An Extra-Official Touch for Russia’s May Day

Tens of thousands of trade unionists, waving boughs of artificial flowers, marched to oompah music down the broad thoroughfare that leads to the Kremlin. Along the route an earsplitting female voice exclaimed, though a public address system affixed to poles, “Hail to the aviation workers of Moscow! Hail to the trade union of postal and telecommunication workers! Glory to workers’ dynasties! Hoorah!”

Though the unions invite Russia’s head of state every year, this is the first year since 1996 that the leaders have agreed to march.

All eyes were on the pair of President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, the first in a whimsical cropped trench coat one might spot in Chelsea, the second in the long black overcoat of a veteran spymaster. Cameras recorded as a gushy middle-aged woman approached them and asked for the secret to their good looks. (“You need to work more,” Mr. Putin responded, dourly.)

News agencies reported that the two men then retired to drink beer with, among others, a “lathe-turner of the sixth category.”

Many in the crowd, which the police estimated at 150,000, had been given banners trumpeting the advantages of stability, the argument at the core of Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency. One placard read, “The swamp has been drained,” a declaration of victory over opposition rallies that occurred over the winter. But people said in interviews that they simply enjoyed re-enacting a ritual from their childhood.

“I am a person from the Soviet time. That is where I am from,” said Lyudmila Pavlova, 60, with a sweet, reminiscing smile. “I was young then, and now I am not.”

There was a political purpose behind Mr. Putin’s show of workers’ solidarity. Opposition forces hope to stage another large antigovernment rally on the eve of his inauguration next week, and May Day always features a demonstration by the Communist Party, Parliament’s second-largest faction. Around 5,000 Communists had gathered in another part of the city, holding banners that read, “We will clean the Kremlin of the self-appointed” and “Elections are not a con game.”

Gennadi A. Zyuganov, who this year placed second in his fourth bid for the presidency, attacked Mr. Putin on relatively new grounds — a NATO proposal to set up a transit hub in the city of Ulyanovsk, best known as Lenin’s birthplace.

“They are dragging NATO here to the banks of the Volga, to strengthen Uncle Sam in his new military adventures,” Mr. Zyuganov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

The Communist event, too, smacked of the past. An accordion and trumpet band played the World War II-era song “Katyusha,” and somebody with a megaphone tried to strike a note of old-school solidarity with Western labor groups, yelling, “Today, the red columns of Moscow greet the workers of Europe!” Stanislav M. Rudasev, 77, a retired engineer, carried leaflets in the pocket of a tattered jacket and wore a hearing aid. He said he was so tired of seeing Mr. Putin’s face that he no longer watches television.

“It’s always the same scene at these marches. Nothing changes,” he said. “It’s all pensioners. We’re waiting for a new generation.”

A crowd of a few dozen Russian nationalists, many in black combat boots and balaclavas, had mustered in the northwest of the city, railing against Mr. Putin and the Kremlin, who they said were preventing them from establishing their own party. One man wore what appeared to be a modified Nazi uniform, with white gloves and knee-high boots.

Some yelled racist slogans targeting non-Slavic people from Russia’s North Caucasus region and Central Asia, at times calling for violence against those they claimed were occupying Russian territory. Over a megaphone, one nationalist leader looked out at columns of young people wearing medical masks and carrying the black, yellow and white imperial Russian flag, some of whom had started heckling several dark-skinned bystanders.

“Guys, ‘death to our enemies’ is too strong a slogan,” he said. “Don’t say it, do it.”