Simply an excellent report from an Echo correspondent about the “Petersburg with Kadyrov” rally.
The Chechen government put out this kind of report about it:
A basic fact-check established that there was no rally at all. Neither the police, nor the district administration, nor the city administration had heard anything about it. All there is is a photo of a few people holding signs:
The author counted 16 people here; I count 18.
Fontanka writes the same thing: The Chechen authorities reported that hundreds of St. Petersburg residents took to the city’s streets on the morning of January 21 in support of Ramzan Kadyrov. Fontanka’s attempt to find any trace of a mass event has so far proved fruitless.
So this is what they meant by “the square could barely hold everyone who wanted to attend.”
And this, meanwhile, is a pro-Kadyrov rally in Yekaterinburg:
As local media report, it did not even attract the police’s attention.
In other words, the size of the rally in Grozny (where public-sector employees were herded in on a workday) was exaggerated by at least a factor of 15, while the regional rallies were simply invented.
So yes, truly a “nationwide people’s gathering.”
One very much wants to remind the pious leadership of the Chechen Republic:
As for the second man by whom you passed, whose mouth was torn to the corners, whose nostrils and eyes were ripped back to the nape of his neck, his offense was that every morning he left his home and spread lies everywhere. Hadith of Imam al-Nawawi, Riyad as-Salihin — 1546