May Day is a great holiday, and **PEACE, LABOR, MAY** are great slogans. But what constantly spoils May Day for us is the bureaucratic mugs of United Russia party members and officials, who crawl out into the streets every May 1 to pretend they are "working people." In Moscow, it is traditionally the crooks from city hall, State Duma deputies, and "leaders" of the "trade unions"—that is, the swindlers who grabbed Soviet trade-union property and have been profiting from it for years. And so those nomenklatura faces don’t have to march alone, they herd in Tajiks and Uzbeks from municipal maintenance offices, students for pay, and public-sector employees in exchange for a day off.
http://youtu.be/WNjMwkQzjZ0 They slapped on caps with party symbols (printed with public money) and stomped off down Tverskaya Street.
One of the main slogans of this year's "United Russia May Day" was: "UTILITY RATES UNDER CITIZENS' CONTROL." They might as well have written directly on the banner: Citizens of Russia, we consider you complete idiots. The United Russia mayor and the Moscow City Duma, where 32 of the 35 deputies are from United Russia, set the rates through their own tariff service—and then march in a column protesting how high those rates are. And that column was made up of employees of the municipal utility monopoly, the very organization that siphons money from those rates through inefficient spending and inflated "investment programs":
Who exactly are they appealing to?
(photos from here) And this is in Yekaterinburg:
(from here) P.S. But in St. Petersburg, there was a really good demonstration. The photos from it look quite nice:
Thanks to all the participants, and greetings to the glorious city of St. Petersburg.