“I’m happy that so many people came out (onto the streets) from the east (of the country) to Moscow,” Navalny said, moments before he was detained.
The Kremlin said on Friday that plans for the central Moscow protest, which the city’s authorities had rejected, were an illegal provocation.
Grigory Okhotin, one of the founders of OVD Info, a human rights organization which monitors detentions, said around 600 people had been detained in Moscow on Sunday.
Police said around 7,000-8,000 people were on Tverskaya Street and surrounding areas by mid-afternoon and put the number of detentions by late afternoon at around 500.
As evening drew in, hundreds of riot police lined up on Manezh Square at the end of Tverskaya Street and drove protesters away from the Kremlin’s walls. Some opposition supporters on Manezh Square shouted “Putin is a thief” as tourists wandered nearby.
Navalny called the protests after publishing allegations that Medvedev, the prime minister and former president, had amassed a huge fortune that far outstripped his official salary.
Medvedev’s spokeswoman called the allegations “propagandistic attacks” unworthy of detailed comment and said they amounted to pre-election posturing by Navalny.
Elsewhere, at a rally in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, a Reuters reporter saw 30 people being detained after unfurling banners reading “The prime minister should answer”.
“I’ve come out (to protest) against corruption and want the authorities to answer the accusations in the Navalny film,” 17-year-old student Denis Korneev said at the Moscow protest.
“In many countries the government would have resigned over this.”
Witnesses told Reuters that four people were also detained at a rally in Yekaterinburg in the industrial Urals region.
On Yekaterinburg’s Labour Square protesters waved posters reading “We are the authorities here” while nationalists and supporters of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party looked on.
Local media reported that large protests also took place in other cities, including St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk.
State media broadly ignored Sunday’s protests.
