The World - News from March 13, 1989

At least 1,000 people staged an illegal protest in a Moscow square against Communist rule. Police waded into the crowd at regular intervals to take placards and pre-1917 Russian flags and whisk the more vocal demonstrators into buses. The Democratic Union, an opposition group which organized the demonstration to press for official recognition of the February, 1917, revolution, said police detained about 40 people during the banned protest. The February revolution toppled Czar Nicholas II and set up a social democratic government. It was ousted eight months later by the October revolution, which brought V. I. Lenin’s Bolsheviks to power.