The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

boris nemtsov had been willing this moment to come for years, but who would have known that it would come now—or what to do with it now that it had happened? People he knew well and some whom he barely knew gathered together now, at the Solidarity office, and said that they would coordinate the protests. But they were not the only ones. A few blocks away, Ilya Ponomarev, the parliament member who had come out of nowhere, held a town-meeting-style gathering to discuss the protests. Groups were popping up on Facebook and VKontakte, with thousands of people expressing their desire to protest some more. The questions were, where, when, and how, exactly?

Virtually none of the new self-identified activists knew that the authorities had long ago placed extensive restrictions on protest. Some of them, like Masha, had heard about the Marches of the Dissenters, but many more, like Seryozha, had not been paying attention at all. The permit system was just one example of the restrictions—the most pertinent one at this point. In Moscow, a permit could be obtained only within a specific time window, which in practice meant filing an application in the morning of the day twelve calendar days before the planned action. If you asked early, the application would be denied, and if you asked late, you would be told that someone already had dibs on your spot. This meant that activists had to arrive at city hall before daybreak, to ensure that they were physically the first people to walk through the door of the permits- issuing office several hours later, when the city opened for business. Then there would be negotiations with police. If the application was successful and a permit was issued, the police would erect cordons around a space large enough for the anticipated number of people and set up metal detectors at the entrance to this cordoned-off space. The organizers and the police negotiated the specifics of inspection: Would people be able to bring in plastic water bottles? What about placards on wooden planks? What about metal ones? If the applicants turned out to have underestimated the number of participants, they would face not only a fine but also problems in their relationship with the police, so important for the success of future applications.

The newbies did not know any of this and might not be prepared to understand this. They might also be unwilling to wait for a new application to go through—their desire to protest, which had come out of nowhere, might dissipate just as quickly. Nemtsov, Navalny, several other men, and a couple of women who now felt they had to harness this newfound energy gathered to discuss the predicament. There was unexpected good news: someone had already secured a permit for a protest on December 10—less than a week away. The bad news was, the permit was for three hundred people who were expected to gather in a small square across from the Bolshoi Theatre. In theory and symbolically, this was a good location: the Bolshoi was a short walk from Red Square, separated from it by an area called Revolution Square. A larger protest would fit nicely there.

The prospect of tens of thousands of protesters in Revolution Square was evidently not one Moscow authorities were willing to entertain. Nor were they willing to negotiate with the women who had secured the permit. They reached out to Nemtsov and to several other prominent men whom they believed to be associated with the protests, and proposed an alternative: Bolotnaya Square. Boloto means "swamp." The square in question used to be just that; now it was an island, separated by the Moscow River from the Kremlin on one side and by a canal from a residential neighborhood on the other. Nemtsov's apartment happened to overlook Bolotnaya Square from

across the canal. The police liked Bolotnaya for obvious reasons: it was easy to cordon off; access and egress would be naturally slowed down by the geography of the place. All the men agreed that a demonstration involving tens of thousands of people would be more orderly at Bolotnaya. They shook on it, and even shared a bottle of whiskey.²² Nemtsov was convinced that the protesters would be safe only if they complied. He wrote an appeal on his blog:

Dear friends! For me the safety and security of people are more important than Twitter and Facebook. It's not only experienced opposition activists who are planning to come to the protest but also a huge number of people who have never been to a protest before. It would be a low, provocational, and criminal thing to do, to have

them end up beaten by riot police. I could never let that happen.²³