Police in Moscow Overpower Opposition Rally

Officials said 9,000 police and Interior Ministry troops were deployed at different locations across the city.

The authorities appear unwilling to allow opposition gatherings except at locations where crowds can be contained easily by large numbers of police. But at Pushkin Square on Saturday, as arrests were taking place, about 150 members of a pro-government youth group rallied with official permission inside the police cordon.

The Kremlin, in particular, appears haunted by the memory of street demonstrations in neighboring Georgia and Ukraine, where crowds grew exponentially and eventually toppled governments after fraudulent elections.

"The authorities want to scare the opposition," said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. "There are always radical activists who will go out on the street, but this show of force was psychological pressure designed for those who want to go out but are unsure and want to be safe."

Despite the attention it receives from the authorities, Kasparov's Other Russia remains a marginal group in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population either supports Putin or is indifferent to politics.

The opposition itself is divided. Some opposition figures, including leaders of the Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties, have distanced themselves from Other Russia because of the presence in it of radicals such as the National Bolsheviks.

At the sanctioned rally Saturday afternoon, the political satirist Viktor Shenderovich chided some of the young radicals in the crowd, telling them to ease up on the talk of revolution. The authorities, he said, have "an inferiority complex."

"Our job is to develop that complex," he said.