In those three hours, however, with the entire courtroom standing the whole time, we got to hear the entire case all over again. We heard about how the three young defendants—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina, handcuffed inside a bulletproof “aquarium”—as well as “two other unidentified people” entered Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on the morning of February 21, at which point they mounted the steps to the altar, shed their winter clothing, donned colorful balaclavas and began to “raise their legs” and to “hit the air, as if it were an opponent.” We heard about how their clothing was in violation of Church rules, how Samutsevich, “in clear collusion” with the others, took out a guitar and how Tolokonnikova plugged it into an amp “without delay,” about how the place where they stood—the ambon—was not for women, how the Cathedral’s employees tried to stop them, how the Pussy Riot “demonstratively and cynically” defied “the Orthodox world” and tried to “devalue centuries of revered and protected dogmas” and “encroaching on the rights and sovereignty of the Russian Orthodox Church.” We heard about the materials seized in the searches of the defendants’ apartments, materials that, apparently, had “offended God.” We heard about the testimony of the victims, the Orthodox believers so deeply wounded by the thirty-second performance, though we learned that that testimony of one witness—he had seen the resultant music video on YouTube and read an interview with Pussy Riot —was struck, which was a shame because he had been the only one to explain to the court the etiology of the group’s name. (“Do you even know what ‘pussy’ means?” he asked the court two weeks ago. “I do. I brought a dictionary.” The word, it turned out, derived from “pus.”)

Through those three hot, tiresome hours, the three young women listened to the litany of absurdist, pseudo-legalistic, theocratic woe, by turns laughing and rolling their eyes. Alyokhina, the brain, watched attentively, her pale face calm under a poof of dirty blonde frizz. Tolokonnikova, the opposition’s sultry new sex symbol (Ukrainian Playboy has just invited her onto its cover), wearing a blue “No pasarán!” t-shirt, smirked and curled her lips in disdain. Even the shy and awkward Samutsevich laughed when the judge, a prissy older woman, read the full text of the punk prayer “Holy Mother, Chase Putin Away!”, uttering the phrase “the priest blows the prosecutor.” At one point, the unmistakable strains of punk wafted into the courtroom. The members of Pussy Riot who are still anonymous and free had emerged on a balcony across the street from the courthouse and began to rage through their new single “Putin Lights the Fires of Revolution.” Then they made it rain CDs. At the sound of the music, Tolokonnikova’s face lit up and, clasping her chained hands like a victorious boxer, shook them above her head.

When the two-year sentence came in, the girls laughed. When they were first detained and charged in March, all the signs had pointed to seven years behind bars. Putin had apologized to the Orthodox faithful, and the patriarch and Church made a point of staying out of the case, though it was quite clear that they weren’t.

But the Kremlin’s grasp on the story soon slipped. First, the story became a domestic PR-headache. Then, starting in July, Western musicians started glomming onto the case one by one: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting, Franz Ferdinand, Bjork, Paul McCartney. Madonna came to Moscow to give a concert, and ended up delivering an ode to the girls, donned a balaclava, and wrote the words “Free Pussy Riot” on her back. Unlike the highly politicized case of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a man with a shadowy past who had the assets Putin wanted, the case of Pussy Riot had become an easily consumable image of good and evil: Three young women against an Evil Empire. The heretofore little-known punkettes received such unanimously positive international publicity that one began even to pity the Kremlin and the Church a little: They had clearly and severely miscalculated.

As is so often the case with the Russian government, it was Putin himself who dramatized the pathos. Just before Putin’s departed for the London Olympics—halfway through the trial—London mayor Boris Johnson spoke up for Pussy Riot; upon his arrival, Prime Minister David Cameron broached the issue with Putin in their private meeting. Putin took notice of these slights; as swaggering and rude as he is (he’s been late to meet just about every foreign leader, including the Queen), he very much cares about his image in the West. It is where, after all, all his friends and subjects have their money. It is also important to Putin to be the leader of a world superpower, which is what he thinks Russia still is. He cannot be an Assad or a Qaddafi; it is very important for him to be what the Russians call “handshakeable” abroad. And so, while his instinct is often to hit first and think later, Putin knows it’s in his interest to cultivate the image of a centrist. It is not unheard of for him to bow to public pressure, though he will try his damndest to make it seem like public pressure has nothing to do with it.

Thus, when the case reached a fever pitch, Putin, speaking from London, said the girls “shouldn’t be punished too harshly.” Let them think about what they’ve done, he chided, and, as always, left it up to the court. The court immediately picked up on the signal, and soon the prosecutor was asking not for seven years, but for three. Some of the victims stopped calling for any punishment. The liberals who had gotten so fired up about the case became even more fired up: Here it was, the taste of victory! Ebullient rumors of probation soon began to circulate around Moscow.

There was some truth in this euphoria, but not enough. Twitter had helped Russian liberals back the Russian regime into a corner in unprecedented fashion. But the system that does not have a reverse gear, a system that admits no mistakes, and shows no weakness (ninety-nine percent of criminal cases in Russia result in a guilty verdict) cannot get a new transmission in one week, or in one case. As soon as the trial began, it was clear that the government did not intend on absolving Pussy Riot.

Still, the two-year sentence was a surprise because it was less than the three many expected, and far less than the seven everyone feared. “In our system, two years is not a real sentence,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, who advised Putin’s successful 2000 presidential campaign. “They probably think they’re being very merciful,” especially considering that the girls have already served nearly six months of it in pre-trial detention. This was, in other words, as much give as the system could give.

Afterwards, supporters of Pussy Riot made their arguments for why it was still not enough. “Putin’s statements that the court could deliver a not-too-harsh verdict were expressed in a verdict that deprived innocent people of their freedom for two years,” defense lawyer Mark Feygin told a scrum of journalists outside the courthouse. “Who in their right mind could say this was a not-too-harsh verdict?” Alexey Navalny, the unspoken leader of the opposition, announced that he was “too angry to comment.” Nearby, a couple hundred very angry people had gathered nearby to protest, and a couple dozen of them were arrested. (One climbed the fence of the nearby Turkish embassy, and the police chased her onto its grounds.) The parents of the Samutsevitch and Alyokhina, who had originally disapproved of their daughters’ performance, now were fully behind them. “They did the right thing, absolutely,” Samutsevich’s soft-spoken, somewhat religious father said afterwards. “They really hit a nerve and showed the Church for what it is.”

And so the conclusion of the Pussy Riot trial served the same function as the performance that was its instigation: a demonstration of the deep contradictions plaguing Russian politics. From the perspective of the government, a sentence of two years is merciful; in the view of the country’s nascent, if disorganized and clumsy, but increasingly conscious, forward-looking middle-class opposition, it is beyond the pale. The original prupose of the trial may have been to cow Russia’s liberals, but the result was the opposite: Those paying attention to the trial—the journalists, the European parliamentarians, the activists, the chattering classes—were outraged, not intimidated, at the thought that three young women would be locked up for two years for singing a silly song.

When Tolokonnikova’s husband and Pussy Riot spinmeister Peter Verzilov emerged from the courthouse after the verdict, he was mobbed by journalists asking him for comment.

“What will happen to your wife and daughter?” one journalist asked. “Who will take care of them?”

“My daughter, wife, and everyone else will be saved by the revolution,” he said blithely. “Only the revolution. And we’re going to make it happen.”

How Three Young Punks Made Putin Blink [TNR]

The video went viral: it was two weeks before the presidential election and Putin, facing a wave of unprecedented protests, was feeling shaky. Three days later, a warrant was issued for the girls’ arrest. According to their indictment, their trial promised to be a decisive moment in the history of Christianity; officially, they were being tried for hooliganism, but the mumbling prosecutor clarified that they stood accused of “insulting the entire Christian world.”

Last week, on the day before the trial began, Petr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband, and I met for coffee. We talked about Derrida and post-modernism, the construction of gender and about performance art, but also about international press coverage of the Pussy Riot case and the growing list of Western musicians—Franz Ferdinand, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting—who had spoken up for the young women. “The state is doing everything to heat up attention for the case,” Verzilov said. “Someone’s putting on a show, as if, God forbid the New York Times doesn’t write about it.”

Verzilov and Tolokonnikova had met as students in the philosophy department of Moscow State University, and had been doing shocking performance art for years, first with a group called Voina, after which they founded Pussy Riot. (One of their first performance pieces, for Voina, involved having sex, together with a large group, in Moscow’s Biological Museum on the eve of Medvedev’s inauguration. Tolokonnikova was heavily pregnant at the time.) “Punk Prayer” was part of a series of performances that took aim at symbols of the regime, past and present: the Place of the Skulls, the execution spot on Red Square; luxury shopping malls, the Moscow metro. The Catherdal was chosen because it had, in Pussy Riot’s view, become a commercial center and because the patriarch had just told believers to vote for Putin in the upcoming presidential election.

Though Pussy Riot’s goal was to challenge Russian society through performance art, they were soon to discover that Putin’s state insisted on imposing its own distinct political aesthetic. “Of course, the indictment came down on Forgiveness Sunday,” Petr Verzilov said, referring to the fact that the criminal charge coincided with the day that Russian Orthodox believers ask each other’s forgiveness before the beginning of Lent. “The people in the Kremlin are obviously given to small acts of theatricality.”

THIS WAS PERFECTLY clear on the first day of the trial, which kicked off with statements from the defendants, read out by their lawyers. The young women, who sat in a cage of bulletproof glass (known colloquially as “the aquarium”) apologized to the Orthodox believers they had offended; Tolokonnikova called it “an ethical mistake.” Alyokhina, herself an Orthodox believer, apologized but also expressed her dismay at the lack of Christian forgiveness. “I thought the Church loved all its children,” she said in her written statement. “But it turns out it only loves those children who love Putin.”

And that’s where the loftiness ended and reality began to disintegrate. The judge overruled the defense’s motion to call any of its thirty five witnesses at the trial: the reason given was that it was too early, but she ended up rejecting the motion again and again throughout the proceedings. The prosecutor began to mutter his way through the indictment, using phrases like “imitating the Gates of Heaven” and “songs of an insulting, blasphemous nature.” The girls, drifting off in their aquarium, stood accused by the Russian state of being motivated by “religious hatred,” of “demonstratively and cynically putting themselves in opposition to the Orthodox world” and of “trying to devalue centuries of revered and protected dogmas” and “encroaching on the rights and sovereignty of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Somewhere else in there was a statement about how the young women of Pussy Riot had shaken “the spiritual foundations” of the Russian Federation, which, until that point, had given the distinct impression of being a secular state.

The defense counsel, for its part, seemed at this point to have already stopped listening; they were buried in their iPads and phones, live-tweeting the proceedings, as was Verzilov, who sat on a bench closest to the aquarium, as if they had decided that broadcasting the surrealism to the world was a better alternative than trying to make sense of it.

When the judge asked the girls how they plead, Alyokhina, a small, mousy girl with a poof of dirty blonde hair, said she wouldn’t plead at all as she didn’t understand what the indictment even meant. When this devolved into a shouting match with the judge—the first of many—Alyokhina demanded, “Why doesn’t the court take my words into account?” She was ordered to sit down.

The prosecution called its first witness, Lyubov Sokologorskaya, who is caretaker of the cathedral’s candles, and who can be seen in the Pussy Riot video, her head covered with a white kerchief, trying to wave off the group’s video camera. She was testifying as one of the nine victims in the case, the Orthodox faithful who had witnessed the 30 seconds of blasphemy and had been suffering ever since. I had run into Sokologorskaya, a tall woman with a vague face, in the bathroom during a break and I asked her why she turned to a secular court to address her religious hurt. She flashed me a sudden, angry look. “Go ahead,” she snapped. “Go ahead. Why don’t you just say the word you’re dancing around?” Before I could understand what it was I was dancing around, her lawyer, Larissa Pavlova, a big woman with a malicious face, led her away.

On the stand, Sokologorskaya was all quiet pathos. One could barely hear her responses to the questions posed by the prosecutor. Was she an Orthodox believer? Did she celebrate all the holidays and keep all the fasts of the Russian Orthodox Church? What is god? What were the girls wearing? Was their clothing tight?

Yes, Sokologorskaya said, their clothing was mostly tight and bright and generally inappropriate for a holy place. She spotted a bra strap; one dress had bright stripes. The worst, though, was that they had fooled her: two of them, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, she said, had approached her and asked her which icons to pray to for various blessings. In the meantime, she realized, their co-conspirators were climbing the railing blocking off the steps leading to the altar, steps on which no woman is allowed to stand. Then they shed their coats and began to jump around, movements she described as “devilish jerking.”

“Have you ever seen any devils?” defense attorney Violetta Volkova asked.

The judge interceded and struck down the question, as she would for most of the defense’s questions.

“I just wanted to clarify, how does she know how devils jerk themselves around?” Volkova yelled, as she would for most of the trial.

The question was struck.

“They raised their legs so high that everything past their waists, you could see,” Sokologorskaya almost moaned. “They were egging each other on, to see who could raise her leg the highest.”

The prosecution went on. Was the behavior of Pussy Riot acceptable behavior according to Church rules? Did it offend the feelings of Orthodox believers? Was it a crime?

“Yes.”

“In your view,” Pavlova asked her client, “what should the punishment be?”

“They need to be punished adequately,” Sokologorskaya said. (This elicited no objection from the defense about a witness testifying to something that was for the court to decide.) “They need to be punished so that they never want to do this again, under any circumstances. So that they’re scared.”

Because Sokologorskaya was claiming “moral damage,” one of the defense lawyers, Nikolai Polozov, asked her if she had turned to a doctor or a psychologist to address her suffering.

“I’m an Orthodox believer,” Sokologorskaya said. “The gracious power of the Holy Spirit is a million times stronger than any psychologist!”

“Then why didn’t the gracious power of the Holy Spirit assuage your moral suffering?”

“The question is struck!” snapped the judge.

“Have you seen the video of the punk prayer?” Polozov asked.

“Yes.”

“If the performance caused you such moral suffering, why did you decide to poison your soul again?”

The judge struck the question.

Did she hear the name Putin? Anything about the patriarch?

There was a long pause.

“I’m trying to remember, I’m afraid to get it wrong,” Sokologorskaya said, voice quavering. “It was just that I was intensively praying. It was enough for me to hear ‘patriarch.’”

“When you are in a state of intensive prayer, are you aware of what is going on around you?” asked Polozov.

The question was struck.

“Rephrase,” said the judge.

“When you are in a state of intensive prayer,” began Polozov, “can you hear what people are saying to you?

The question was struck.

“Irrelevant,” said the judge.

“What did my client Tolokonnikova say on the dias on Februrary 21?” asked Mark Feygin, another of the defense lawyers.

The question was struck.

“Irrelevant,” said the judge.

“Who told you the girls in the video are the same girls as the ones on trial today?” Feygin asked. “They were wearing balaclavas, as you recall.”

Struck.

The defendants were given the chance to ask questions through a small window in the aquarium. When it was Tolokonnikova’s turn, she asked how Sokologorskaya could determine the girls motivating hatred for Orthodoxy, to which she had just testified?

“Because you disturbed the peace in the cathedral,” Sokologorskaya said. “You used curse words.”

“Do you remember what I personally said on February 21?”

“I don’t want to repeat these words.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

Struck.

“She already answered your question,” said the judge.

“Is ‘feminist’ a bad word?” Tolokonnikova asked, referring to the part of the punk prayer in which they implored the Virgin to become a feminist.

“In a church, yes.”

“What dress was I wearing?”

“You know what your dress was like,” Sokologorskaya snapped. “It’s probably why you wanted to raise your legs.”

SOKOLOGORSKAYA WAS FOLLOWED on the stand by Denis Istomin, a young man with sun-bleached blonde hair and a taut, angular face. He rolled up to the witness stand wearing a pair of tight pants and an electric blue shirt.

“Is it fair to say you are an Orthodox believer?” asked the prosecutor. It was the first question he would ask every witness. “Do you celebrate Church holidays and keep all the fasts?”

When it came to the events of February 21, Istomin said he happened to be in the Cathedral on a Tuesday morning by sheer accident. “My parents gave some money to help build it and I feel it is our church, too,” Istomin said. It was his first time in the Cathedral. When he knelt down to pray, he heard women’s voices; when he looked up, he saw girls in colorful balaclavas dancing around on the steps to the altar.

“Did you hear what they were saying?” asked Pavlova.

“Yes,” said Istomin. “They were shouting insults at our god Jesus Christ. It was blasphemy. People in the cathedral were crying, some people were sick. There was no precedent for this.” Their clothes, he said, “did not conform to Christian tradition.” Their dancing was “dancing on the graves of our ancestors.” Sadly, this was to be expected. “Our country went twenty years without an ideology,” he said flatly. “A whole generation grew up without Orthodox values.”

“What did you do when you saw this disorder?” asked Pavlova.

“I tried to stop them,” Istomin said. One of the girls, Alyokhina, was held up by a church security guard who removed her mask. “Someone took her mask off. She looked at me, and I looked at her,” Istomin went on. “I recognize her today. I have a photographic memory.”

After Istomin, the accidental witness, has been asked to weigh in on the extent to which Pussy Riot had criminally offended all of Orthodox Christendom, Pavlova—or “Lawyer Pavlova,” as she preferred to refer to herself in the courtroom—tried a different line.

“Would you say that this was art?”

“What is art anyway?” smirked Istomin. “I don’t think this is art, but if some people consider it art, then it should be displayed exclusively in closed spaces and not be made available for wider public consumption.”

“You’re here as a victim,” Lawyer Pavlova went on. “Are you claiming any monetary compensation here today?”

“No,” said Istomin, lifting his hawkish nose. “I don’t need their money.”

“You heard the girls apologize this morning,” Lawyer Pavlova said with gravitas. “Do you think they were sincere?”

“I don’t see any repentance in their actions,” Istomin said.

“I have no further questions,” said Lawyer Pavlova.

The occupants of the “aquarium” were again permitted to ask questions. (All three had been taking furious notes throughout the testimony. A tattered paperback Bible lay on the bench where the girls were sitting.)

“When you held me up and led me to the door of the Cathedral, did I resist?” asked Alyokhina.

“I can’t say definitively, I’m not a person who holds grudges,” said Istomin. And, with a smile added, “Actually, all Orthodox people are like this.”

“What did you do after you led me out?”

“I went back to restoring order.”

“Tell me, were you here in this courtroom three hours ago?” Alyokhina went on.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear me when I apologized for offending the Orthodox faithful?”

“You know, a spoon is useful at lunchtime,” he scoffed. “We waited for this apology from you in the first days after your blasphemy. And, as Stanislavsky once said, ‘I don’t believe in your repentance.’”

“Tell me, please, what form does my repentance have to take for you to believe me?”

“I don’t know, use the Internet, like you did last time,” Istomin said, referring to the YouTube sensation. “Or go to church.”

“I can’t go to church,” Alyokhina said. “I’m in jail.”

Volkova, the defense attorney, began asking questions again. “What words did the accused say?”

“They were saying bad words,” Istomin said.

“Which words?”

“The question is struck,” said the judge.

“Is holy shit an offensive phrase?” Volkova shouted.

“We already established that these words offend God!” the prosecutor shouted.

“The question is struck.”

Feygin, whose massive frame reminds one of an antique wardrobe, took his turn. “Is it true that you are part of the group Narodny Sabor?”

“Yes,” said Istomin.

“What does the group do?”

“It provides military-patriotic training for youth,” Istomin said. “It’s a good organization.”

“Did you know my clients before February 21?”

“Yes.”

“Were you also a victim in the court case against Erofeev,” Feygin asked, referring to another scandalous case, from 2006, when the Orthodox faithful filed suit against the curators of an art show in which contemporary Russian artists took on the theme of religion. The Orthodox faithful won.

“The question is struck,” said the judge.

“We’re trying to establish that Istomin has participated in similar court cases,” Feygin pleaded.

“He’s a professional victim!” yelled Volkova. “Like a professional beggar!”

“The question is struck!”

BY DAY TWO of the trial, the trial had become an acknowledged embarrassment. Even the Putin loyalists were already cracking. After the first day, a member of the ruling United Russia party wrote in his blog that, even though he was offended by the Pussy Riot performance, “an indictment based on citations from sixteenth century Church cannon makes the country the laughingstock of the entire world.”

It was soon clear that the authorities were eager to wrap things up as quickly as possible, and shift the public’s attention to something that wasn’t quite so unexpectedly humiliating. And so the judge decided not only to prevent the defense from calling any witnesses or asking any questions; she also had no intention of keeping Russian courthouse hours. Rather than end each session at six, when the courthouse closed, she kept going. “We’ll be here till morning if we have to,” she said when the defense suggested adjourning for the day.

The main effect of the grueling twelve-hour sessions was the deterioration of the defendants’ health. On the third day, an ambulance had to be called twice for the girls (and for Volkova, who had worked herself up into a tizzy), but the paramedics determined they were fit to stand trial. Volkova started a shouting match with the judge: Her clients were not given time to sleep, and were not being fed. “When I asked the bailiff whether they’d eaten, he told me they’d been fed tea!” she shouted. The judge said it was not the court’s prerogative to deal with such things. When the defense team attempted to pass a bottle of water into the aquarium, every cop in the room lunged to intercept it. Afterwards, an attorney for the plaintiff, Lev Lyalin, himself a religious man who was representing three of the victims, told me, “You know, I’ve been an attorney for a long time, and I can tell you’ve never seen a court work at this clip before. Even I don’t feel well, and I’m not in prison.”

On top of this, the court was doing everything in its power to make the trial a black box. First, they shut down the live stream of the proceedings (ostensibly to protect the victims). On day two, they moved the trial to a tiny courtroom where not more than ten journalists could fit. When the journalists left on the stairwell mutinied, the trial was moved back to a bigger courtroom. The next day brought a ban on Twitter, which the press inside the courtroom to broadcast the insanity they were witnessing. When a higher court overruled them the same morning, they tried to introduce a ban on audio recordings.

The one thing that the authorities had determined was not negotiable was the verdict. That had been determined months ago: Shortly after the punk prayer became a viral hit, Putin spoke at a Church event, apologizing to the faithful for the harm done to them by the Pussy Riot performance. The court had received its signal from the Kremlin; now the only question was whether the girls would get the full seven-year sentence.

In that way, the trial became an inadvertent continuation of their performance piece, one that grew far past the boundaries they had envisioned for it and ended up becoming a monumental, historical work. The kangaroo court, the prison sentence, the martyr status—Pussy Riot didn’t expect any of it, but they had clearly hit a nerve and the state’s overblown, medieval response had became part of the show. And if Act I (the punk prayer) turned off some liberals with its edginess, Act II (the witch trial) was clearly a nation-wide hit and a liberal cause célèbre.

It was a prime example of a classic Russian genre: a bitter dark comedy depicting the absurdity of oppression. Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich have audibly laughed their way through the proceedings, as have the defense lawyers, the journalists, even Alyokhina’s mother, forcing the judge to periodically scream at the courtroom. “Is this funny to you!” the judge cried at one point. “No, it’s quite sad,” Alyokhina said, barely stifling her laughter. By Thursday of last week, the burly enforcers stalking about the courtroom were threatening to toss out anyone who even smiled.

But how could one not laugh? How else could one react to a tall, greasy man who was called as an expert witness for the prosecution because he had seen the YouTube video and read an interview with PussyRiot? Sweating through his testimony, he described for the court how the girls had “pushed themselves into hell,” and that “to the Christian faithful, Orthodox or not, hell is as real as the Moscow metro.”

How else could one interpret a witness, a church treasurer, who walked into the courtroom with a frilly parasol, which she then lovingly hung off the edge of the witness stand before giving her testimony? “Excuse me,” she said when it clattered to the floor as she discussed how much offense she had taken at Pussy Riot’s performance.

How else could one react to a victim weeping through her testimony and, describing how one of the girls prostrated herself on the altar on February 21, uttered the nearly Biblical phrase, “and her butt was raised high and this butt was facing the altar”? To an altar boy who looked like he spent more time at the gym than in church? (“Do you think they could have been possessed?” Feygin asked the altar boy. “The question is struck!” said the judge. “He is not a medical expert!”) To the candle woman, the first victim, watching the proceedings from the gallery, angrily muttering her bewilderment, and repeatedly crossing herself?

How else to respond to the fact that the nine victims, all security guards and attendants of the Cathedral, felt confident in opining on theological, psychological, and jurisprudential matters, and in delivering their verdict on when the punk prayer crossed over from art to blasphemy? To the fact that all of them described in soaring words the depth of the Christian faith but that all but one could not find it in their hearts to accept the girls’ apologies?

To call this a show trial would be to understate its grotesque aesthetic. This was not a show trial, but it was a show—a sumptuous, tragicomic show, in which three twenty-something girls have unintentionally check-mated the regime.

On Thursday, as the girls were marched out of the courtroom in handcuffs, Verzilov called to his wife.

“Nadia!” he shouted. “Björk says hello!”

Pussy Riot v. Putin: A Front Row Seat at a Russian Dark Comedy [TNR]

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which the 28-year-old Baronova, a brash, lanky blonde, shed her skin as a pro-Putin patriot to become the unlikely it-girl of the Russian opposition. But she came into her own in the latter role sometime around May 6, the eve of Vladimir Putin’s third inauguration. What began as a peaceful demonstration in Moscow by tens of thousands of Russians spun into days of street war between the police and the opposition. Demonstrators clashed with police, who chased them into cafés and subway stations, and hauled them away in paddy wagons. A spontaneous, mobile Occupy movement began moving from city square to city square, barely outrunning the omon riot squads.

Through it all, Baronova, then a little-known former press secretary for leftist Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomarev, seemed to be everywhere—pushing herself around on a child’s scooter, mouthing off to anyone in a uniform. At one sit-in, she popped a wheelie in front of a chain of burly, stone-faced omon officers and then proceeded to loudly read from a paperback copy of the Russian constitution. Before long, she was lost in a throng of photographers. “I’m trying to make a political career,” she told me when I saw her that day.

In the following weeks, though, Baronova became disillusioned. The opposition was quixotic and fractured, and she had little confidence in its powers of persuasion. So she applied for a master’s degree in political science and planned to take a two-year break from activism, starting this fall.

But then, early on the morning of June 11, officers from the Investigative Committee—Russia’s equivalent of the FBI—climbed onto the balcony of her apartment, turned on an electric circular saw, and threatened to cut the door down. Baronova was out, and the only person inside was her terrified nanny—Baronova has a five-year-old son—who let the agents in and watched as investigators turned the apartment inside out, taking Baronova’s computer, books, political materials, and a trove of family photos.

The stated reason for the raid was Baronova’s participation in the May 6 protests. But, although the Investigative Committee searched the homes of about a half-dozen prominent activists, Baronova was the only one who was charged. Overnight, she went from just another angry protester to a central, if incongruous, figure in the opposition’s loose confederation of leading lights—a political naïf with no clear ideology and a knack for absurdist displays of dissent. “Maybe to some more seasoned people, she seems too young and hotheaded,” says Boris Nemtsov, a deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and a veteran member of the opposition. “But they can’t dispute the fact that she brings with her a new wave of activists. She is the next wave.”

TO THE EXTENT THAT Baronova gave much thought to politics in her early twenties, it was to regard Putin with unabashed pride. She comes from a family of Soviet scientists and was herself a chemist and manager at a chemical supply company. During her twenties, she started making good money, got married, had a child, and generally lived the humdrum existence of Moscow’s white-collar “office plankton.”

For much of this time, Baronova says, “I believed in the greatness of Russia.” She opposed Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which she still considers an “American project.” The first crack in her resolve came in 2004, when Russian security services badly bungled the hostage crisis at an elementary school in Beslan. That’s when she stopped voting for specific candidates and started marking “against all” on her ballot.

Over time, Baronova says she “outgrew” Putin and transferred her hopes to Dmitry Medvedev, the new president and ostensible liberal. When Medvedev announced in September last year that he would not seek a second term and suggested that Putin run again for president, Baronova was stunned. “At that point, I said, ‘Lord, burn this place down, nothing will change here,’” she says, quoting a Russian rap song.

On December 4, Baronova went to vote in the parliamentary election and saw that officials were redirecting people in her precinct to a nonexistent address. The next day, she attended her first rally, at Chistye Prudy in central Moscow, to protest the widespread fraud that occurred during the parliamentary elections. When the billy clubs started flying, Baronova says she tried to avoid the crush of the crowd, but she caught a couple of blows from an omon truncheon and was tossed against an electrical switch box.

Shaken, Baronova wanted to leave the country, but her ex-husband wouldn’t let her emigrate with their son. So she went to the office of Solidarity, an opposition organization, and volunteered to help them—and later Ponomarev—with public relations. She also poured the money she’d saved for her son’s education abroad into the opposition’s activities. “I see this as a cold civil war,” she explains. “The state is using all its resources to fight its own citizens, so we have to use of all of ours.”

Then came the search and the criminal charge. “If that’s not a hint that I should leave the country, then I don’t know what is,” Baronova says. One protester who had been arrested at around the same time reported that he had been savagely beaten as he was detained; another said she had been force-fed psychotropic medications. Two activists have fled the country and applied for political asylum in Europe. Since she was charged, Baronova has repeatedly been called in for questioning about her connections to other opposition leaders. A woman whom Baronova suspects is a government plant has moved into her building and started accusing Baronova of beating her son, even though he has been away all summer; child protective services has threatened to take him away. Meanwhile, pro-Putin youth groups have been entreating her to attend their annual summer camp. “Why are they flirting with me?” she exclaims. “I don’t get it!”

Baronova faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison, although she sees little chance of actually going to jail for that long—“I’m good at p.r.,” she says matter-of-factly. But the experience has left her rattled. “From my point of view, I lost. I didn’t get anything done, I spent a ton of money, and brought harm on myself,” she says. “I want to cross all this out and live the quiet life of a quiet person. But that’s not possible anymore.”

“Now that they’ve done this, now that they’ve upped the ante, I can’t leave this half-finished,” Baronova says, her voice straining with agitation, as it often does. “I don’t want to be one of those émigrés of 1917, sipping wine by the Mediterranean and waiting for Russia to get better so I can come back. I have no choice but to do it myself.”

Lady Dada [TNR]

Julia intercepted him in the bathroom with a game-changer: the people outside the door had started an electric saw. “She said, ‘You should probably open the door,’” Navalny recalled.

Seven officers from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation piled into the apartment while two of their colleagues, armed with machine guns, blocked the door to the building outside. (It would take Navalny’s lawyer two hours—and going on Moscow’s most prominent radio station to say he was being blocked from seeing his client—to get into the apartment, something the Investigative Committee quickly denied.)

Upstairs, the investigators read out a search warrant: Navalny was being investigated as a witness in the case that had been opened after the violent clashes between police on protesters on May 6th. He was not a suspect in the case, nor was he charged with anything, which made the aggressive thoroughness of the ensuing search seem rather disproportionate. The investigators took anything electronic or telephonic: every laptop, desktop, iPhone, iPad, e-book, flash drive, D.V.D. player, D.V.D., disk, camera, memory card, and hard drive in the house. They checked the kids’ room and confiscated their laptop and camera. “I said, ‘Why don’t you look at the pictures on the camera? You’ll see they were just taking pictures of each other,’” Navalny said. It didn’t help. They took the kids’ camera, too. And the ten thousand rubles (three hundred dollars) they found.

Investigators also visited the apartment of Julia’s parents, who were not at home and were not even witnesses in the case. Her eighty-five-year-old grandmother was at home, however, but was physically unable to get to the door when the saw started up. “It was a very tense situation,” said Navalny (his wife was on the phone with her grandmother). “We were afraid she would die of the stress.”

After a thirteen-hour search, the apartment looked like a hurricane had hit.

Meanwhile, investigators had also arrived at the apartments of other opposition leaders, including leftist Sergei Udaltsov (scion of a long line of Soviet statesmen), veteran opposition politician and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, and Kseniya Sobchak. Sobchak is a television celebrity who was once Russia’s scandalous “it” girl (its Paris Hilton, if you will), and she went over to the side of the opposition when a wave of protests broke out following the contested December parliamentary election. Since then, she’s dropped one boyfriend—a well-liked functionary in the mayor of Moscow’s culture office—for a more fashionable one: a young, but seasoned, opposition activist named Ilya Yashin … whom they found in Sobchak’s bed. Sobchak, still half-asleep and thinking she was opening the door for her cleaning lady, didn’t even think to check the peephole and so found herself, in only her négligée, facing ten investigators from the committee. (The flat of Yashin’s parents, where Yashin still technically lives, was searched that morning, too. Among the confiscated items: Mrs. Yashin’s recipe book.)

Sobchak fared worse than the Navalnys. Her lawyer was unable to get inside for four hours, and only knew of the proceedings because Sobchak had managed to squirrel a phone away somewhere and send a desperate text to her assistant. “It was ridiculous,” she told me later. “I felt like a spy.” The search went on for nine hours, and, at first, the investigators wouldn’t let Sobchak get dressed. They also wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom alone. “They didn’t have a woman to go with me to the bathroom,” she told the Echo Moskvy radio station. “I had to do it in front of a man in a mask and with a machine gun.”

It’s worth noting here that Sobchak isn’t just your average opposition activist, or even your average Russian starlet. Her father, Anatoly Sobchak, the first mayor of post-Soviet St. Petersburg, was Vladimir Putin’s close friend and mentor. Sobchak is even rumored to be Putin’s goddaughter. (Sobchak says that the rumors are false.) Her going over to the opposition, though she carefully avoided direct criticism of her family’s friend, was the ultimate betrayal, and the search—pointless and humiliating—was a clear reprisal. Sobchak told me that she tried to go see Putin in early December in order to explain her reasons, but he wouldn’t see her. Most recently, when the independent television channel Dozhd TV—where Sobchak has a popular interview show—tried to accredit her for the massive St. Petersburg Economic Forum, in June, she was the only member of the Dozhd crew who was turned down. When pressed, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, is said to have replied that the name “Sobchak” is never to be uttered to him again. (Sobchak wouldn’t comment on this, and Peskov didn’t answer his phone.)

This is also probably why the investigative officer in charge of the group explained to Sobchak that none of this would have happened had she not gotten tangled up with the wrong people; she should have, he said, married “a dependable Chekist”—that is, agent of the secret police—and stayed home and had his babies.

Investigators took not only all of Sobchak’s electronics, but they also opened her safe where they found over a million euros, four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and about that many rubles. (Sobchak explained the stash on Twitter: “My annual income is over 2 million. If I don’t trust the banks, I don’t have the right to keep money at home?”) The tax bureau has now opened an audit and the Investigative Committee is working out why the money was split up in several different envelopes—the preferred method of handing out cash in Russia. “Some people keep their money in envelopes, some people rubber band it, some people keep it jars, some people make little airplanes out of it,” Sobchak says. “I personally think envelopes are the most convenient way of storing money at home. Why am I obligated to explain this to the whole country?” (Photos of the money, neatly fanned out and next to a ruler for scale—that is, official photographs from the investigation—made it onto the tabloid LifeNews.com just hours after investigators left Sobchak’s apartment.)

Investigators also seized her passport, effectively banning her from leaving the country for any reason. So far, both of her petitions—to get back her money and her passport—have been rebuffed. Once a glamorous socialite, now Sobchak says she is broke and has had to borrow money from her mother. “At least they didn’t plant drugs on me,” she says. “I guess I should be thankful for that.”

Like Sobchak, Yashin, Navalny, and the others whose homes were searched on Monday morning were all handed a summons to appear at the offices of the Investigative Committee at 11 A.M. on Tuesday, which was conveniently just an hour before the start of that days’ anti-Putin rally where all of them were supposed to speak. They all showed up, and dutifully answered the same fifty-six questions about who organized the May 6th violence, how it was planned, and who financed it. Sobchak’s interrogators made her read aloud the statement she had prepared with her lawyer—she’d hoped to save time and make it to the rally—frequently asking her to slow down, rewind, and repeat.

“The whole point was to just keep me there the whole day, to keep me from going to the protest,” Navalny said of his time with his interrogators. He had very little to tell them since he’s now been jailed twice for his protest activity, and questioned extensively both times. “They asked, ‘Tell me about your work history since 2005,’” he said. “It was just a million pointless questions. Four hours of them, then a break, then more pointless questions. When they found out that the rally was over, they suddenly lost interest.” Then they took him along while they searched the office of his anti-corruption organization, RosPil. (Navalny was asked to come back again on Wednesday. When he did, he was asked for a handwriting sample, which he refused, citing the fact that he is just a witness in the case.)

The Investigative Committee has thrown over a hundred investigators on the highly-publicized case—twelve comparatively nameless people have already been arrested. According to Navalny, not many of the investigators seem to understand what exactly it is that they’re doing. “I can’t recall criminal investigations like this in Moscow, except for Nord-Ost,” he said, referring to the time, in 2002, when terrorists took hundreds of people hostage inside a Moscow theatre. “And all because one police officer got a black eye on May 6th, for which he was rewarded with an apartment.” (Actually, over a dozen policemen were wounded that day; several have in fact been given apartments for their troubles.)

Why is the state doing this? Yashin has said that he thinks they are ginning up a criminal case against opposition leaders like him. More likely, it is a case of an overzealous machine seeking to please its master. If one reads the tea leaves—and that’s often all one can do in Russia—it is clear that Putin has had enough of the protests. Go out and protest for fair elections, but the elections are now over, and he won. Now it’s time to go home. But people don’t seem interested in that, and both protests, on May 6th and on June 12th, drew tens of thousands of people. (In fact, many of those I spoke to at the protest on Tuesday said that they had planned on skipping the rally but changed their minds when they heard about the searches.)

How to deal with them? Putin is no Assad, and at least so far he has shied away from a real crackdown. But he’s clearly unhappy with the situation and wants it to go away. In a country where the law is not a framework of protections and guarantees but rather an instrument used selectively for taking someone out, it helps when your friends or loyal minions are behind the controls of the legal system. Putin’s friend and classmate Alexander Bastrykin, for example, happens to be the head of the Investigative Committee, the same ostensibly independent government organization that harassed Navalny’s grandmother-in-law and chaperoned Sobchak to the bathroom. (A few hours ago, Bastrykin apologized to the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta for the harsh tone he took with Sergei Sokolov, one of the paper’s reporters. Sokolov had said that Bastrykin invited him on a drive, and then drove him out to the forest, where he proceeded to yell at and threaten him, which Bastrykin denied.) United Russia, the ruling party created to support Putin a decade ago, is doing its part in the Russian parliament: last week, they rammed through a law drastically upping fines and ordering restrictions on protesters and those found violating the peace. The Federation Council—the Russian equivalent of the Senate—was in such a rush to please that it passed the law all of twenty minutes after receiving it from the lower house.

And yet, thankfully, none of these zealous cogs seem ready to go all the way; they seem to pause at the critical moment. Protesters arrested over the weekend in St. Petersburg, for instance, were not charged under the new law. And so far, Monday’s searches yielded little more than rattled nerves. Which is not to say that psychological warfare waged by a state against its own citizens is something to discount.

Navalny called me on Wednesday, just after he finished observing the Investigative Committee turn his office inside-out. He was his standard cheery, sarcastic self: the image he cultivates is of a fighter for truth who fears nothing. And yet even he was unsettled by Monday’s experience—despite having fought state abuses for a decade and having dealt with various reprisals, including a flimsy criminal case and two jail terms. “It’s very unpleasant,” he said, hinting obliquely that his wife’s nerves didn’t fare as well as his own. “Even if you’re ready for it, even if you know it’s coming, you can never be one hundred percent ready. It’s very stupid and infuriating because you know it’s stupid and yet you can’t do anything to stop it.”

Sobchak, on the other hand, is new to the game. She has been involved in Russian politics for only six months, and even if she saw it from backstage as the daughter of Putin’s mentor, she has yet to develop Navalny’s thick skin, the kind you need if you are going to become an enemy of the state. On Tuesday, the day after a humiliating and financially ruinous nine-hour search—and after six hours of questioning—she gave an interview to Echo Moskvy. “You know, it’s a nasty feeling when a strong person like me—and I’m a fighter—when you suddenly sit down and realize that your hands are shaking,” she said. “Yesterday, my hands were shaking because it’s the feeling that you can’t do anything, that these people who are walking around your apartment, that they can do whatever they want.”

The Price of Opposition in Russia [TNY]

And so, on the eve of Tuesday’s anti-Kremlin protest, I asked a colleague for her prognosis, mostly because everyone I knew was asking for mine and I wasn’t sure what to tell them. “This time I expect to be bad,” she said. “So I’m sure it will be like Hair!”

Which it was. A largely festive crowd of tens of thousands marched down Moscow’s boulevards, braving rain and thunder and a steamy, greenhouse-like heat that felt strange in the balmy northern capital. Nationalists, liberals, anarchists, and gays cheered and chanted and moved peacefully down the route approved by authorities; they filled out forms indicating what issues they’d like to see addressed through a referendum; they listened calmly to speeches from a stage on a street named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. It seemed more summer festival than anti-government protest.

Who could have predicted that this would be the sequel to the rocks and the tear gas and the billy clubs of May 6? Who would have thought that this would be the protest after the Russian parliament, dominated by the for-Putin, by-Putin United Russia Party, rushed through a draconian anti-protest law just in time for today’s rally? And, a day after state investigators broke into the apartments of various opposition leaders, handed them summons that would keep them from today’s march, and turned their apartments upside down (a reason many protesters cited for coming out today), after six months of demonstrations with little to show for it, after all this, who could have predicted such a merry, energetic gathering?

Six months and nine major rallies after a disputed parliamentary election set this movement off, very little is clear about where, exactly, this is all going. (Nor have the two sides figured out how to reliably count the crowds they gather: Tuesday’s estimates, for example, range from 15,000 to 200,000.) On Tuesday afternoon, the rally accepted a vague manifesto that calls for more peaceful protests and getting “like minds” into government positions. There is also an especially dreamy section called “After Putin.”

But so far, Putin shows no sign of ushering in an “after” era. This week’s Gestapo-like searches — which, according to his press secretary, Putin had full knowledge of — showed just how little time the man is spending on finding an exit strategy. And if the opposition is still a vague and motley crew, Putin also doesn’t seem to have found a good strategy for dealing with them. According to people who have seen him in recent weeks, the president is rattled but mostly contemptuous. These people, in his mind, are an infinitesimal minority, and do not have to be reckoned with. (”The government is a little confused. What are they against?” United Russia functionary Yuri Kotler told me shortly after the May 6 crackdown, feigning the same wonderment about the protesters. “During the day, they sit in their cafés, and then they get bored?”) The arrests and the searches all seem to be screw-tightening measures, but they have been half-hearted.

“They’re trial runs,” said Duma opposition deputy Gennady Gudkov, who has been active in the protests — and is losing his private security business as a result. “Let’s see what happens if we do this, or if we do that, or if we go there. They’re looking to see what the reaction will be.” (Gudkov, a former colonel in Soviet counterintelligence, seems to recognize these tactics from his KGB days.)

So what next? Last month, after the peaceful May 6 rally descended into violence — for which arrests continue — I wrote that we were about to see a radicalization of the protests. Yet even after a month of events that should have moved the protests in this direction — the arrests of people for wearing protest symbols, the rushing through of the anti-protest law, the quiet scrubbing down of media outlets of some of its more independent voices, the searches — Tuesday’s events did not bear me out. Does that mean that the protest movement won’t become radicalized in the future? I can’t say for sure, but all the factors for it are still there: an opposition with no access to a system that shows no sign of letting them, or of giving an inch. Historically, such set-ups have not ended well in Russia, whether for the system, the opposition, or the population at large. Moreover, if Gudkov is right and these are merely half-hearted trial balloons, what happens if the Kremlin really puts its all into something that looks like the Iranian response to the pro-democracy “green” movement of 2009? Will the opposition radicalize then?

There is also the economic factor to consider. The Russian economy is currently growing at a relatively healthy 3.5 percent, but it’s useful to recall the whopping growth rates Russia was posting just a few years ago. In 2007, the year before the world financial crisis hit Russia, Russia’s GDP growth topped 8 percent. It had been growing at that pace, buoyed by soaring commodity prices, for almost a decade, and it was not accidental that this was the decade in which Putin made his pact with the people: You get financial and consumer comforts, and we get political power. It’s hard to maintain such a pact when the goodies stop flowing.

Which brings us to the looming issue of the Russian budget deficit. To keep the people happy and out of politics, the Russian government has promised a lot of things to a lot of people. (Putin’s campaign promises alone are estimated by the Russian Central Bank to cost at least $170 billion.) To balance its budget with such magnanimity, Russia needs high oil prices, to the point where last month, the Ministry of Economic Development announced that an $80 barrel of oil would be a “crisis.” Keeping in mind that oil is now about $98 a barrel, and that Russia used to be able to balance its budgets just fine with oil at a fraction of the price, this doesn’t look too good for Putin. Factor in the worsening European crisis — Europe is still Russia’s biggest energy customer — and the fact that the state has put off unpopular but increasingly necessary reforms, like raising utility prices, and you find yourself looking at a powder keg.

“It’s not too late to save the situation, but I fear that by the fall, it will be too late,” Gudkov told me Tuesday afternoon as we moved with the throng. “Because by the fall, people will join who are not just concerned with politics, but people who have economic concerns. And it will be a rougher, tougher protest because the people who will join the protest are people who are less educated, less well-off, less informed. And they are people who don’t have a good understanding of the law and why it’s important to obey it.” That is, should an economic and budgetary crisis hit and have a tangible and extended impact on Russians outside the Moscow middle class, the resulting populist protests could swallow up this liberal, bourgeois festival of the past six months. And, though predicting things in Russia is a fool’s game, it never hurts to be a pessimist.

Powder Keg [FP]

The Mariinsky, whose conductor and artistic director, Valery Gergiev, is close with Vladimir Putin, seemed to have become the latest unexpected staging ground of the anti-Kremlin protests that have seized Moscow since the disputed parliamentary elections in early December. Liberal bloggers expressed elation and surprise, and the production quickly became the talk of both cities. “All of Petersburg is waiting!” wrote one commenter on Adagamov’s blog. “We’re waiting for it as if it were a miracle!” And many Muscovites wrung their hands, wishing they could flock to the Mariinsky to see the sadistic behavior of the riot police they had witnessed on their streets enacted on the stage of one of the most famous theatres in the world.

Intrigued by Adagamov’s photographs and the voluptuous praise for the production, I jumped on a plane the next morning to catch the second day of the première. Turns out, I could’ve saved myself the trouble.

Written between 1868 and 1873, Modest Mussorgsky’s opera is based on a long poem by Alexander Pushkin about Boris Godunov, who ruled first as regent for Ivan the Terrible’s mentally retarded son Fyodor, and then as Tsar, from 1598 to 1605. Because Godunov was not from Ivan the Terrible’s Rurik dynasty, his hold on power was tenuous. It didn’t help that he was suspected of having murdered his rival for the throne, Ivan the Terrible’s other son and potential heir, the seven-year-old Dmitri. On top of this, his reign coincided with an economic and national-security crisis, to which Godunov responded by tightening the screws. Eventually, a young man claiming to be the slain prince Dmitri led a rebellion of the poor, hungry, and disaffected. With the sudden death of Godunov, in 1605, Moscow was opened to the “false Dmitri.”

The opera, which hews fairly closely to the facts of this historical saga, would seem to provide a rich vein of symbolism: four hundred and seven years later, Russia again faces economic trouble, social unrest, and a ruler whose legitimacy is being vigorously questioned. Indeed, the winter’s protests, which the “Godunov” production is clearly referring to, quickly turned on Putin himself: in March he was elected to his third presidential term, never having gone away when his second term ended in 2008. (Putin seemed very much the regent for the weak and comical figure of Dmitry Medvedev.) In fact, the opera, which premièred at the Mariinsky a hundred and thirty-eight years ago, was always seen as a political opera. Royal censors first banned, then heavily edited it, in part because of an imperial edict banning the portrayal of the Tsar onstage.

And yet, this production of “Boris Godunov” fell absolutely flat. The director, Graham Vick, who is British, tried so hard to squeeze the opera into the outlines of today’s political situation that he lost the plot entirely. There were certainly political parallels he could have played with: Able but vaguely illegitimate ruler? Check. Popular unrest? Sure. But who, for example, is the haunted Boris Godunov supposed to be? If he’s Putin, then whom did Putin kill to get the throne? And why is he kicking a huge gilded Soviet crest lying on the ground at the beginning of the opera? Is it because it’s actually Boris Yeltsin, who toppled the Soviet Union? Whom did he kill? Who is this false Dmitri? The anti-Putin protests have yet to find a real leader. And yes, it could have been powerful to watch riot police in their trademark blue fatigues bringing down a shower of nightsticks on singing protesters. But why are these protesters begging for bread, when the core of the Moscow protesters are white collar and upper-middle-class? And why did even the gratuitous violence of the police, which should have rung so true, feel so emotionally empty?

First, the production was hobbled from the get-go by the hype surrounding it, which was mostly generated by those involved with the Moscow protest movement, who are eager to see signs that their rebellion is echoing anywhere outside their relatively small circle. But it also seemed to me that Vick, as a foreigner, simply didn’t understand the nuanced political situation he was trying to stage. (He declined to talk to me for this piece.) I often find this explanation odious, but in this case it seems particularly apt: a lefty baby-boomer—he was described in the playbill as “a socialist, a philosophical communist”—he arrived in Russia amid unprecedented social unrest and projected onto the situation the clichés he has likely heard in the West, clichés culminating in the image of Putin as the slayer of children. The Moscow protests, viewed from abroad, have often been erroneously compared to Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. Vick seemed to fall prey to similarly pat—and therefore misleading—stereotypes. A particularly cloying touch was the out-of-nowhere parade of fur-clad wives of state dignitaries sashaying haughtily past the protesters.

In the ruckus surrounding the Mariinsky production of “Boris Godunov,” Russians seem to have forgotten that the subject of protest has been taken on by some of the most prominent Moscow theatres for years. Many provocative productions have been staged by a young, punkish director named Kirill Serebrennikov. His latest, a production of “The Golden Cockerel,” at the Bolshoi, mocks a king’s coronation (which for a while become the byword for Putin’s recent inauguration), as well as the now annual and highly ridiculous Victory Day parade that clogs Moscow every May 9th with tanks and intercontinental ballistic missiles in a feeble show of aggressive insecurity.

I recently saw Serebrennikov’s production of Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” at the Moscow Art Theater, which was founded by Stanislavski and Chekhov shortly before the Revolution. There, in the final act, hungry and wretched crowds gather, and the London police worry that these malcontents will sully the Queen’s upcoming coronation. The Queen, they tell the ringleaders, wants to roll through empty streets. The line instantly generated applause: On May 7th, the day Putin became President for a third time, his black limousine rolled through streets so deserted that some commentators said it looked like a neutron bomb had gone off in Moscow. All the streets even remotely near his route had been cordoned off, and people trying to get close were instantly arrested.

But here’s the rub: Serebrennikov staged “Threepenny Opera,” a Marxist critique of the corruption of Western Europe (it premiéred in 1927), in 2009, when protests and coronation-inaugurations were the last thing on anyone’s mind. Back then, Muscovites talked about modernizing a stagnating state—and about Apple products. It was a subtle, masterfully clairvoyant touch. (A bum holding a sign that says, “We demand a fair coronation!” seems to be a later addition for the new production; “We demand fair elections!” has been a rallying cry for the protests. Even this, however, was so subtle as to be a satisfying surprise when you spotted the sign in the thicket of them on the stage.)

Serebrennikov’s approach is also more powerful because it is in the best Russian traditions of political satire and subtle mockery of the powerful—summed up by a phrase which translates to English as “middle finger in the pocket,” the rough equivalent of flipping people the bird as soon as they turn their back. It’s a satire that’s masked by necessity, but it’s also one that Russian audiences, steeped in the satirical literary canon, will recognize immediately.

In a recent interview with Moscow’s Rain TV, Serebrennikov said that he couldn’t avoid talking about politics because that was all anyone was talking about. Perhaps because he is so attuned to the atmosphere of political obsession among the cultural élites of Moscow, Serbrennikov knew that he didn’t have to march riot police onstage or have anyone beaten for the audience to pick up on his planted references. He knew that they wouldn’t miss his furtive wink, the middle finger in his pocket.

“Boris Gudnov” in St. Petersburg [TNY]

More than anything, though, Lavrov insisted on towing the Syrian government line, suggesting that who had killed all those women and children was far from clear, since some died by artillery—which only the Syrian government has—and others execution-style. Who could have done that? “We are dealing with a situation in which both sides evidently had a hand in the deaths of innocent citizens,” Lavrov said, contradicting the accounts of witnesses who blamed government forces and paramilitaries. He added, “Guilt must be decided objectively.”

Insisting on “objectivity” has become a favorite Kremlin weapon against outside criticism. Blaming the West, pointing out its flaws (the famous tactic known as “whataboutism”), searching for elaborate cabals behind even the fairly obvious—all of these are tried-and-true tactics, but, in recent years, “objectivity” has joined them. Russia Today, the Kremlin-financed English-language news channel, for example, operates under the slogan “Question more.” It is an admirable motto for any news organization, but in this case it is a bit like Fox’s claim of being “fair and balanced.” Consider an infamous advertising campaign that RT ran in the U.S. and England, in 2009, superimposing symbols that were seemingly diametrically opposed to each other, and then asking a rhetorical question that equated them. One blurred together the faces of Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked, “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?”

It’s a clever device, substituting counteritutiveness for objectivity, and it’s something one encounters a lot in conversations in Russia, a hairy land of slippery facts where Occam’s Razor doesn’t stand a chance. What happens if you turn X upside-down, and discover it’s actually a Q? The problem, of course, is that Q may not really be the answer, and that you end up in a small epistemological hell. But it certainly makes for good rhetorical theatre.

More often than not, however, it’s used, especially in the hands of Kremlin officials and the state press, as Russia’s answer to Western moralizing. When an international crisis strikes, leaning on “objectivity” allows Russia to present itself as the parent in a room of screaming, disoriented children. In fairness, Russia has had some wins; the Russian government appealed to objectivity of evidence in the runup to the Iraq War, and they were right: perhaps the Americans should have paused and taken a couple of deep breaths. “I like being counterintuitive,” Russia Today host Peter Lavelle told me a couple years ago. “Being mainstream has been very dangerous for the West.”

For the sake of objectivity, however, we can’t lose sight of the fact none of this is being done for the sake of objectivity. One of the favorite refrains of Russia Today and other Kremlin apologists is that journalists, as fallible human beings, cannot be truly objective, and that objectivity itself is an artificial construct. (How’s that for objectivity?)

This posture is a defense tactic, the Kremlin’s way of adapting to a new post-Cold War geopolitical reality. “Whataboutism” was a popular tactic even back in Soviet days, for example, but objectivity wasn’t. It’s new. Why? Because “there was no pretense of cooperation,” Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow, says. “We were usually fighting each other in these proxy wars, in Nicaragua, for example. Before, it was a struggle of good and evil, whereas now it’s become a very nebulous thing. It’s no longer a cold war because we don’t have clear ideological markers that separate us”—both countries are, on paper, free-market democracies—“but we”—the Russians—“think that you’re using human rights to achieve your own geopolitical aims.” And so we appeal to objectivity, if there even is such a thing.

And so, when it comes to Syria, much as when it came to Libya, the answer is, Let’s all calm down and recognize that there are no saints here—and therefore no villains. “We need to choose—if the priority is to stop the violence, as everyone says, then we need to pressure the regime and the opposition and get them to stop shooting at each other and sit down at the negotiating table,” Lavrov said on Monday.

But this is a stalling technique, and stalling in such times can be quite dangerous. “The longer the Russians insist on waiting, the more likely it is that the Syrian opposition becomes the very radicals the Russians are warning against,” one Western diplomat told me this winter, a sentiment echoed in today’s statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Pointing to its notion of objectivity, Russia has stuck firmly to the Annan plan, which calls for observers and negotiations, for government troops to pull back, and for rebels to lay down their arms. But it has clearly become moot if—it was ever really workable. “It’s a very convenient position,” Georgy Mirsky, a Middle East expert at the Institute of International Economy and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Science, says.

And what, objectively, is Russia’s interest here? According to Mirsky, the issue isn’t the Russian Navy port at Tartus, or even the arms sales to Assad—which, by the way, have not stopped—or even Russian Orthodox support of Syrian Christians. The issue is an appearance of strength and independence. “If Putin shows weakness on Syria, it will look like what happened with Libya,” Mirsky says, referring to last spring, when the Russians abstained from the Security Council vote authorizing intervention, rather than vetoing it. “And what it looked like at home was that [then President Dmitry] Medvedev surrendered Qaddafi. The Russian people didn’t know who or what Qaddafi was, but as soon as the American bombing started, given the anti-Americanism that exists in our country, Qaddafi became our man. And Medvedev surrendered him to the West.”

Putin, Mirsky argues, doesn’t need this. The current stance allows Russia to project an image of real concern for everyone’s human rights and safety, but if things—the Annan plan, the Assad regime—fall apart, objectivity becomes convenient in that it also absolves the Russians of any responsibility. The Annan plan didn’t work out? Too bad, that. Assad was toppled by an armed uprising? Well, we tried. For Putin, Mirsky says, “it’s better for Assad to hold on to the end, even if he loses. Because at least it will be clear that our government doesn’t follow the Western marching orders, that we are a sovereign superpower whose opinion is listened to, that Putin won’t follow American commands to follow the policies that America needs.” Meanwhile, objectively, the killing continues.

Russia’s Syrian Excuse [TNY]

This was McFaul’s welcome to his new job: United States ambassador to Russia. Along with being attacked on state television and having picket lines across from the embassy, he was being followed — and harassed — by a red-haired reporter from NTV, the state-friendly channel. One day, a horde of activists from Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, showed up at the embassy gates in white jumpsuits, and played dead: They did not want to be the victims of a revolution, like the unfortunates of Egypt, their posters said. As a result, the ambassador’s security had to be tightened.

“What I did not anticipate, honestly, was the degree, the volume, the relentless anti-Americanism that we’re seeing right now,” McFaul told me in February, a note of real hurt ringing in his normally chipper, measured voice. “That is odd for us. Because we have spent three years trying to build a different relationship with this country.” He added, almost stuttering, “I mean, I’m genuinely confused by it.”

A month later, he lost it.

The explosion came when McFaul arrived at the office of For Human Rights, an NGO in Moscow’s historic center. He was going to see his old friend, veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomarev, whom he’d known since he was an international studies graduate student running around perestroika-era Moscow. It may have been late March, but it was cold and the stuff that fell from the sky was neither snow nor rain: a long cry from McFaul’s California home. As ambassador, though, he didn’t have to bother with a jacket: he had his black Cadillac.

Had he known that the redhead from NTV would again be waiting for him with a camera crew, however, he may have dressed a little warmer.

What was McFaul going to discuss with Ponomarev?, the redhead asked as the camera bounced to follow the moving ambassador.

“Your ambassador moves about without this, without you getting in the way of his work,” McFaul said in slightly crooked Russian. He was clearly angry but maintained a wide, all-American smile. “And you guys are always with me. In my house! Are you not ashamed of this? You’re insulting your own country when you do this, don’t you understand?”

“We understand,” the redhead said, before going on to inquire which opposition politicians McFaul supported. McFaul, who had already turned to walk into the building, wheeled around, the huge smile now touched with a cartoonish disbelief.

“I met with your president yesterday,” he said, sarcastically nodding at her. “I support him, too. It’s the same logic. If I meet with him, it means I support him, right? It’s called diplomatic work. It’s how it works everywhere.”

He offered the redhead a formal interview, where they could “calmly” discuss everything and anything she wanted, before he remembered something. “I’m not wearing a coat. This is just rude!”

The redhead took no notice and pressed on. What had he discussed with opposition veteran Boris Nemtsov?

McFaul’s smile, now huge and aggressive, looked like that of a man unhinged. Didn’t they read his story in Moskovsky Komsomolets, he asked? Didn’t they read his Twitter feed?

And then he snapped.

“This turned out to be a wild country!” he burst out, reaching up to the gray heavens. “This isn’t normal!” This behavior was unacceptable, he went on, in all “normal” countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, even China. How did they manage to be everywhere he was, anyway? How did they know his schedule? This, he contended, his voice rising, was in violation of the Geneva Convention. (In the heat of the moment, he misspoke: He meant the Vienna Convention, which tightly regulates the obligations of the states sending ambassadors, and those receiving them.)

In fact, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, passed by the United Nations in 1961, stipulates certain things — the inviolability of embassy grounds, as well as of ambassadors’ communications, the duty of the receiving country to ensure the ability of the ambassador to work unmolested, and “to prevent any attack on his person, freedom, and dignity” — that seemed to have been overlooked by Moscow in the last few months.

And the incident in front of the For Human Rights office was merely the last straw: There were rumors of mysterious individuals trespassing on the grounds of Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence, of repeated security threats. The apparent interception of his schedule was almost confirmed by NTV, which said, through a spokeswoman that “the ubiquity of NTV can be explained by its broad network of informants, which is well known to every public figure in this country.”

Those informants — whoever they are and wherever they sit — of course obviate the need for any illicit activity on any redheaded reporter’s part, which is why, the spokeswoman said, “NTV’s employees obviously do not hack into anyone’s phones or read e-mails.”

And though the State Department filed an official complaint with the Russian Foreign Ministry after the NTV tussle, it was McFaul’s undiplomatic lament about the wildness of the country that made headlines in Moscow. On Twitter, he wrote, “I misspoke in bad Russian. Did not mean to say ‘wild country.’ Meant to say NTV actions ‘wild.’ I greatly respect Russia.” And in an interview a few days later, he went even further, saying, “I really regret that I expressed myself inaccurately.” And then he pulled out the card he hoped he wouldn’t have to use: “I’m not a professional diplomat.”

And just when things quieted down after the presidential elections in March, McFaul stumbled into another mess. Last week, while discussing the successes of the reset, he told an audience of students at a Moscow university that Russia had “bribed” the Kyrgyz to kick the U.S. off its miliatry base at Manas. (The United States, he said, also bribed the Kyrgyz.) The Russian Foreign Ministry lashed out, attacking McFaul on Twitter late Monday and accusing him of “spreading blatant falsehoods.” On Tuesday, Putin’s foreign policy advisor weighed in, saying, “Ambassadors need to work on a positive agenda because there are already so many agents trying to ruin the atmosphere.” McFaul, again on the defensive, stood by his speech in a blog post, but admitted, “Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken so colorfully and bluntly. On that, I agree and will work harder to speak more diplomatically.”

* * *

When he arrived in Moscow on Jan. 13 to take up his new post, Ambassador McFaul was just being Mike: the easy-going American guy whose informality disarms most everyone; the deft Washington operator who has both neoconservatives and liberals convinced that he’s their guy; the Russia expert famous for his wide-reaching and motley network both in Moscow and in the United States; the man whose swearing-in ceremony — normally a staid and sparsely-attended affair — was packed to the gills with hundreds of friends and well-wishers, as well as the ambassadorial corps of nearly the entire former Soviet Union. In a break with tradition and protocol, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a glowing ode to McFaul and swore him in.

And yet, in Moscow, something was off. The McFaul mojo seemed suddenly powerless. Shortly after his arrival, McFaul stopped by the bar at the Marine House, on the embassy grounds, to have a beer. The regulars — marines and embassy hoi polloi — were rooted to their seats, frozen with fear — they’d never caroused with the ambassador before. When he joined the pick-up basketball game at the embassy one night, one of the Russians approached him afterwards and joked, “I didn’t realize I was playing basketball with the anti-Christ.”

I met McFaul early on a sunny, freezing Sunday afternoon in February. The staff scurried around, turning on lamps and vacuuming the rich indigo carpets of Spaso House, a sprawling yellow mansion off the old Arbat Street. McFaul came down to meet me in baggy jeans and a blue sweater, a water stain on his belly. Instead of shoes, or even slippers, he wore washed-out blue socks. As we settled into the plush, floral maroon couches of the library, a Russian butler in a tuxedo brought us coffee on official china and then began to stoke the fireplace. “Hey, howyadoin’?” McFaul said to the butler, who didn’t know how to respond.

“When I was here as a kid in 1983, there was all this outrageous stuff,” McFaul explained when I asked him about whether this anti-Americanism was really so new. “But it didn’t reverberate as fast to America as it does today. Because of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, it moves fast. I can tell you from our government’s perspective: At the highest levels, they’re paying attention. And there’s this notion that I get told privately, that, hey, don’t pay attention to this election stuff. We’ll get back to our interests later. Well, that’s going to be a little hard to do because it’s gotten so offensive. And personal. They have to understand that this message that is intended for people here is also being heard at the White House.”

“It makes them look weak in the West,” McFaul says. “Man, we thought this was a more serious country. This is not serious stuff.”

Like other American officials in Moscow, he reminds me that, three weeks after his May inauguration, reinstalled President Vladimir Putin is going to have to travel to the United States for a G-8 summit, and a tête-à-tête with Barack Obama. (A meeting that Putin, perhaps tellingly, canceled.) According to various State Department sources, the anti-American propaganda and personal attacks on McFaul — who served as Obama’s close adviser on Russia matters before being tapped for the ambassadorial post — have severely tested the patience of both McFaul’s bosses: Clinton and Obama.

“This didn’t even happen in the Soviet Union,” McFaul goes on, a small rage rising in his voice. “Let’s be clear about that. This is breaching diplomatic protocol. Imagine the outrage if this happened to the Russian ambassador in Washington. It’s just not the way countries interact with each other. It’s not respectful.”

At the same time, however, McFaul is not your traditional ambassador. Not only is he not a career diplomat, unusual for such a sensitive post, but he came in at a time when the State Department has been pushing its representatives all over the world to actively use social media. In McFaul’s hands, the directive has become a flamethrower. It’s hard to remember a time when an American ambassador to Russia plunged into his work so boldly at such a politically precarious time: McFaul arrived just a month after Putin accused Clinton of stirring up regime change in Russia. On his second day, he had opposition activists over to the embassy. (The meeting, McFaul explains, had been scheduled long in advance of his arrival to coincide with the visit of Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.) Not a week into the job, he was tweeting at Navalny. He publicly invited himself onto the TV shows of Russia’s reigning diva-loud-mouths, Tina Kandelaki and Ksenia Sobchak. He accused Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the English-language pro-Kremlin channel Russia Today, of lying. “That was only because I couldn’t get the phrase ‘untrue statements’ into 140 characters,” McFaul explains.

For someone whom friends and colleagues unanimously describe as a man who glides easily between all possible worlds, who is a keen reader of character and situation, McFaul’s transition to diplomacy has been surprisingly bumpy. “I think he may have not totally understood the ramifications of his new position,” says Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, McFaul’s former colleague at Stanford University and co-author on many of his scholarly articles.

“A good diplomat is going to say enough and start enough conversations that will help make his case, not get into arguments that permanently cast him as an enemy,” says Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of the diplomatic world. He is also McFaul’s close friend. “A diplomat has to figure out the terrain he’s operating on and to make sure he makes good use of it. He knows there are a lot minefields out there and he has to be careful.” He adds, “He probably responds to things on Twitter a little differently than I would. But that’s Mike, and in general it works for him.”

Alec Ross, a senior advisor to Clinton and one of the architects of this policy of social media diplomacy, disagrees that direct engagement with the people via Facebook and the like sets American diplomats up for disaster. “I don’t agree that it’s going over Putin’s head,” he told me. “Russian officials are very aggressive users of social media themselves. Look at [Russian Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev, look at [Russian diplomat and politician Dmitry] Rogozin. They started tweeting years before Ambassador McFaul. And the content of his Twitter feed is about his playing basketball. This is not exactly the Radio Free Europe tower.” Ross made sure to add, “Ambassador McFaul enjoys the full support of the State Department.”

And yet this initiative, coupled with McFaul’s unshy public image, played right into the hands of the Kremlin, suddenly rickety and feeling pressed by this winter’s pro-democracy protests, and just when it needed a big and convincing win in the March presidential elections. “They’re using McFaul as a resource,” says Sergei Markov, a United Russia deputy and trustee of Vladimir Putin. “It would be a sin not to use it.”

McFaul, for his part, is understandably at a loss. He is, after all, the architect of the “reset,” the man who made Russia an unlikely foreign policy priority for Obama, the man who arranged the spy swap in the summer of 2010 to keep it from torpedoing Russian-American relations, who twisted Georgia’s arm to keep it from blocking Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the man who, even as officials of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party attacked him — post-election — for meddling in Russian affairs, was in Washington, lobbying Congress to repeal the Soviet-era Jackson-Vanik amendment, which prohibits normal trade relations and has long been a sticking point in Russian-American relations. And after all this, he has found himself the target of a dirty and personal attack, orchestrated — or, at least, condoned — by the very people with whom he had worked closely for the last three years, people he thought he knew.

On that bright Sunday afternoon, McFaul talked about the things he and “the president” - Obama — had accomplished so far, and the tougher tasks still left on their plates. He talked about the differences in Russian and American approaches to diplomacy — one ceremonious and legalistic, the other loosey-goosey. But the virulent attacks clearly stung him in a personal way, and at times he sounded like a lover scorned. “They’re the ones who have changed,” he said, shaking his head and spreading his arms in a kind of stunned helplessness. “We’ve changed nothing. Zero.”

* * *

McFaul was born in 1963, in Glasgow, Montana, a tiny town near the border with Canada, but he grew up on the other side of the state, in Butte. The city is famous for its gold, silver, and copper mines, and for the Berkeley pit, a lake of acidic water laced with heavy metals so poisonous that it kills whole flocks of foul unwise enough to rest there. (It was once a copper mine.) As a scholar, McFaul can appreciate Butte as an interesting town, one with parallels to contemporary Russia. “In the 19th century, it was the fourth largest city west of the Mississippi,” he says. “There were oligarchs in Butte, and they made a lot of money there and they shipped it to New York and lived there. There was a similar tension between the metropole and the regions,” referring to the Russia outside of Moscow.

Things looked less interesting closer to home, however. Butte was classic middle America, a rough mining town where social status was directly proportional to athletic prowess. Even now, sitting in the ambassador’s sitting room at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during another interview, 30 years later, McFaul can boast of the fact that the high school wrestling team swept the national championships 17 years in a row. He demurred when I asked him what sport he played. “These are delicate moments for me!” he exclaims. It was, he says, “a pretty rough experience growing up there.” (McFaul ran track.)

The pain eased two years later, in 1978, when the family moved 90 miles down the road to Bozeman. McFaul’s father had quit his job as a music teacher, and decided to become a professional musician. He would end up spending decades on the road, but in those days, his steadiest gig was at the Ramada Inn in Bozeman. He split his time between the Ramada and Butte, where his wife and children still lived. Bozeman was a university town and, in addition to reuniting the family, the McFauls figured they would have an easier time putting their five kids through college if they could live at home. Three months after moving to a trailer in Bozeman, McFaul’s father lost his gig at the Ramada. “He virtually never played in Bozeman again,” McFaul says.

Despite the family’s financial straits, the young McFaul underwent a renaissance in Bozeman. He discovered the town’s thriving counter culture; he was elected student body president. He took the debate class where, at the height of the Cold War, he argued for the repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. It was his first exposure to foreign policy and Soviet-American relations. “That’s when I developed the view that our policy toward the Soviets was wrong,” he recalls. “I had what in retrospect what I would call a naïve view, that if we just could communicate and get to know people better, we could reduce tensions.”

Two years later, when he got to Stanford, he signed up for introduction to international relations and Russian. “I was horrible at it,” he says of the latter. “I hated it. I still do. I’m not good at languages. But my whole motivation was to go to the Soviet Union.”

In June 1983, after his second year at Stanford — and two years of Russian — McFaul arrived in Leningrad. It was the first time he had traveled abroad, and yet the leap from California to Leningrad seemed smaller than the one he had made from Bozeman to Stanford. His arrival in wealthy Palo Alto had politicized him and moved him further to the left. “There were rich people in Montana, but that’s because they have a lot of land,” McFaul recalls, slipping his foot out of a clunky black shoe. “They all drive pick-up trucks and wear blue jeans.” Stanford was different. “The first day of freshman year, I met a guy who had 90 Grateful Dead tapes. That was like a sign of wealth to me. I just never met anybody who had 90 tapes of anything! That blew my mind.”

Leningrad in the early 1980s had the right dash of gritty authenticity. That summer, McFaul experienced the city’s famous white nights. He waited in line for ice cream with chocolate sprinkles; he argued with his American friends about unemployment and trickle-down economics.

That summer, McFaul laid the foundations of what would become a wide social network in Russia. He made a local friend, Yuri, with whom he snuck into underground jazz concerts. He became acquainted with the local refuseniks and the farsovschiki, or black-market speculators. “They’re the ones you could meet because they had business to do with you,” McFaul says. “Yes, they were taking our blue jeans and changing our dollars, and it was all business. But they also listened to Led Zeppelin and did things that college kids want to do.”

The next time McFaul came back to the Soviet Union, in 1985, it was for his semester abroad, at Moscow’s State Institute of Russian Language, part of the city’s prestigious Moscow State University. “That took the edge off the romance,” he says. The cafeteria had given someone food poisoning before the foreign students’ arrival and remained shuttered for the rest of the semester. “It was a struggle to get calories,” McFaul remembers.

His saviors were the African students he roomed with. They fed him homemade stews and taught him how to eat something rarely eaten in Middle America: vegetables. McFaul was still socializing with Moscow’s refuseniks and farsovschiki, but it was the African crew that became the fulcrum of his time in Soviet Moscow. Life was hard for them, McFaul recalls: racism, sporadic violence. “But those guys knew how to throw parties. They could access beer. Buying a beer in 1985 was not easy to do in this country. And they knew how to do it.”

The star of the crew was Fani, the Nigerian. “He was the Michael Jackson of Moscow,” McFaul grins. “The best disco was at [Stalinist agricultural expo center] VDNKh. What’s that hotel called? Cosmos! Is it still there?” He remembers Fani bribing the doormen to get their friend Natasha, a student at the elite state diplomatic academy, MGIMO, into the club. “The Nigerian guy was sneaking in the MGIMO students, in their own country,” he says. Through Fani, McFaul met the children of the elite of Eastern Europe — they were friends with the son of the Polish defense minister — and through them, the MGIMO kids. “They reminded me a lot of the elite right now,” he says of the gilded youth of the Soviet Union’s twilight. “They liked their lifestyle, they were appreciative of what they have, they don’t want to lose it, but they also know the system’s limitations and want more.” But he adds, “they were scared to death of real dissidents.”

McFaul didn’t meet any real dissidents on that trip, but he became interested in the African question, and would end up writing his doctoral dissertation on Soviet and American influences on revolutionary movements in southern Africa. “They came to Moscow on these scholarships to learn communism,” McFaul says of his African friends. “Nothing was a more powerful tool of making them pro-American than the experience that most of them were having here.” McFaul also says those hungry months made him increasingly anti-communist.

At the end of his semester in Moscow, he shipped off to Nigeria, where a Stanford student named Donna Norton — his then girlfriend, now wife — was doing research on urban-to-rural migration. Fani met him in Lagos. It turned out he was the son of the general secretary of the Communist Party of Nigeria. “In all my time here, I never knew it,” McFaul says. “He’s an entrepreneur now. He’s making a lot of money in Nigerian-Russian trade.”

* * *

When I met Sergei Markov, the United Russia Party foreign-policy hawk and Putin enthusiast, he was on crutches and had a cast on his left foot — a motorcycle accident in January had left him with a broken ankle. We talked as he waited in the freezing green room of a Russian television studio. He had set up an invisible conveyer belt from the refreshments table to his mouth. “The reset has fulfilled its mission, which was to remove the foolishness of the Bush era,” he said, inhaling a mushroom pastry in one bite. “Now it’s time for the Americans to meet us halfway.” That means: Get rid of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, develop their military strategy with Russia’s interests in mind, and change the anti-Russian “regimes” in Latvia and Estonia. (How? Well, that is up to the Americans, he told me.)

Even with these beliefs, Markov thinks McFaul is the right man for the job. “He’s the perfect representative of America,” he told me, devouring a cucumber spear. “He is open, friendly, generous. He’s very democratic. He has a strong moral compass, and he really wants to help.” Markov knows all this firsthand.

It is one of those strange twists of fate that this man was once McFaul’s close friend and colleague. The two were observers of the ferment of Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Markov was a philosophy graduate student at Moscow State and active in Democratic Russia, an early shoot of the Russian democracy movement, and McFaul was studying international relations at Oxford. Together, they chronicled the collapse of the Soviet Union, interviewing scores of participants in the events of the time for a book called Russia’s Unfinished Revolution. (Markov’s then wife earned some extra money transcribing the interviews.) They had tea at Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s tiny apartment in Moscow’s northern suburbs. They went to see the hard-core “Pamyat” (or “Memory”) movement, where one activist greeted the two students in full SS regalia, and another nearly killed Markov for accidentally sitting on the group’s flag. Markov recalls McFaul noting afterwards that it was his first time seeing a real racist, in the flesh.

Markov began to work with the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute — a decade-long gig. He went to McFaul’s wedding in California, where he — unsuccessfully — hit on another Russia scholar and friend of McFaul’s, Condoleezza Rice. In 1994, McFaul and Markov helped found the Moscow Carnegie Center, which hosted regular discussions and seminars featuring a novel feature to draw an audience: free dinner. A few years later, Markov was pushed out of Carnegie because he was viewed as the propagandist of the second Chechen War. McFaul defended him and the two have remained friends to this day, “which can be kind of difficult at times,” says a mutual friend who had been part of their crew in the 1990s. “The last time I was in Washington, I stayed with McFaul,” Markov told me. “We debated vigorously.”

But if McFaul is famous for his ability to befriend anyone, he is also famous for a hot, quick temper (as the redhead from NTV can well attest). At one academic conference, McFaul got into a long, full-throated throwdown with Stephen Kotkin, the famous Soviet historian, because he had criticized McFaul’s 2008 essay in Foreign Affairs, co-authored with Stoner-Weiss, his Stanford colleague, and called “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back.” (Someone from the Kremlin called the two authors to tell them, “Mr. Putin has read the article, and it was not entirely to his liking.”) But McFaul’s views on Russia escape easy categorization. He seems to dish it out on a purely egalitarian basis. Former Bush administration official David Kramer, who runs Freedom House, an organization known for its very anti-Kremlin views, frequently squabbles with his old friend McFaul. “I’ve gotten some very long emails from him after I’ve written some things,” Kramer told me. “And, yes, it had some colorful language sprinkled in.”

And yet, McFaul has been able to hop between the lily pads of academia, politics, and journalism. After a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he stayed on to complete a DPhil, the rough British equivalent of a Ph.D. This put him at odds with many in the political science community in the United States, where the methods rely less on local knowledge — as per the British model — but on computation and a strict methodology. “He kicked the door open into the American system in a way I haven’t seen,” says Stoner-Weiss. “Look at how many DPhils you see at elite American universities. There aren’t that many. And the fact that he got tenure without doing hi-tech methodology tells you how good he was.” (McFaul puts it this way: “I went to Oxford so I’m considered a Neanderthal.”)

If he was able to win over the gray beards of the academy with his mastery of the subject, he was also the friend of every Western journalist covering Russia, past and present. Sometimes he managed to beat journalists at their own game. In 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was facing an uncertain election, the hardliners around him — Alexander Korzhakov and Oleg Soskovets — were at times encouraging the sick old man to stall the election or call it off entirely. “They didn’t talk to Western correspondents much, and we never knew what they were up to, or thinking, ” recalls David Hoffman, Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow during the 1990s. McFaul, meanwhile, had no problem penetrating the barrier: Once, Korzhakov and Soskovets even brought him back to one of their dachas to drink and talk politics. “I was terribly jealous,” Hoffman says. “I also wanted to meet with these guys. They sent an official Volga for him!” Hoffman’s jealousy subsided when he found out the reason for the Yeltsin crew’s hospitality. They had thought McFaul was CIA.

* * *

McFaul’s entry into politics came in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. Long at home in policy circles in Washington, he had become a foreign-policy advisor to John Edwards, who was running against Obama in the primaries. (Edwards later flamed out in scandal, admitting he fathered a child with a campaign staffer while his wife was dying of cancer, and McFaul now tries to downplay their relationship.) Then he switched to Obama. With the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008, McFaul’s share of Obama’s attention span grew. He was able to convince the president-to-be that repairing the Russian-American relationship would be a great opportunity to set the new administration apart from that of George W. Bush. It would be another way to improve America’s image on the international stage, an image Bush had done so much to mangle.

McFaul relished the role of advisor, joining the White House staff as a senior director on the National Security Council. He became simply “McFaul” to Obama. In his office in Washington, in the Old Executive Office Building, he had a poster of a New Republic magazine cover that showed Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, leaning over Obama’s desk in the Oval Office. Once, when I visited McFaul there, he explained it to me: The illustration had actually been based on a picture of him, but the designers at the magazine swapped Emanuel’s head for his. McFaul loved to talk about his experiences negotiating with the Russians, about accompanying the president to summits, about getting to know the Russian mucketymucks and to rub elbows with them. He loved participating in an historical process and gathering anecdotes along the way: He can tell a long story about how the “burger summit” between Obama and Medvedev happened, and how Vice President Joseph Biden got on the phone and boxed Saakashvili’s ears after Georgian state television led an evening newscast with a fake Russian invasion.

But by 2011, his family was itching to return to Stanford. When McFaul broke the news to Obama, the president offered to make him ambassador — a strange move, given how much the Russians loved then ambassador and Russophile John Beyrle. But Obama was keen to keep McFaul: As his domestic agenda ran up against an intransigent and radicalized Congress — which majorly delayed McFaul’s confirmation — and American policy in Middle East went up in flames, Russia was one of the few major successes that Obama could point to.

At first, McFaul spoke of himself as “an accidental ambassador” — a phrase he says he is trying not to use anymore. And the early miscalculation — and Russia’s icy reception — aside, McFaul is coming to relish this new role, too. “Actually, I think that Mike has become a pretty disciplined diplomat,” says Sestanovich. “He does this ‘aw, shucks I’m not a professional diplomat,’ but he’s gotten pretty good at managing public statements, at managing public-policy process. He’s found his balance pretty quickly.” Nor does Sestanovich buy into the talk of McFaul’s naïveté. “My children grew up hearing Mike talk about knife fights in Montana mining towns,” he says. “The idea that the world is dominated by misunderstanding that can just be dispelled by dialogue is not Mike’s worldview.”

* * *

“There’s this notion out here that all I taught was regime change,” McFaul told me that February afternoon at Spaso House, referring to the infamous commentary on state-owned Channel 1, which alleged that McFaul, an expert in revolutions, was coming to finish the job he started in 1991. McFaul did, in fact, teach a class in revolutions at Stanford, but, he points out, he also taught a course on U.S.-Russia relations and on the political economy of the post-communist world. As for the Channel 1 allegations, McFaul says they are “absolute nonsense.”

“I’m not here to foment a revolution,” he says. “If we were here to foment revolution, we’d be doing very different things. I know exactly what we did in other countries. I’ve written a lot about how external actors impact on domestic change and the punchline of most of my work is that it’s always incredibly marginal and, in big countries, almost negligible.”

Given all that’s happened, does he feel that the reset is stalling, or dead? Or, given the extent to which simple spite and wounded pride factor into Russian foreign policy, that it was a naïve endeavor to begin with? “Our policy is that we think it’s in our national interest to have governments that are open, more transparent, and more accountable to their people,” he says, citing the widely held theory that democratic countries are more likely to be at peace with each other.

But at times this winter, the reset has looked more and more like the jolting dance of unwilling partners who occasionally — and perhaps purposefully — step on each other’s feet. On one hand, Medvedev told Obama in Seoul in March that this was the best Russian-American relations had ever been. Then came the hot-mic incident — Republican challenger Mitt Romney went at Obama for asking America’s “geopolitical enemy No. 1″ for “room to maneuver” — and Medvedev’s testy response. He asked “all U.S. presidential candidates” to “check the time — it is now 2012, not the mid-1970s.” Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin youth groups were harassing Obama’s ambassador to Moscow.

In the meantime, a split seems to have developed inside the State Department as a result of all of this. Career Foreign Service officers are appalled at McFaul’s undiplomatic behavior — what kind of ambassador gets down and argues with a sham television reporter? — while McFaul’s big bosses still insist he’s the right man for the job.

But the incident with NTV proved “a breaking point,” according to one U.S. official in Moscow. Afterward — and after the State Department filed an official complaint with the Russian Foreign Ministry — the Russian promise that the harassment would die down after the presidential elections came true. Shortly after Putin’s inauguration, in May, McFaul boasted, “It’s the last time I ever saw those guys.”

The State Department, for its part, has decided to show a unified face and step up its public defense of McFaul. Speaking amid the ashes of the controversy surrounding McFaul’s Kyrgyz “bribe” comment, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland made clear that the Americans weren’t about to change anything. “He speaks plainly. He speaks clearly. He doesn’t mince words. He’s not a professional diplomat,” she said. “I think that for the Russian government, the fact that he speaks clearly when things are going well and he speaks clearly when they’re going less well is something that they’re having to get used to.”

The Undiplomat [FP]

On Sunday, May 6th, about seventy thousand Muscovites—as well as some people who came from other parts of Russia—gathered to peacefully protest Vladimir Putin’s third presidential inauguration, scheduled for the next day. They marched down a wide avenue, carrying funny signs and chanting “Russia without Putin!” They marched until they got to Bolotnaya Square, the site of two other unprecedentedly huge anti-Kremlin rallies this winter. But the police, apparently going back on agreements with the protest’s organizers, stood in such a way as to make entry into the square very difficult, and then cut the electricity to the stage. A sit-in started, someone pushed someone, and the scene became very violent very quickly. Protesters hurled bottles and chunks of cement, police threw tear gas. Smoke bombs flew back and forth. Riot police—dubbed “cosmonauts,” for their shiny round black helmets—descended into the churning, angry crowd in a V formation to pluck out young men to beat and drag away. Over four hundred people were arrested that day, and at least a hundred of them were later slapped with draft cards.

I watched this for about three hours, occasionally getting caught in a terrifying crush and once catching a chunk of concrete to the leg. I watched the plainclothes cops videotape the proceedings. I watched riot police approach terrified bystanders—women and middle-aged men who had come to the rally but had not signed up for this—pull them off the fences, and force them into the scuffle. “I don’t want to go in there!” a woman yelled. “I’m scared!” I saw people keel over, wheezing and coughing from the tear gas, as I pulled my sweatshirt over my nose and mouth. Very scary angry young men, either anarchists or nationalists or provocateurs, who looked very different from the mass of middle-class protestors, threw themselves into the battle. I saw someone hoist a police helmet on the tip of a red flag while four others bobbed in the water of the canal behind us. I saw a burly riot cop stumble out of the scuffle, fluorescent red blood streaming down his face. I saw bloodstains on the ground, and yellow port-a-potties go down, spilling their contents, turning into makeshift barricades. I saw row upon row of internal-security troops blocking the bridge leading to the Kremlin, as if Moscow were preparing for a foreign invasion. I saw two rows of riot police press in on the stragglers from two sides, and I saw the panic in the faces of those around me.

I took ham-fisted pictures of all of this with my iPhone and tried to upload them to my Twitter feed, which in these situations is especially convenient: a notebook and a newswire in one. Then I, too, got squeezed out of the square. I was shaken, exhausted, and strangely hungry, and walked with a friend to get something to eat and catch our breaths. We headed up to another small bridge over the canal, where some protesters had gathered. Everyone was riled up, and no one really wanted to go home.

This is where I took the picture. There was a phalanx of riot police on this bridge, too, blocking another route to the Kremlin. In front of them stood a young brunette in a short red dress and wedge platform shoes. She was waving the orange flag of the opposition Solidarity movement, and, judging by the expression on her face, she thought she was Moscow’s Lady Liberty—the icon of the protest. I thought she was, too. It was just so Russian: a woman in heels, even during a violent protest, self-consciously, calculatingly, making herself into a consumable, sexy image while those around her talked about fair elections and Putin’s villainy.

I was wrong. My friend, Olaf Koens, a Dutch reporter, had the better eye. (He does some television work.) But after hours of documenting the violence, his iPhone was dead. He smacked my arm and said, “Look! Look! There’s the picture!” I saw a small boy on what looked like a tricycle moving through a scrum of people raining abuse on the police. Then he just stopped. I had followed him, my phone still in hand, and, when he stopped, I kneeled down and snapped the picture. I posted the picture on Twitter, misspelling Tiananmen, and went to get something to eat.

The picture went viral, though I was too distracted by the protests to really notice at first: they continued, uninterrupted, for another three days. After Bolotnaya, the protesters fanned out into the surrounding streets, and the police followed, chasing them into cafés and metro stations. Two of my friends, Russian journalists, were arrested. One of them was hit in the head with a truncheon. The following day, people wearing white ribbons (the symbol of the protest) were pulled off the streets, as were those who didn’t know what the white ribbons meant. A café where the opposition likes to drink was raided.

Soon, the protest morphed into something opposition politician Alexey Navalny called the “people’s strolls”: on the night of May 7th, I was with him as hundreds of people trailed after him through the streets of Moscow. Improvising on the spot, they kept going until five in the morning, passing cars honking their support, passengers hanging out their windows and flashing peace signs. It was an exercise in escaping the baffled riot police. “How can I turn them around?” I heard one officer say into his walkie-talkie. “It’s just me and five warriors here!”

Over the next two days, scores more were detained by the police only to be quickly let go: the jails were already too full after the events of May 6th. And yet the protests kept going, moving around the city, from square to square, even as Navalny and the other opposition leader, the radical leftist Sergei Udaltsov, were arrested. “I was born and raised here,” a thirty-five-year-old man told me. “And now they’re going to arrest me for strolling through my own city? Now I’m going to come every night.” At each gathering, the faces were different. Twitter and Facebook were used to marshal reinforcements. I slept only infrequently, for a couple hours in the early morning, periodically marvelling at the blooming bruise where the concrete had hit my thigh.

I never did find out who that little boy is, or how his parents let him wheel that close to the police. Instead, I’ve found myself observing the evolution of the protests. After running from the police all over town on Wednesday, about seven hundred people gathered by the statue of Abai Kunanbaev, the Kazakh poet-philosopher and new symbol of the roving protests, in Chistye Prudy. (The movement is now using the hash tag #occupyabai.)

Chistye Prudy was the site of the gathering, on December 5th, a day after a disputed parliamentary election, that launched the protest movement, a wave of discontent among the middle class to which the Kremlin has responded by alternately ignoring it and issuing threatening statements. (A couple of days ago, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, allegedly told a parliament deputy that the protesters deserved to have “their livers smeared on the pavement” for each injured cop.)

And yet, there was no anger here. People sang songs and socialized. A trio of drummers showed up. A young man handed out McDonald’s burgers, saying, “Who wants a State Department burger?” (Putin and his allies have portrayed the opposition as American pawns.) So many of those present had been arrested, some more than once, that it became almost unfashionable not to have been arrested. The police with their herd of personnel carriers stood ready in the streets, but the order to move in never came. They hung around blasting music from their cars and eating sunflower seeds, or catcalling to passing girls from the protest. It was a party, and it looked a lot like Union Square on a Saturday night. No one knew where it was going, or how it would all end, but most people I spoke to predicted that blood would be a factor in that end. They seemed calm about that prospect.

The Boy on the Bicycle [TNY]

Even the Queen of England, elected by no one, I thought, waves to her subjects.

I sat watching Putin’s frigid Presidential ritual with Sasha and Masha, the two “Persidents” of Ruissia, a farcical country whose borders happen to coincide coincide with Russia’s. They are the authors of the KermlinRussia twitter account, which started as a biting parody of the twitter feed of the now departed Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev. It has become a wildly popular satire of Russia’s bizarre, “Sopranos”-like political system and economy. If Russia had a Stephen Colbert, it would be Sasha and Masha. (I profiled the anonymous duo, and you can catch a glimpse of them in David Remnick’s recent account of Russia twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

“Where are the citizens who elected him?” I wondered aloud.

“Were there citizens who elected him?” Sasha said, looking up from his iPhone, where he’d been checking responses to their most recent tweet. “I think the citizens of Moscow would kill him.”

“I can only imagine what they’d write on their posters if they were allowed out,” Masha added.

Even with fraud, Moscow delivered one of the lowest shares of votes for the new-old President: forty-five per cent. His total nationally was sixty-four.

Putin’s cortege swung off the embankment off the Moscow River and up past the ice-cream cones of St. Basil’s Cathedral. We remembered the legend of its construction: a Russian architect had built it for Ivan the Terrible, to mark the capture of the Tatar cities of Kazan and Astrakhan. Ivan loved the unusual construction, and asked the architect, “Think you can build another?” When the architect answered in the affirmative, Ivan blinded him.

“That’s what happened with Putin and Medvedev,” Masha explained, referring to their swapping the roles of President and Prime Minister after Medvedev had served one term as President. “Putin said, ‘Think you can get elected again?’ Medvedev gave the wrong answer.”

By this point, Putin’s limousine was already inside the Kremlin gates. It rolled over the cobblestones past the lush Kremlin gardens, blooming with the fragile blossoms of spring. Putin was mounting the stairs, draped in red carpet.

“Oh, I see the swelling has gone down,” Masha said, alluding to Putin’s alleged—but very obvious—plastic surgery, which had appeared late last year.

Putin was announced, and two guards in full 19th-century regalia pulled open a set of massive doors to let the President-elect into the hall. (“Why don’t they just slam him with the door?” Masha wondered.)

To say that the Andreev Hall, the site where Putin was about to swear his oath to protect the Russian constitution, was gilded would be like calling Times Square “well-lit.”

“My god, it is so tacky!” Sasha moaned. “Why did they decorate it like that?”

“Well, that’s certainly not Italian,” Masha said, referring to the Renaissance Italian artisans who built the Kremlin walls.

The camera panned across the crowd applauding as Putin strode into the hall: the invited political, economic, and artistic élite, some guests from “the people,” all aged, all loyal, all of distinctly Soviet—or Botoxed—aspect: the modern nomenklatura.

“There’s the electorate!” Masha said.

Sasha shook his head.

“They’re so ugly,” he sighed.

The camera caught sight of Lyudmila Putina, Putin’s wife, who disappeared from public view around the time rumors surfaced that Putin had taken up with the young rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva. (Rumors also place Putina in a convent near Pskov.) Putina blinked rapidly and seemed unsteady on her feet. She did not look well. Kabaeva was in the crowd, too, and someone posted a picture of her at the event on Twitter.

“Let’s repost it and write ‘The first lady,’ ” Sasha suggested.

“No, no,” Masha said, knowingly shaking her black bob. “Second lady.”

Up it went.

“Really, though, Medvedev is the first lady,” he said. “He goes to all the social functions, he does the children’s charities.”

On the screen, Medvedev was intoning something about the duties he dutifully, perfectly carried out. He seemed to be giving a wedding toast or a bar-mitzvah speech.

“Oh, the pathos,” Masha rolled her eyes. “Stanislavski is spinning in his grave listening to you, comrade.” The camera panned to Silvio Berlusconi, also in the audience: “Where’s Qaddafi?” they tweeted.

Putin stepped up to the dais, rolling like a tough guy. The camera showed his hand, with wedding ring, on the red leather-bound copy of the constitution. He promised to uphold the freedoms of the Russian people, the country’s security and sovereignty.

“Your sovereignty from the constitution,” Masha said. She added, flatly, “Looks like there’s no wind in the Andreev Hall of the Kremlin.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s not crying!”

We laughed, they tweeted it, but the mood was quickly souring. The day before, Moscow was convulsed with violence as riot police clashed with opposition protesters. Four hundred people were arrested. Scores were injured. The police snatched some of them from cafés and metro stations. Young men of military age were specifically targeted, and then slapped with draft cards. Today, as we sat in a sunny Moscow café, laughing at the pomp and the circumstance, reports were coming in over Twitter of more people being arrested all over the city. There was supposed to be a flashmob of people wearing white—symbol of the winter’s peaceful anti-Kremlin protests—and the order had come down to arrest people walking the streets with white ribbons. People were snapped off of park benches, as they strolled Moscow’s romantic boulevards. Riot police stormed a café, Jean-Jacques, known as a hub of opposition social life. They grabbed people sipping coffee outside, turned over tables, and shattered dishes. Then they occupied it, and the pub next door. Immediately, a picture juxtaposing today’s image with a photograph of Wermacht enjoying a Parisian café in June 1941 made the rounds online. “This,” one blogger declared, “is war.”

And, increasingly, it’s begun to feel like one. But if satire is perfect for ribbing the stagnant, silly regime of a leader who dives for urns and rides around with Orthodox Christian motorcycle gangs, it can feel a little out of place in a war, and, especially, in a siege.

Putin was walking back out the hall now, passing hundreds of his clapping guests. They were reaching out to shake his hand, to touch him. If he felt any pleasure at their adoration, he didn’t betray it.

Masha quietly scrolled through her phone. Sasha looked out the window.

“It’s so sad,” he said. “All of this.”

Putin’s Inauguration: Satire and Violence [TNY]