Moscow (AFP)

The spirit of the 2018 World Cup has disappeared, bad habits have returned: faced with police "brutality" and growing pressure from the authorities, Russian football fans have displayed a rare union this weekend in protest .

In the 30th minute of each first division match, the kops of the "ultras" have emptied, they leaving the stadiums in response to the call made Friday by "Fratria", the main supporter association of the most popular club of the country, Spartak Moscow.

The electroshock is from last week. On 1 December, in the hours leading up to the most anticipated match of the season between Zenit St. Petersburg and Spartak Moscow, between 150 and 200 supporters of the Moscow club were arrested in the streets of Russia's second largest city.

"Arbitrary arrests, without explanation", denounces Fratria in a statement. If supporters of both clubs are known for their animosity and that the match was considered risky, no violent act had yet been reported.

A witness, quoted by the R-Sport news agency, said "police raids in bars, in the streets of the city, people residing in Moscow were arrested and taken to police stations where they were accused of hooliganism."

Among the arrested supporters, the leader of another group of Spartak fans was sentenced to a year and a half stadium ban for insults against Artem Dzyuba, one of the stars of Zenit St. Petersburg and the selection Russian became the pet peeve of the Moscow club.

If the Russian hooligan movement caused real street battles in the 1990s, the police have taken the phenomenon head on in recent years.

While Russian hooligans had devastated the city center of Marseille during the Euro-2016, the Kremlin wanted to "clean" its stadiums before the World Cup-2018. Successfully, since the World Cup could be held in a warm atmosphere unanimously hailed.

Today, incidents are rare in or around the stadiums and the phenomenon of "Okolo-Football", the "quasi-football" in which groups of supporters fight in small groups in isolated places, remains circumscribed. But the police pressure has not decreased.

- "Breaking point" -

"The World Cup has taken place, and the authorities have only increased the pressure on the fans by using increasingly cynical methods of repression," CSKA Moscow supporters denounced in a statement supporting Spartak's supporters.

"What happened in St. Petersburg is simply the breaking point," says AFP a manager of "Fratria" who wants to be identified by his first name, Anton: "Before that, many supporters different teams had already suffered incomprehensible acts of the police representatives ".

In July, riot police OMON had already violently attacked fans of Spartak Moscow waiting to leave the stadium, after a match in Rostov (south), images of police hitting supporters on the ground shocked in Russia. "Every fan, to varying degrees, has had a similar story this season," says Anton.

"The problem of illegal actions of the police, it was already happening at the time of the Soviet Union, when police struck 13-14 year old children", remembers Alexei, a mechanic of 40 years who participated in the action of supporters during the match of Spartak Moscow against Rostov Sunday night.

The appeal of "Fratria" received considerable resonance in Russia and was followed by all first division clubs. He has also received the support of many personalities in Russian football, such as Zenit St. Petersburg coach Sergei Semak, who said it was "a call for constructive dialogue with the authorities".

Editor of one of Russia's leading sports websites, Sports.ru, Alexander Polivanov likened the arrests of Spartak supporters to those of Egor Zhukov, a student and blogger recently sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for "extremism." ", saying the authorities were trying to" scare "to silence any potentially critical voices.

© 2019 AFP