Opposition planned Moscow micro-Maidan in May 2012 – activist

MOSCOW. March 12 (Interfax) – The convicted Left Front activist, Konstantin Lebedev, who is serving a prison term for organizing the mass disturbances in Moscow in May 6, 2012, told Moscow City Court that he and the other co-accused, Sergei Udaltsov and Leonid Razvozzhayev – were planning to stage a “micro-Maidan.”

“We were prepared for mass disturbances because the micro-Maidan had to lead to some consequences. Tents were bought to be installed at the demonstration venue. It was a Maidan embryo. It was what later became Occupy Abai. We were planning other mass disturbances, not those which occurred there,” Lebedev told the court on Wednesday.

There were no special instructions from Georgian man Givi Targamadze, from whom, according to an eyewitness, they received $30,000 in April 2012, he added.

“There were various scenarios. The main and principal scenario on which we counted: a column of demonstrators would march for an official rally, and the rally would be over. We would refuse to break up, set up a tent camp and defend it,” Lebedev told the court on Wednesday.

“We did not organize breakthrough groups,” he said.

The tents were supposed to be delivered to the square by Anastasia Rybachenko, a defendant in the Bolotnaya Square case who has been amnestied, he said. He would not say where the tents ended up after the rally.

The rally organizers also agreed in advance that they would stage a sit-in during the May 6 demonstration in the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, Lebedev said

“Navalny, Nemtsov, Kasparov, Chirikova, they are not even the organizing committee but the people who determined the behavior of the people who gathered for the rally. These were the people who failed to accept the plan, mine and Udaltsov’s, to go for an official rally, but voted for a move towards the bridge,” Lebedev said, adding he could not recall the exact names because Udaltsov “was not particularly talkative.”

This was “the third option which was accepted not by us but by the organizing committee: to walk towards the bridge and stage a sit-in there,” of which I was informed by Udaltsov after he returned from the organizing committee meeting and spoke to some of its “top” members, he said.

“There was a complete chaos, which was organized, but each participant acted at his own discretion,” Lebedev said, describing the event in Bolotnaya Square.

I was “behind the river,” within 300-400 meters from the scene of clashes between demonstrators and police, he said.

The opposition activists are being charged with organizing mass disturbances accompanied by violence, arson, property damage, and planning to organize such disturbances. Razvozzhayev is also charged with an illegal border-crossing.

According to the inquiry, the activists accused along with Konstantin Lebedev and Targamadze organized the May 6, 2012 mass disturbances on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow.

After that, throughout 2012 they were planning further actions to organize mass disturbances elsewhere in Russia.

Lebedev was convicted of the same charges leveled against Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev and sentenced to two and a half years at a medium-security prison. He is serving his sentence at the Lefortovo prison. Lebedev pleaded guilty to all charges, his case was considered in a fast-track trial.