The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In his blog post, Nemtsov announced that the protesters had "unanimously adopted" a list of demands. There had been no vote at Bolotnaya, and most of the participants could not hear the speakers, but the last time Nemtsov had attended a protest this large—over twenty years ago—there had been lists and demands. That seemed to be the way these things worked. There were six demands. One was to release "all political prisoners," meaning the people arrested at last week's protests, and five concerned the parliamentary elections— annul the results; fire the chairman of the Election Commission; investigate reports of vote-rigging; allow opposition parties on the ballot; and hold new, open, and fair elections. Putin's resignation was not on the list, nor did the list include any mention of the upcoming presidential election. The demands did not explicitly include Mikhail

Khodorkovsky, who had been in jail for eight years, or Vladimir Makarov, unknown to most of the protesters. The demands made no mention of the killings of opposition journalists, or of media freedom at all. The demands were intentionally minimal, apparently easy to carry out. They were modeled on the logic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gorbachev's Politburo, weak and uncertain, might have been open to compromise and reason. The Communist parties of the Soviet Union's satellite countries had sat down to negotiate with protesters in response to similar kinds of demands during the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. To Nemtsov and his co-organizers, Putin's government seemed, suddenly, to be in the same sort of teetering state as those governments had been.

"Suddenly" was the operative word. Then again, those old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Union remembered that the regime had seemed eternal until one day it did not. But what had happened now? Why had people taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, people of different ages and income levels, all over the country? Social scientists who wrote about the protests invariably used the word "mystery."

A Russian-born, Western-educated German sociologist undertook probably the most thorough attempt to crack the mystery. Mischa Gabowitsch based his study on interviews with dozens of protesters all over the country as well as on a close examination of the posters, slogans, and forms of protest. His evidence debunked the idea that this was a middle-class protest or even a protest primarily driven by middle-class values such as the desire to protect private property and receive good government services in exchange for one's tax rubles. Gabowitsch concluded that the critique of corruption, and especially Navalny's narration of it, created the preconditions for protest. Navalny's term "Party of Crooks and Thieves" supplied the language. Protesters talked about many things being stolen from them—not only money and government services but also votes. Nemtsov put a number on it: he claimed that thirteen million votes had gone missing. The most blatant vote-fix of them all—Medvedev's handover of power to Putin—could also be framed as a manifestation of corruption.

At the same time, noted Gabowitsch, seeing the protests as solely a reaction to witnessing the blatant fraud in the parliamentary election would be wrong.

Compared with the reforms of electoral law and the elimination, intimidation and pre-selection of opposition candidates, the vote- rigging on election day itself may not be a trifle, but they are no more than the last cog in the power vertical's steering mechanism. This distinguishes the situation in Russia in December 2011 from that in Serbia in 2000, in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2004 or in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. There electoral manipulation had been the decisive tool to prevent the victory of a candidate who was popular or at least supported by a broad coalition. In Russia, by contrast, the preceding reforms had made the emergence of such a candidate or coalition unlikely. Why, nevertheless, was it a rigged election that

led to spontaneous mass protest in Russia?²⁸

He suggested that part of the answer lay in the ritual of elections, which had been painfully violated. In other words, it was precisely the obscene manner of the rigging, not the fact of it, that caused the outrage—like what had caused Seryozha to throw a blank ballot in the bin in disgust, after flying all the way from Kiev to Moscow to cast it. If the protesters were objecting primarily to what had felt to them like public indecency—not just at the voting booth but also earlier, in September, when Putin and Medvedev publicly shook on the presidency—then it stood to reason that they did not call for Putin to be deposed and did not confront the regime with its gravest crimes. Held on a cordoned-off island, the protest was not confrontational at all. Some of Bikbov's respondents said that they were demonstrating for stability—using the keyword of the Putin era, turning it into their demand. Or their request.