The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Nemtsov and two other activists also recorded a video putting forth this position and specifying the demands of the upcoming protest at Bolotnaya Square: the release of all political prisoners— they meant the casualties of the last two protests, when nearly nine hundred people had been detained and scores of them had been sentenced to fifteen days in jail—and new elections.²⁴ Tens of thousands of people were clicking "I'm going" on the social network pages created for the protest, and the activists felt it was important that they go to the right place and make the right demands. It was for their own good.

the night before the protest at Bolotnaya, Masha was hanging out with her new friends from Starlight Diner and her childhood friend Tolya, whose family had emigrated to Canada almost twenty years before. Tolya was now a computer scientist working for a Russian company in Moscow. Everyone was planning to go to the protest the next day, and no one could understand why they were supposed to go to the island rather than Revolution Square. Consensus was, this would be a wasted opportunity: for the first and quite possibly the last time in their lives, these people, who had been weaned on profound disgust for any sort of collective action, were moved to join one. They naturally assumed this was true of all other newly minted protesters. How could they allow such a chance to be wasted by going to a place where they would be neither heard nor seen, except by one another?

Masha said that she had been reading about Occupy Wall Street, and it was obvious to her that Occupy was the right model. Go to Revolution Square, set up camp, refuse to leave. Or go to the Central Election Commission, which was just a block away from Revolution Square, and occupy that, demanding new elections. In fact, that was what the Ukrainians did in 2004, long before Occupy Wall Street, and it had worked for them.

"When I was a student at Oxford," said one of the young men, and he launched into a long description of the tactics he saw used by student activists there. "But you need a leader to follow for that."

Did they have a leader? The group began tossing names around. Nemtsov was a holdover from a previous era. Yashin was always trying to get people to take him seriously, because they did not. Another self-proclaimed leader, Sergei Udaltsov, had orthodox Soviet views and generally seemed to want to be a 1920s commissar. That left Navalny. They liked Navalny, though his nationalist views and what they called his "Komsomol ways"—including his love of chanting slogans such as "One for all and all for one"—made him less appealing. Still, they would be willing to follow him if he called them to a good protest. But Navalny was still serving his fifteen-day sentence.

"He should make a statement from jail," said someone. But it was too late for that.

"I think you should go and talk to the organizers and tell them they are wasting an opportunity," said someone. Masha realized that they were addressing her. All of them, in fact, seemed to agree that Masha would be a good person to deliver this message. But she did not know how to contact any of the organizers. So the next day they went to Bolotnaya. So did about fifty thousand other people, making it the largest Russian protest since the Soviet Union collapsed.

there was a stage, and speakers on it—apparently, people always had this at protests. Looking at them—he could not really hear them— Seryozha realized that he had been to a protest once before, more than ten years earlier. In April 2001, after almost a year of threats, police raids, and court disputes, the journalists of NTV, the independent national television channel, had been told that the company was now under the control of the state gas monopoly. They called for a protest in the street in front of the television tower, where all the broadcasters had their offices. Seryozha wound his way out there—the television tower was far from the Metro, and Seryozha had trouble navigating the buses in an unfamiliar neighborhood of Moscow. Then he stood in the pouring rain, watching his favorite television anchors, people whose faces had been on the screen as long as he had been aware of television news, come out and speak from the temporary stage. Some of them looked like they were crying, though it was hard to tell in the rain. It had seemed like the end of the world.