The Russian protest movement had been transformed at the end of 2011, or so we hoped, after Duma elections that demonstrated a shocking level of fraud even for Russia. Ordinary urban Russians who had done all right under Putin and mostly kept their mouths shut could not accept this latest assault on their dignity. Everyone knew the elections were a joke, and that they had been a charade since 2000. But this time Putin’s party, United Russia, had gone too far. The blatant vote rigging pushed hundreds of thousands of Russians into the streets with a unified anti-Putin, anti-United Russia message. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
There were flags from across the political spectrum, which validated my original 2005 protest concept of accepting anyone who would march against Putin, regardless of ideology. The majority, however, had no real political affiliation at all. They were marching against corruption, against impunity, and against Putin. The mask was all the way off, and Putin made it obvious he was no longer interested in pretending to be a democrat. People were simply sick of him.
As the protests continued through December, reaching over one hundred thousand people on December 24, 2011, the protesters were also marching for a relatively new face at the front of opposition marches, Alexei Navalny. He had been arrested at an earlier march and his release was anticipated by huge crowds. In repressive regimes like that of Vladimir Putin there is a constant struggle between the dictatorship and those who oppose it to restrict, or liberate, vital information. Navalny was the vanguard of the “data dissidents.” He built a network to reveal the corruption of the Putin regime, relentlessly documenting the kleptocracy case by case, with popular outrage as the result.
Navalny’s rise to prominence in the opposition movement was no accident, however. He had worked hard for many years as an organizer and activist. Apart from his persistence and skill, Navalny also possessed the more subtle requirements for leadership in the modern age. His charisma is complemented by a sardonic sense of humor that is ideal for puncturing the propaganda of the gray and humorless Kremlin. His knack for phrasing branded Putin’s United Russia as “the Party of Crooks and Thieves” for all time.
Navalny mastered the blogging and social networks that the opposition depends on since we are banned from the mainstream media. As had already been seen in other countries, groups could organize public protests very quickly online. Of course this did not mean you would not be beaten or arrested when you showed up, as many were. I was hardly an expert on flash mobs or even Twitter back then, but I was happy to march with Navalny on several occasions and work together with him and opposition activists old and new.
Navalny and his new breed of followers were largely undeterred for over a year, and we regularly scheduled large sanctioned protests as Putin’s formal return to the presidency arrived on May 7, 2012. The refreshed opposition movement was symbolized by white ribbons, noted by Putin with his typical vulgarity: “I thought they were condoms.”
The May 6 protests in Bolotnaya Square the night before Putin’s inaugural address were the first to be interrupted with serious violence, as the police intentionally shifted the barriers to create bottlenecks and then attacked protesters who were squeezed outside of them. There were over four hundred arrests, including those of organizers Navalny, Nemtsov, and Udaltsov, and over a hundred people with serious injuries.
I was not scheduled to speak that day because the theme of the rally was to provide an opportunity to the activists and speakers who had come from all over the country to be there. And so after reaching the police cordon at around six o’clock in the evening I passed through and headed for my scheduled appearance on Echo of Moscow to discuss the protest and Putin’s return. I also had a guest in tow that day, the American political consultant Frank Luntz, who was startled to get an up-close view of Russian democracy in action. He called in to Fox News that evening with his impressions.
“The government we remember of the Soviet Union, of the 80s, appears to be back now,” Luntz said. “People are scared…. It’s frightening to think, but it was almost as though the police wanted to have this confrontation, that they wanted to send this message, 24 hours before Putin comes back into office, that dissention and disagreement is not going to be allowed. They certainly didn’t have to do it violently, they certainly did not have to attack. There was no justification whatsoever…. I marched in the entire parade and there was a gentleness, there was singing, and chants. These were docile people and they were attacked unfairly.”
I watched the entire catastrophe erupt on the live feed from the Echo of Moscow studio. I had been planning to do my spot and return to Bolotnaya to hear the speakers and meet some colleagues, but the entire square had turned into chaos by six thirty. The entire city had been turned into a fortress to prepare for Putin’s inaugural the next day and the police were obviously intending to send a message, as Luntz astutely pointed out. The tsar was back and anyone who wanted to march against him had better be prepared to have his skull cracked.
The new crackdown did not end in the streets. The regime targeted the entire Coordination Council of the opposition movement, raiding their homes and even their offices and families’ homes. Leaders were called in for interrogation over and over. Even more new anti-protest laws were passed to allow for much higher fines and up to thirty days in prison for a minor civil offense. It was not a headless movement; it required coordination and communications work to bring fifty thousand or more people to the streets. That was still plenty to put the lie to Putin’s approval ratings, but it was not enough to topple the regime. There were a few more fairly large rallies up until the May 6, 2013, Bolotnaya anniversary rally that brought tens of thousands of Muscovites out.
On July 18, 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on concocted embezzlement charges typical of the kind used to persecute opposition figures. This happened after he had registered the day before as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral race. A bizarre cat-and-mouse sequence then ensued. Navalny was shockingly released, probably for the dual purpose of avoiding making him a martyr and to add some needed quasi-legitimacy to the mayoral election. He was allowed to appear on the ballot and campaign, although of course the Kremlin candidate, incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin, had the innumerable advantages of state power and media. Another likely reason why Navalny was released and allowed to run was as a way for the Kremlin to keep the ambitious Sobyanin in his place. Without Navalny on the ballot Sobyanin’s result would have surpassed Putin’s national 63.6 percent and dwarfed Putin’s 47 percent in Moscow. It shows how subtle and dangerous modern dictatorships are that they can employ democratic structures and tools in this way.
Navalny duly finished a distant second and continued his life as a marked man with his convictions and new charges constantly hanging over his head. His last conviction, in December 2014, left Navalny under house arrest and his brother Oleg in jail, a standard hostage-taking maneuver of the KGB old school. They are both prisoners of conscience. Navalny was helping organize a new march on March 1, 2015, when our colleague Boris Nemtsov was murdered on February 27. The march was turned into a memorial parade for our friend.
It is difficult to say what could have gone differently for the public protest movement in that period. If a real revolution was to occur it needed to be early, before the regime formulated a response. Perhaps the huge demonstration on December 24, 2011, on Sakharov Avenue was the best chance if there was one. I was there with nearly every other member of the opposition and there must have been at least thirty other speakers. Navalny came tantalizingly close by saying what many of us had thought for so long: