The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The social networks filled with expressions of outrage and, above all, disbelief—even though the case, the conviction, and the sentence conformed to the overall logic of the crackdown. Seryozha had read that people planned to meet at Manezhnaya Square, just outside Red Square, the night of the sentencing. That was what everyone had been calling it: "a people's meeting," like a town meeting. Whoever scheduled it had, of course, anticipated that the court's decision would be unfair. But when news of the actual sentence came, it was shocking. Strange how that worked: something could be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.

Seryozha went to Manezhnaya around six in the evening. He was among the first couple of thousand to arrive. Police sealed off some of the early arrivals on a portion of sidewalk and shut off the nearest Metro exit, but people kept coming from other streets, joining a crowd that was divided into three or four large segments. There were about ten thousand people in all. There was no permit for this "meeting." Everyone there was risking detention and a crushing fine. Seryozha had never seen people act like this. The last time this happened—the last time Muscovites took to the streets, at great potential peril, because they could not stay home and let things happen—had been in August 1991, when Seryozha was nine.

Seryozha had spent so much time thinking about people and protests. After the crackdown began, he took stock. He realized that he had stopped working entirely. He had been cutting white ribbons full-time. That might have been an exaggeration—he also did things like design posters and banners and help out with other projects, and attend the Protest Workshop. He was lucky that he could afford to: he

had an apartment he had inherited, and a lucrative-enough profession that had allowed him to save up.

Then the rules changed and protest had become an almost impossibly high-stakes game. Seryozha still believed in protest. Or, he still believed that all a citizen can do, when the right to vote has been perverted and the courts have been usurped—all a citizen can do, and must do, is go out into the streets. But he also felt that he had no moral right to say this. He searched for this right, he dug into his soul for the source of his authority to call on people to take the risk and protest, and he did not find it. For a person to tell other people to risk their freedom, to risk Russian jail, he had to be beyond reproach. Seryozha was not beyond reproach.

But now all these people had come without asking anyone's permission and stayed without asking anyone's direction. It looked like the beginning of a new era. People stood. At first they stood with their arms linked, in a staring contest with a row of riot police in front of them. Then, after an hour or two or three, the protesters relaxed. Some sang songs, including great rousing Russian war songs—one called on people to rise up, which seemed appropriate. One woman took a book out of her bag and stood there, reading. Periodically, chants would start up. "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" or "Putin is a thief!" or "We are not afraid!" At one point, news spread that the prosecutor's office had asked the judge to suspend Navalny's sentence, but no one believed it—at least, Seryozha did not believe it —and everyone stayed. They plastered the facade of the parliament building with round red "Navalny" stickers. People climbed onto the ledge of the elevated first floor of the parliament building and stood there, unafraid of the police, or of the fines, or of falling. This protest felt like nothing had ever felt before. This one was not about making jokes or talking to like-minded people or staking out an apolitical space: this one was about fighting. This one was beyond reproach.

Around eleven in the evening the police seemed to get their orders. They began charging the crowd, grabbing people, throwing them to the ground, and dragging them into prisoner transports. They shouted at the rest to disband. Some people walked away. Seryozha was with a group, maybe a hundred people altogether, wedged

between lines of police. They resisted happily at first. The riot police pushed them down the street—their batons were painful against one's back—but these people, most of whom Seryozha did not know, laughed and walked, pretending to be out on a summer night's stroll, then doubled back and took up their protest again. But the group kept thinning, and the number of people in the square kept dwindling. A little after midnight Seryozha was the last man standing. But was he beyond reproach?