V. Chikushin, one of their number, said he was out on the streets because “The Russian people are on their knees.” He cited the influx of migrant laborers to Moscow and what he said were excessive payments to Muslim areas of the country. “We’re here to return the good name of nationalism,” he said.

The nationalists march circled the Kremlin along a route laid out by the police, then plunged into the larger crowd of mostly young, liberal
Muscovites that had gathered at a main rally to protests electoral fraud, and voice complaints about the lack of pluralism in the
political system.

“Provocateurs!” some shouted as the nationalists arrived. No large clashed broke out. The police broke up one fistfight, though it was
unclear who the four men involved were.

Fears had swirled before the event that nationalists or other fringe groups might disrupt the event, tainting the protest and perhaps
providing fodder for state television to cast aspersion on the entire gathering.

Several nationalists did ignite red and green flares, sending smoke billowing over the crowd , provoking shouts of “put those out!” by the larger, calmer main mass of protesters.

Mostly, the groups mixed peacefully. Several nationalists said they were united with the other protesters by anger of electoral fraud.
“We have a lot of differences,” with the liberal opposition, Mr. Chikushin said. “But we agree the elections were falsified.”

— Andrew Kramer in Moscow

Raw video posted by the government-financed television broadcaster Russia Today showed snow falling on the early hours of the protest as demonstrators gathered and passed peacefully through checks by security forces employing metal detectors and pat downs.

Another video, posted by the Kremlin-backed network, showed pockets of smoke rising as protesters who were described as Russian nationalists appeared to light flares in one area of the demonstration.

A video report from Euronews, which includes images of protests filing across a bridge over the Moscow River towards the start of the protests, put the number of security forces on hand at around 50,000.

Sophia Kishkovsky, a Times stringer, reported from the protest earlier in the day that local university students were leading chants of “Churov resign! Churov resign!” Vladimir Churov heads the Russian Central Election Comission and has denied claims of widespread election fraud, claiming that videos purporting to show ballot manipulation are fake.

The same students mocked the notion that the protests are being organized from abroad. “They think we can’t do anything ourselves without Americans,” said one student, Irina Zubova.

Several Times reporters and staff in Moscow are posting updates from the protests to Twitter, including my colleagues Michael Schwirtz and Glenn Kates.

Mr. Schwirtz reported that apart from pockets of nationalists, the large crowds appeared calm.

He also observed, toward the start of the protest, a wedding:

The Russian newspaper Vedemosti, a partner of the Financial Times, reported as many as 50,000 people had gathered at the rally in Moscow by the early afternoon.

There were also reports of protests in other cities around Russia, including a large-scale demonstration in St. Petersburg. Radio Free Liberty’s Russian service reported that 10,000 people participated in marches there.

A user-generated map of protests in other cities, created on a site run by Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, reported demonstrations across the country; the reports could not be independently verified.

Below is a video said to be from a rally held on Saturday in the Russian town of Voronezh, roughly 320 miles south of Moscow. It was posted by Max Zhukov, who describes himself on Twitter as a resident of the city.

Glenn Kates contributed reporting from Moscow.