Wisconsin Photojournalist Detained In Moscow Protests

A photojournalist from Wisconsin was detained for several hours last weekend while covering an anti-government protest in Russia. Alec Luhn, a Stroughton native and a 2010 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was covering the protest for The Guardian when he and hundreds of others were arrested or detained.

His Monday account of the protest on The Guardian website offers a chilling portrait of the risk Russian citizens take by standing up against the Kremlin. Luhn said he was pushed face-up against a truck, but others were treated more brutally in a protest where there was no threat of violence. A 15-year-old’s nose was broken by a Russian police officer’s jackboot, Luhn wrote, and another man said police had kicked his feet from under him.

The protest in Moscow was organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has said he plans to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bid for a fourth term next year. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in cities across Russia to protest high-level corruption, according to media reports.

“The treatment of peaceful protesters was shocking,” Luhn wrote for The Guardian.

At least 500 and perhaps double that number were detained, with 120 of them spending the night behind bars, Luhn said. Navalny was sentenced to 15 days in prison and fined the U.S. equivalent of $350 for resisting police orders and organizing a public gathering without a permit.

Foreign journalists aren’t typically detained in Russia, and Luhn repeatedly identified himself as such and demanded to know why he was being arrested and detained, according to a series of tweets. He was charged with holding an unsanctioned rally, an administrative violation, and released from custody after five and a half hours.

In an email to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Luhn said he was “lucky to be out.”

“The foreign ministry has told me the charges against me will be lifted, but many of the 16 others I was in a police van with are not so lucky,” he wrote in the email. “They will have to go to court and face a fine or community service. I was speaking with some of them today; they don’t expect a fair hearing despite their assertions that police abused their power.”

Luhn wrote in The Guardian post that he has “witnessed many unfounded arrests and farcical trials in more than six years reporting in Russia.”

“But I was still shocked at how roughly police detained several peaceful demonstrators and a foreign journalist in this instance, even though there was no threat of rioting or violence. The charges filed against many of us were dubious at best,” he wrote.

The director of the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism told the Journal Sentinel that Luhn “exemplifies the best of journalism, as he persistently and professionally holds the powerful accountable for their actions.”

“It took the Russians five hours, but I am glad that they finally saw the light,” Andy Hall said, calling Luhn a “courageous, hard-working journalist.”

Luhn graduated from UW-Madison with a major in journalism and mass communication, history and Russian

Police detain a protester in downtown Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 27. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)