Police armed with assault rifles raided the homes of Russia’s top protest leaders yesterday in an unusually blunt show of force on the eve of a mass rally against President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

The coordinated security sweep in the early hours of a public holiday targeted the homes of a new brand of young Russian politicians who analysts believe represent the biggest threat to ex-KGB spy Putin’s 12-year rule.

Some of their supporters compared the raids to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s night-time arrests of his biggest foes during the Red Terror wave of the 1930s.

And even Mr Putin’s own human rights council adviser expressed shock at what to many appeared to be a blatant and previously unseen campaign to intimidate the Kremlin’s biggest foes into submission.

“I think that from the standpoint of social harmony, modernisation and political reforms, this is the very worst that could have happened,” adviser Mikhail Fedotov told Interfax.

Washington was “deeply concerned by the apparent harassment of Russian political opposition figures on the eve of the planned demonstrations on June 12,” State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland told reporters in the US capital.

Officers beat down the doors of the increasingly popular anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny as well as media celebrity Ksenya Sobchak, a more recent Putin critic.

Others on the list included Sergei Udaltsov – an outspoken ultra-leftist who stages periodichunger strikes to protest his repeated arrests – and the far more moderate democracy campaigner Ilya Yashin.

“They are taking all the electronic devices,” Mr Navalny tweeted during the raid. “Even disks with photos of the children.”

“This recalls 1937,” campaigner Valery Borshchyov said in reference to the most infamous year of Stalin’s repression.

“In those days, they also made the arrests at night, in secret, when people were not working,” he told Interfax.

Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee said 10 raids were conducted in all as part of a probe over a May 6 demonstration “that ended in mass disturbances.”

A so-called ‘March of Millions’ that drew 20,000 people in Moscow ended in the arrest of hundreds after bloody clashes broke out between protesters and police on the eve of Mr Putin’s inauguration to a third term.

Mr Navalny and the nine others face up to 10 years in prison if they are charged and convicted of organising mass disturbances.

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