In May, the rally "Control Walk" was held for the first time in Moscow. The procession was organized by a group of writers, including Grigory Chkhartishvili (Boris Akunin), Dmitry Bykov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya and others.
At the beginning of May 2012, the writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, known to the general public under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, published an appeal for Muscovites and visitors to go on a “Control Walk” on his LiveJournal blog. According to the author of the idea, after numerous political rallies and pickets in the capital in autumn and winter, and subsequent clashes between opposition and riot police, it was necessary to establish whether citizens could move around their hometown in large numbers without fear of consequences.
Akunin-Chkhartishvili’s appeal was drawn up in a half-joking tone: everyone was invited at their own risk to join the protesters, who, “shaking from fear, ” were going to take a walk from the monument to Pushkin, located on Pushkin Square, to the monument to Abay Kunanbayev on Chistykh ponds.
Among the applicants for the "Control Walk" were mostly writers: poets Dmitry Bykov and Sergey Gandlevsky, prose writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, detective Yulia Latynina, author of Pokrovsky Gates Leonid Zorin and many others. The musicians at the rally were represented by Andrei Makarevich and Alexei Kortnev. Attended the event and a deputy of the State Duma.
According to the GUMVD of the city of Moscow, about two thousand people took part in the action. However, independent experts, in particular media correspondents covering the event, published figures several times larger than the official figures. According to the organizers of the "Control Walk", on May 13, about ten thousand people walked in the center of Moscow.
Gathering at noon on Pushkin Square, the walkers went along the Boulevard Ring, without any slogans and agitation. Car traffic on the rally route was temporarily stopped. Periodically, the protesters stopped and applauded to one of the writers who gave interviews to numerous television channels. Not a single clash with representatives of law enforcement officers during the "Walk" has occurred.
