The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Since then, one of the anchors had demonstratively quit journalism to take up the traditional dissident occupation of stove- stoker, another had moved to Ukraine and had his own show there, but the rest of those journalists had found some accommodation within the new, entirely state-controlled television world. Some were enthusiastically stumping for Putin, while others confined themselves to culture and apparently innocuous social issues. The city had built a monorail road to the television tower. And Seryozha forgot about that protest. If someone had asked him, the day before he went to Bolotnaya Square, whether he had ever been to a protest, he would have been adamant that he had not. He would have said, in fact, that up until a few months ago, when he first learned of the Makarov case, he had had no argument with the regime.

Now someone very loud on or near the stage began shouting, "Down with Putin!" A few hundred people picked up the chant. Seryozha did not. Something about it made him uncomfortable. He had not come here to bring down Putin. He did not want to think of himself as a revolutionary—to his grandfather, that had been a dirty word. All that had gone wrong, Alexander Nikolaevich believed, had been the result of drastic action taken without forethought. Good change could be only gradual and intentional. Also, Seryozha did not want to chant. Chanting put one in mind of either Communist-era parades, which Seryozha remembered, or perhaps felt like he remembered, or of the Kremlin youth movements, which sought ecstasy in unity and aggression. Seryozha did not want ecstasy. He wanted to register his existence as someone separate and different from the state. For this purpose, he wore a white ribbon. Somehow, over the last few days, white had become the color of this protest. It was a symbol like Ukraine's orange, but also its opposite. White was pure, it was nonaggressive, and it was every color. It was important to Seryozha and to the people he was now meeting here that this was not a protest of any political party or movement. They preferred to think of it as not being political at all.

alexandre bikbov, the sociologist who had been providing an educational alternative for students of Moscow State University's sociology department, now turned his seminar into a mobile survey unit. Their goal was to ask people what they were doing, and why, while they were doing it. Both the Kremlin and the media in Russia and abroad quickly accepted the understanding that the protesters were members of the middle class who opposed Putin. One commonly used phrase was "angry city dwellers," where "city dweller" implied affluence and youth. The Levada Center conducted surveys that showed that the protesters were not in fact predominantly affluent—they included some poor people, many people of moderate means, and some rich people. Nor were they predominantly young: just slightly more than half were under forty, but 22 percent were older than fifty-five.²⁵

Bikbov found that they were also not particularly angry. They liked to joke, and they loved a good funny banner, like i didn't vote for these assholes, i voted for the other assholes, the runaway favorite among the many visual and textual gags held up on handwritten placards at Bolotnaya. The humor,

Bikbov concluded, served a dual purpose. On the one hand, it defused the feeling of having been violated: one is less of a victim if one can laugh about it. It also signaled that the protesters were not dangerous. Revolutionaries do not kid around. By cracking jokes the protesters shifted their focus from the Kremlin to one another. The protest seemed like a contest in which like-minded people looked for the wittiest person among them.²⁶

Afterward, participants combed social networks to see if their particular placard had become an audience favorite.

"White, the color of our protest, is a good symbol," wrote Nemtsov in a euphoric blog post on December 10. "It means that protest participants can harbor no 'dark' thoughts." The blog post began with the words, "I am happy. The 10th of December, 2011, will go down in history as the day of resurrection of civic dignity and civil society. After ten years of hibernation, Moscow and all of Russia have awakened."²⁷

It was all of Russia indeed. On or around the same day, nearly a hundred Russian cities and towns—which is to say, all of Russia's cities and towns—saw protest rallies, demonstrations, or marches. In several places, the relative number of participants—the percentage of a town's population that came out to protest—far exceeded that of Moscow.