Aleksandr disappeared into work, and he took Boris with him. Through the rest of the smothering summer into the ruddy fall, they worked: they collected signatures, they gave interviews, they brought up the Moscow bombings whenever it was appropriate and, quite often, when it was not. Aleksandr wrote articles for The Wall Street Journal to be read only by people who already agreed with him. He spoke to crowds that were not smaller but also not discernibly larger. Putin unveiled his successor, Medvedev—a skittish-seeming man with no appreciable credentials—who immediately announced that he’d make Putin his prime minister if he were elected. The week of his coronation, he polled at 79 percent.
To the crowds, Aleksandr unveiled his best lines yet: here in Putin’s Russia, the government is reviving the idea of collective guilt for dissidence. Here in Putin’s Russia, we put people on trial in cages in the courtroom. Here in Putin’s Russia, commercial airlines are exploded for politics. Do we want four more years, at least, of Putin’s Russia? Because with Medvedev, there is no doubting that is what we will get. And the crowds said no, they didn’t want that.
At the end of November, one of the rallies got ugly, and Aleksandr was beaten by a small mob. The Kremlin sneeringly reported that he had spoken English to the reporters there. “I spoke Russian, too,” he snarled at Radio Free Europe, even though his lip still hurt when he talked too quickly. “I speak Russian quite well, in fact, and I’d be more than happy to debate Vladimir Vladimirovich on national television so that we can see who speaks it better.”
In December—after new, marginally promising poll numbers came out—he was detained by police and thrown in jail for a week. He stared out the window into a pallid block of sky. The week was not pleasant, but it was also, he knew, not representative: he emerged well fed and unharmed, and overall, it was a media coup for his side (CNN rolled old interviews, the blogosphere ignited, there were text boxes in Newsweek and Time). The week afterward his crowd was bigger than ever, and he knew that they knew that the arrest had been a miscalculation, a blunder into blowback.
It didn’t matter. In January they would not let him register—of the 2,067,211 signatures endorsing Aleksandr’s candidacy, 80,000 were deemed falsified by the authorities. Venues were canceled, permits revoked. Aleksandr withdrew, rather ceremonially, by delivering a blistering speech in blistering wind. And in March, Medvedev won with a staggeringly robust 70 percent of the vote, while Aleksandr watched the returns in a rented restaurant full of miserable people who eventually resorted to throwing things at the television, then shuffled out—depressed, drunk—into a black and snowy night.
Aleksandr stayed at the restaurant, with Elizabeta making curlicues on his shoulders, until after the staff had finished cleaning up.
Even Misha, whom he caught sneering on BBC a few days later, seemed distressed. “I’m no fan of Bezetov,” he said. “But the election was rigged. Obviously, it was rigged. There was no election here at all, so you can stop reporting on the results.”
They pulled Nikolai out of the FSB and made him minister of the interior and gave him an enormous dacha in the woods outside Moscow. Aleksandr would see him sometimes when the television was covering some event in the Duma—in the background, he could catch Nikolai’s red-raw face, his portly nest of jowls. He’d been a loyal servant to the regime. He might have been prime minister one day if he hadn’t been so unforgivably ugly.
At home, at least, there was Elizabeta—and whenever he lost his belief in the eventual arrival of unlikely events, she was there to remind him. He carried her around the apartment, and he reenacted every single inchoate gesture and emotion that had been choking him up for the past few decades. I always wanted to do this, he’d say. I always wanted to do this. They loved each other, and that was enough, although her coughing was dreadful, and there were nights when they didn’t touch each other at all and only watched old movies while Elizabeta sat sucking her oxygen through tubes. There were other nights when Aleksandr—who was not yet an old man but who would not be able to say that for long—thought about what it might have been like to have love for a youth, or for a decade, or for an entire lifetime.
His first rally after the election was in Moscow, and he thought—although he didn’t have Nina to count for him—that it was a bigger crowd than ever. Nine thousand, he figured, maybe ten. Maybe they were angrier, and maybe they were remorseful, and maybe this time they meant business. They yelled slogans. They waved flags and held posters, and some of the posters were of Aleksandr’s own crumpled and two-dimensional face. He cleared his throat to calm them down. He looked out over them, these people, his people, Russians under duress, citizens with objections. It would always be hard to believe the polling data, it would always be hard to believe the electoral returns, when all of these people kept showing up and shouting.
He pulled the microphone toward him. They quieted down, friends shushing friends, so that they could all hear what he would say. He wanted to say something spectacular. He wanted to say something that would justify all the things that required justification—a countless number, that. He wanted to say something that would strike the perfect balance of rueful cynicism and quiet, enduring hope. He wanted to say that there was no choice but to despair—and then, afterward, there was no choice but to stop despairing. He wanted to say that even if they didn’t see it in this lifetime, somebody would see it in some lifetime. He wanted to say that the historical sweep is a consolation, it has to be a consolation, we have to pretend it’s a consolation until it becomes one. He wanted to say that there is honor in being a small turn in a noble game, even if one doesn’t get to know the outcome. He wanted to say all this, but there was no way to say any of this, and there were notes to consult. He looked down. They were waiting. He looked up again.
“We have lost this round, my friends,” he said. “We have lost this game, to use a terrible chess metaphor. There was a time when I was a young man that I beat an old favorite just by letting myself imagine that I might.”
It was a weak comparison, he knew. It took more than imagination.
“Some of you might remember this,” he said, “although I expect that many of you are far too young. This was when chess was a more central pastime. This was before the Internet.”
There was light chuckling, though he’d made the joke before.
“That’s all I ask of you—it’s a modest request, after all, for an old man who has been through a lot. I don’t ask you to believe that we will win. I ask you to imagine that we might.”
And they were. He knew they were. He could feel them imagining—he could almost hear the collective crackling of their most personal wishes, and some of them were what you might expect: a girl wants her brother to return from Chechnya with his limbs and his sanity; a young man wants to vote in an election that doesn’t make him throw up afterward; an old woman wants to know what happened to her father during the Terror, and she wants a government that will tell her. Maybe some of them have more modest desires. Maybe some of them want to watch Putin handle a hostile press conference. Maybe some of them want to go abroad without being asked what their countrymen have been thinking for the past century or so. Maybe some of them want a satirical comedy program that skewers all of the politicians, makes a gleeful mockery of all of the institutions, every single night.
“Imagine that we might,” he said.
He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, and the crowd was quiet and reverential. Their flags caught the wind, and their posters fluttered away, but they didn’t stop them. In that moment, through their united imagining, he could almost see it. And who is to say they were not seeing it, too?