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Communists, labor unions march in muted May Day parades in Russia |
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May 2, 2000 MOSCOW, MAY 1 (AP) - Small parades of trade unionists and Communists marched Monday in muted and chilly May Day celebrations across the former Soviet Union, but for many people it was mainly a chance to plant vegetables.
With the favorite target of past Communist parades, former President Boris Yeltsin, in retirement, slogans tended toward demands for higher social benefits and minimum wages.
President Vladimir Putin, elected March 26, enjoys widespread support, and many Communists appear ready to work with him.
NTV television, citing police, said 15,000 people in Moscow joined a trade union march under blue union banners fluttering in a near-freezing breeze along Tverskaya Ulitsa, a main thoroughfare leading to city hall.
Separately, Communists and other left-wing groups paraded with red Soviet flags, marching past a towering statue of Lenin on Kaluga Square in central Moscow. Police put the number of Communist marchers at 7,000, Interfax reported.
The celebration of international workers' solidarity has become a pale echo of Soviet-era celebrations with their massive government-organized parades past Kremlin leaders atop Lenin's tomb on Red Square. Most Russians, who grow much of their own food, used the holiday to plant seedlings at their suburban cottages.
Trade union officials said several thousand people marched in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Vladivostok in the Far East, Novosibirsk and Yakutsk in Siberia and a half-dozen other cities, according to the Interfax news service. Marchers in the Siberian town of Kemerovo walked through a thin coating of wet snow.
Celebrations were muted in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, with leaders of left-wing parties laying flowers at a monument to Lenin.
This year May Day competed for public attention with Orthodox Easter Sunday, which fell the day before. Patriarch Alexy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated Easter week services Monday in one of the cathedrals in the Kremlin.
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