Which makes the second thing a little less surprising. If the first big protest, on Bolotnaya Square, on December 10, was a mix of the politically active and the young and white-collared, the crowd that reconvened there on Saturday was extremely diverse. There were pensioners and office workers and a group of military history hobbyists wearing fatigues. (”We’re freaks,” one of them explained.) There were even veteran paratroopers, the saltiest of the salty earth and famous for their August holiday when they strip to their skivvies and frolic in city fountains. One does not expect to see them marching alongside iPhone-toting urbanites and democracy activists. And yet, there were paratrooper flags everywhere. “They think that our people don’t think, don’t see anything, and don’t understand anything,” one of the veterans, a 50-year-old named Sergei, told me. “It’s time for the country to be ruled by honest people.”

Beyond the sloganeering, there were signs this time of genuine political organizing in advance of the national elections on March 4 when Putin will run to resume the presidency he temporarily handed over to Dmitry Medvedev four years ago. Several booths had been set up to gather signatures for petitions to contest election violations in court. People recruited election monitors, part of a drive over the last few weeks that’s culminated in two projects to train over 20,000 volunteer election monitors: one by the blogger and opposition Alexey Navalny and another, called Voters’ League, formed by the creative types among the protest organizers.

I also met two men who had decided to run for office in the Moscow municipal elections in March. “We need normal people to get into government, so that the organs of the state work not for themselves but for the citizens of the district,” said one of the candidates, Konstantin Kolisnichenko, 36, who, surprisingly, works for a government bank. (Unsurprisingly, he’s had a near impossible time getting on the ballot.) It was a statement that sounded a lot different from the chants of “Putin is a thief” around us. It sounded suspiciously like normal political discourse.

Meanwhile, the pro-Putin forces gathered across town. More accurately, they were bused in, and many were paid for. There were a lot of them, though not nearly as many as the 138,000-person Internal Ministry estimate. And if the tens of thousands at Bolotnaya laughed and smiled, the people at the pro-Putin rally had little to be cheerful about. The message delivered to them as they stood in the frost was one of brimstone and fire: the country was on the verge of collapsing, revolution was around the corner. “They want to drown the country in blood,” television star Maxim Shevchenko shouted from the stage about the protesters gathered on the other side of Moscow.

This apocalyptic imagery is strange, given the peaceful nature of the opposition protests. It does, however, reflect the fear and incomprehension about the protests inside the halls of power. “Julia, do you have a pet?” Yuri Kotler asked me the other day. Kotler is a young member of the ruling United Russia party and was once an advisor to Boris Gryzlov, former speaker of the Duma. I had asked him how the slowly mounting protests were perceived in the Kremlin. Yes, I said, I do have a pet. A cat. “Well, imagine if your cat came to you and started talking,” Kotler explained. “First of all, it’s a cat, and it’s talking. Are you sure it’s talking? You have to make sure. Second, all these years, the government fed it, gave it water, petted it, and now it’s talking and asking for something. It’s a shock. We have to get used to it.”

Leaving aside the telling analogy of citizens as mute-animal property, the comment is important for another reason: 100,000 people come out to protest in severe cold, the third such mass protest in the heart of the capital in two months, and the Kremlin is clearly still trying to get used to it — or hoping it will all go away. “It’s a bureaucracy, and it works for itself,” Kotler told me. “It’ll take a long time for them to understand that they’re hired.”

But there is evidence that the initial shock is wearing off and the Kremlin — that is, Putin — is slowly hardening its stance. First, it offered some carrots, in the form of legislation to make party registration easier and to bring back popular election of governors. It stopped cracking down on protests, as it had done in early December. And last week, Putin said his campaign would think about working with the Voters’ League monitors. Russian television viewers even got to see Boris Nemtsov, a veteran of the democratic opposition — and the federal television blacklists — on national television, as well as some criticism of Putin’s performance during his annual Q&A with the public.

Now, there is talk in the capital of “tightening the screws,” one of those still-resonant phrases from the Soviet era, when screw-tightening meant something far harsher than what is available to the Kremlin today. “They’re waiting for the opposition to make a mistake,” says one Moscow source with close knowledge of the Kremlin. “Once they do, it will be a welcome opportunity to crack down.” In fact, the stick has already been used along with the carrots. Opposition figures and those involved in organizing the protests have been harassed in the last months. Nemtsov’s phone was hacked and recordings of his salty discussions with his press secretary were made public. Details of the Christmas holidays of various figures also leaked to the press. The parents of one of the organizers, journalist Ilya Klishin, were summoned to their local branch of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, which the security organization later denied.

And the journalist responsible for that rare on-air critique of Putin has since been fired from his station, the Gazprom-owned NTV, where there has been a purge of editorial staff in recent weeks amid rumors that a Kremlin loyalist, Margarita Simonyan, might replace the current head of NTV. Whether or not she does, the point has been clearly made: to bring order to an upstart channel, to remind staff about their ultimate loyalty. It was made even clearer in the decision of Channel 1, the main state-owned channel, not to air potentially sharp programming in the month before the presidential election.

Saturday’s pro-Putin rally in Moscow — and smaller ones across the country — have to be seen in this context. If the opposition’s strategy is to show the Kremlin that its sheer numbers demand more inclusion in the political process, Putin is answering in kind: there are even more of us. Which is why the official tallies of yesterday’s protests in Moscow — 138,000 for Putin, 35,000 against him — were so bizarrely off. (Most observers, including police I spoke to on the scene, put the figures roughly in reverse: 30,000 for Putin, 100,000 against him in Moscow.) And why it was so important that, in every city where there was an opposition protest this weekend, there was a larger, mirror one in support of Putin, with titles like “Strong leader, strong nation.”

Nor is it a coincidence that, just as people streamed home from the protests, Russia vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has turned his guns on his own citizens. Russia is not Syria, and it is unlikely that Putin, with his European pretensions, would crack down that hard. But his people do warn of blood flowing and, at the last meeting of the Valdai discussion club, in November, Putin spoke of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s “gruesome” end. It has been rumored to be something of an obsession for him.

Thus the stonewalling, and what we’re about to see: a real escalation by the opposition. If the protests in December were about new, fair parliamentary elections, the focus now is becoming Putin, and there will soon be only one demand: Putin has to go. This is, of course, the logical outcome for a leader who has so personalized Russia’s entire dysfunctional political system, and who continues to preclude conceding more than an inch. But upping the ante is a risky game, especially if you lose it.

When Russians — and those thousands of new election monitors — go to the polls to vote for Russia’s president for the next six years, it’s by no means clear what will happen. Putin will likely win, but how? The possible scenarios do not promise a calm Russian spring. If Putin wins in the first round, but with just over the required 50 percent of the vote, few will see it as a legitimate victory, most likely because it won’t be. “They’ve spent a decade building a system that, on every level — teachers, local elites — are incentivized to falsify the vote to deliver the right percentages,” political consultant and former Kremlin advisor Gleb Pavlovsky told me in January. “You can’t just flip a switch, and expect the system to stop on a dime.” If Putin forces a win in the first round, Pavlovsky added, “he’ll assume the presidency for the first time in an atmosphere of mistrust, skepticism, and depression.”

The problem is, by March, it will no longer be -10 degrees outside. If half a million, or even a million people come out — and chances are, many will — how will the security forces respond? Will they leave them to protest in peace, as they have in the last two months, or will they crack down, as they did on December 5? If Putin is forced into a second round of the presidential vote and then wins, he will still have less legitimacy than before, especially in his own eyes. “For him, it will be a psychological catastrophe,” one government official explained to me. “We’re screwed,” the official said when I asked him for his assessment. He gave the current incarnation of the system two more years, tops.

But some in the opposition are not too optimistic for their own prospects either. “Everyone was so euphoric yesterday,” says opposition leader and former Duma speaker Vladimir Ryzhkov. “But I went home last night and thought about it, and, oh boy. We’re stuck. We’re at a dead end.” Dead ends rarely end well in a country where dialogue with the other side is stigmatized, especially when the side with the power — and the guns — keeps warning of blood and chaos.

So far, however, those thoughts seem to be far from the minds of the tens of thousands who braved the bitterest cold for a purely political cause. “I had the choice to stay in my warm bed today,” said one middle-aged woman in a floor-length mink coat. The strap of an expensive purse crossed her torso, there were Armani aviators perched on her nose. Her skin was clearly familiar with the salons of the city. A former businesswoman, she said she had missed the December protests. “I know I picked a crazy day to come out,” she said about the cold. “But I just couldn’t sit at home anymore.”

Clearly, the times are changing. In the last two months, a surprising addition to the protesting crowds has been Ksenia Sobchak, the popsy, fashionable daughter of the late Anatoly Sobchak, former mayor of St. Petersburg and Putin’s political mentor. She has long been part of the gilded, Kremlin-friendly elite, a sort of Russian Paris Hilton, and her joining the protests has been viewed with some suspicion. On Saturday, she weighed in on her Twitter account. “If the government doesn’t see now that people are willing to stand out in the frost and defend their rights, that government will be overthrown.”

Upping the Ante [FP]

On December 6th, two days after the disputed elections brought thousands of angry Muscovites into the streets, these youth groups staged a massive counter-rally. They had pins and scarves and jackets and giant drums, which they pounded as the police surgically snatched nearly six hundred opposition protesters from the crowd and sent them off to jail. (They also had aggressive soccer hooligans keeping order, another hallmark of such gatherings.)
Four days later, on December 10th, a historically huge crowd of fifty thousand had come out to Bolotnaya Square to demand fair elections.

Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party—whose questionable victory was the reason for the ruckus—said it would bring out just as many people for a rally by the Kremlin walls two days later. But only two thousand people came out, if that. It was a thin crowd, which made for a strange counterpoint to one of the speakers, who went on about looking out from the stage and seeing a sea of United Russia supporters. Who were these supporters? One Russian journalist, armed with a camera, decided to find out by asking them why they came. Most turned away or ignored him. One of them, a migrant worker from Central Asia, could barely string together a sentence in Russian. (Many in the crowd that day, it turned out, were migrants—and not Russian citizens.)

There was a similar sham rally a few days ago, in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains. This one, though, was in support of Putin’s candidacy for the Presidency and of the working class, which dominates the region. Many of the workers who attended the rally had been bused in from neighboring cities, industrial centers where life, even in Putin’s gilded era, is still not very pleasant. Several colleagues who went out there for the rally told me that people were very angry at Putin—the word “lynch” was used—but went to the rally in Yekaterinburg because their employers required them to, and because there was free vodka. This didn’t seem to add much to their mood, though: A video, which quickly went viral, showed a Duma deputy—formerly a worker from a nearby city—screaming “Urals! Russia! Putin!” He heard crickets in response. The protest, by the way, scraped together about ten thousand people, and police fined the organizers for having more people than the permit for the gathering allowed—an especially fine touch.

Today was the crowning moment of the Kremlin’s effort. As a hundred and twenty thousand opposition protesters marched through subzero temperatures—negative ten degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact—to Bolotnaya Square, buses across town brought in pro-Putin protesters to Poklonnaya Gora, the plaza commemorating Russia’s victory in the Second World War. The official police estimates of the size of each crowd were not believable. They put the pro-Putin number at a hundred and thirty-eight thousand, and fourteen-thousand five hundred at Bolotnaya. I was at the opposition rally, where there were clearly many, many more people than fourteen-thousand five hundred people. A smiling police officer confirmed this, adding that there were “significantly fewer people” at the pro-Putin rally. He seemed to be gloating.

I did, however, send my friend Albina Kirillova, a director with the hip opposition Rain TV channel, to Poklonnaya Gora. I asked her to capture the spirit of the pro-Putin rally, to find out if people were genuinely supporting Putin, if they had been bused in, or if they had been required to come by their employers, as has been frequently reported. Here’s what she found:

There were, as expected, people who had been paid to come; people who came out because of a work-place “initiative”; people who were less than fluent in Russian; and people who were less than sober. But there were also a lot of people who actually support Putin, either because they see no alternative to him, or because they really do like him. And they should, without a doubt, be able to gather and voice these feelings, just like the opposition.

But here’s the thing: when these protests are fake, when they aim to merely usurp and simulate popular sentiment in a controlled and controllable way, when the point is simply to mimic what the other side is doing, it’s downright destructive. People took to the streets in December and today because they’re tired of pretending that fake elections are real, that fake press is real, that fake protests are real expressions of anything. Responding with more of the same undermines the sand castle of Russia’s political system even further. It also just looks ridiculous.

Here’s another thing: these fake protests are expensive. Two days ago, the Russian franchise of Anonymous hacked the e-mail of youth minister Vasily Yakimenko. He is in charge of those Kremlin youth groups, and in charge of their fake protests. That protest with the pins and the scarves and the jackets and the drums? It cost the Russian federal budget—and the Russian taxpayer—nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Judging by the traffic the buses created near Poklonnaya Gora, Saturday’s protest probably cost even more, but the Russian taxpayer—a hundred and twenty thousand of whom were protesting exactly this kind of nonsense on Bolotnaya—will never know exactly how much. And what happens if more and more Russians start protesting as the Russian winter turns to spring, and—as is likely to happen—when Putin wins the Presidency in less than honest elections? Throwing money at things has been Putin’s preferred method for dealing with just about any problem, but this may be one of those times where this method doesn’t work.

And one more thing about today’s pro-Putin protest: Putin didn’t even show up. Instead, he commented on the show of support at Poklonnaya Gora and the fine for too many people showing up. “I’m positive that the organizers didn’t expect such a response,” Putin said. And he offered to pay the fine himself.

Protest and Pretend in Moscow [TNY]

By the time Navalny came out in the early morning hours of December 21, he was received with a hero’s welcome. “I went to jail in one country and came out in another,” he told the cheering journalists and supporters who had braved a blizzard to catch a glimpse of him.

It was true: Russia had changed while Navalny was in jail. He had missed the huge rally on December 10 on Bolotnaya Square, when the numbers who came out in peaceful, euphoric protest — an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 — made the original demonstration at Chystie Prudy look like a civic sneeze. Navalny had missed Vladimir Putin’s stuttering, insulting response, and the energetic, often fractious and messy planning for the next protest, which took place — with Navalny front and center among the 100,000-plus who turned out — on Dec. 24.

It was particularly ironic that Navalny had missed the first mass demonstration in recent Russian political history.

Navalny has been in opposition politics for nearly a decade, but in the last two years, he has become the man to watch, becoming the first of his opposition colleagues to turn rhetoric and abstract principles into concrete action. First, Navalny (trained as a lawyer) started taking corrupt state corporations to court and blogging about it. Then he created a site called RosPil that crowdsourced the work of exposing questionable government deals. When he asked his supporters to donate money for the cause — and for hiring lawyers to work on the project — the Russian web responded, delivering double the amount he asked for. “People donating money is extremely significant, given Russians’ cynicism,” Aleh Tsyvinski, a Yale economist who has become a sort of mentor to Navalny, told me when I profiled Navalny for The New Yorker in the spring. “Writing to Navalny is, in some ways, a way of exercising power. He is tapping into a huge demand for a grassroots movement.”

In effect, Navalny trained a set of thousands of Russian Internet dwellers to do something concrete with their disaffection. And by the time the election season kicked off, in March, Navalny’s mantra of “vote, and vote for anyone but United Russia” found a deep resonance among his following, and quickly spread. His alternative title for Putin’s ruling United Russia party — the Party of Crooks and Thieves — became a sticky meme, with one-third of Russians now identifying the party in this way, just three months after the phrase flew out of Navalny’s mouth on a radio show.

So when the huge crowd gathered in Bolotnaya on Dec. 10, it was his crowd — a largely white-collar crowd, and the crowd that his campaign had driven first to vote (an unusual activity for this set), then to come out and protest. (When I asked him, a year ago, if he was scared, given the fates of previous dissidents like jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, in taking on the regime, Navalny trotted out his trademark pluck. “If tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly, we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”) The protest was a game-changer, and it was, to a large extent, the fruit of his political labors.

And yet, it was a crowd whose size and support he — and everyone else — had underestimated. Most of the people I spoke to at the protests have come to see Navalny as not only the most viable opposition politician, as well as the one most representative of their views. But there’s one big caveat: his nationalistic views. Navalny had joined the scarily nationalistic “Russian March” in November, alienating many in his core constituency of the urban bourgeois, who fear Russian skinheads — the most violent in Europe — almost as much as they worry about Putin’s plans to return to the presidency for another 12 years.

Now that he is out of prison and back in the game, what is his plan? How does he view the most recent Kremlin attempts at placating the street? How does he visualize his own political future? We spoke as the euphoria of December’s protests fades into exhaustion. “I hope to go somewhere for a week in January, and not have to answer emails,” he said. He paused and added, “Not that I’ve been answering them for the last three weeks anyway.”

What follows is a transcript of our conversation:

FP: What did you make of last Saturday’s record-breaking protest?

We were all worried because the 10th was an unprecedented event. It was an unprecedented, new reality so what we were all worried that it was just a one-off. In the last two days before the protest, though, everyone infected me with their optimism and confidence, and on Saturday it became clear that it’s not an accidental protest, that these people are upset and that they will continue to protest and demand what they want, and will get what they want. It became clear that they would come out a second time, a third time, and a fourth time.

You missed the last protest, on the 10th, because you were in jail. What did you hear about it?

They brought us a radio to our cell, and we heard that there was a group on Facebook [for this protest] and that 20,000 or 30,000 indicated they were coming. I have a popular blog and I know that you can get a ton of “likes,” but are they convertible into real attendance? That is the big question. So we were discussing whether there will be more people than at the rally on Dec. 5 when there were 6,000 people. But, honestly, I was very skeptical about the idea of 50,000. I guess I just underestimated it.

When you heard that 50,000 to 60,000 people came out, what was your reaction?

There were 18 of us in the jail cell, and out of those 18, 16 were political prisoners. And we were of course really happy to hear this. We felt our own involvement in this, and we knew that, to some extent, we were one of the reasons that people had come out. It was really cool. One guy in our cell, a soccer fan who had also been arrested, he said something I really liked: “It’s like a really great birthday party. You weren’t invited to it, but it’s still really nice to see.” That’s how we felt.

No one expected these numbers, but, in a way, you seem to have underestimated the size of your electorate.

What is my electorate? People who don’t like corruption? Everyone is my electorate because 95 percent of people strongly dislike corruption. But the question was, do they dislike it enough to come out with me and protest? These people aren’t serfs. I can’t take bring them out onto the square, or not bring them out. I can’t say, “Go here, do that.” I wasn’t the one who brought these people out to protest. The events of the last month are what brought them out. They are the crest of the wave, but the wave didn’t rise up because of them.

Why then?

Putin created the wave. Injustice, deceit, fraud, falsification created the wave. Of the approximately 75 people who got jail terms after being arrested on the 5th, almost all of them were volunteer election monitors. There were not very many political activists like me. Most of them were there completely by chance. One guy was a programmer, one was a film director, a soccer fan, a random teenager — people who had never in any way participated in politics or activism. But they come out on the 5th and marched because they were furious, because they had been kicked out of polling stations, because they saw the election protocols that gave United Russia 100 votes, but then saw that the official results were 500.

Putin’s main mistake was to pull this nonsense in Moscow. United Russia got 46 percent here, even though it got 32 percent in the Moscow region [which is rural and votes more readily for the ruling party]. In Yekaterinburg, United Russia got 25 percent. Of course, everyone expected that, in Moscow, they wouldn’t get more than 28 percent and then — bam! — 46 percent, and areas in the center populated by the intelligentsia were delivering 90 percent for United Russia.

When I asked people at the protests on the 10th and the 24th if there was a politician who reflected their views, most said “Navalny, but … ” because they were disturbed by your participation in this year’s nationalist Russian March, in November. Some saw this as a cynical attempt to widen your base. Have the December protests convinced you that your natural, white-collar base is big enough?

I didn’t go to the Russian March to find another base. I do what I do because I think it’s right. I am very grateful to the people who support me, but I’m not going to rule by poll results or focus groups. I have a set of views on what I need to say and do, and I will continue to say and do them regardless of whether my support is rising or falling. I’m not flirting with anyone, not liberals, not nationalists. I think my line on most things is sufficiently clear.

If you go into “big politics,” though, won’t you have to pay attention to polls and take your citizens’ views into account?

It’s one thing to listen to people’s opinions, and another to let your supporters manipulate you. I formulate my political positions by looking at polls, by taking into account the views and opinions of those who surround me every day. At the same time, I am a person just like these people and I want exactly the same things that they do. Mostly, though, you’re talking about political activists who are saying, Navalny should do this or that.

No, the people I spoke to were a random average, and they said, “I like Navalny, but his nationalism scares me.” How do you respond to them?

If there are still people who are made uncomfortable by my participation in the Russian March, or are scared of “Navalny with his nationalistic views,” that points only to a problem of clarity. That means I wasn’t able to clearly and correctly explain my views. Because every person with whom I am able to discuss this subject in depth, they agree that my views on this are correct, reasonable, and appropriate. So I guess I’ll just have to keep explaining.

Many thought your speech at the protest on Dec. 5 was very aggressive — “we will cut their throats” and so on — and it was very different from your speech on Dec. 24, which was much calmer. What changed?

Dec.5 was an angry, aggressive protest of a minority. Election observers were the core of this protest, which was and wasn’t officially permitted; they were completely surrounded by the police. They were in the minority, and they understood that they had lost. It was a lot of people, but it was still the protest of a minority, of the persecuted, the angry, of those who hate this regime. I was speaking to them. But when, on Dec. 10 and the 24, it became clear that “we” is actually everyone, then the rhetoric changed.

The questions people seem to come back to over and over again is: to what extent can one change the current system from within, and can one compromise with it? How do you answer these questions?

You can’t change this system from within. Its founding principles are corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism. If you join this system, your main instruments become corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism, and it’s impossible to build anything with such instruments. I have my own experience with trying to reform the system from within — I spent a year in Kirov [as an advisor to the Kirov governor] — and I’ve also seen the experience of other wonderful people, like [former finance minister] Aleksei Kudrin, who became part of the system instead of changing it.

People who talk about changing the system from within are lying. They’re trying to justify their own hypocritical position, to defend the fact that, as part of the system, they’re deriving material or political benefits from it.

So then what’s the plan? How do you change the system?

You can change the system using a tool invented by human civilization. This tool is called “democracy” and “free elections.” We need to have free elections. Then we need to participate in these elections and win, to show that our principles for building a government, unlike those of corruption and cynicism, are better.

The people who came out to protest in December, whom should they vote for in the presidential election on March 4?

I don’t know who they’ll vote for on March 4, and I don’t think it’s important. First of all, they need to vote against Putin. Second of all, there won’t be an election on March 4. It will be a throne inheritance procedure. Who people vote for is not important. We need to use this procedure to get another strike against the regime.

What results do you think we’ll see on March 5? Because Putin will probably win, and can win even without falsifying the vote. But then what?

We have to do what we did before: demand free elections, continue to develop protest activism, to press on the state until we get parliamentary elections in which anyone who wants to can participate, and to demand new presidential elections.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, but Putin’s power is not based on elections but on his very real popularity. His popularity is based on the good deeds he did a long time ago, and on television. But he hasn’t done anything good in a long time. In fact, he’s done a lot of very bad things. We can use the television to tell everyone what we know on the Internet, to tell people about his horrible, disgusting, corrupt dealings. And that will be the end of him.

What do you think about the Kremlin’s proposal to reinstate gubernatorial elections?

They’ve obviously realized that they’ve reached a certain limit, and that there’s a very real danger that they will be booted from the Kremlin, so they’re trying to lower the pressure inside the political system by breaking down everything they’ve done in the last ten years. Right now, though, it smacks of deceit because there will still be ways to block candidates and parties from registering, to remove them from the ballot on technicalities. It’s a starting bargaining position.

What do you make of Putin’s reaction to the growing protests of the last month?

He’s trying to save face. If he betrays any confusion, his support will drop further. He’s in a situation where he can’t do anything to make his support grow. It will continue to decline; the only question is the pace of that drop. If they showed him on television holding his head and crying over the protests, his support would be evaporate overnight. But he’s not an idiot. His image is that of a tough guy, and he’s playing the tough guy to the last.

What do you make of [businessman Mikhail] Prokhorov’s candidacy for president?

It’s the Kremlin’s Trojan project. He’s absolutely not independent. He will not win the presidential elections. Nevertheless, his entry into politics is a good thing because any new people, any new political entities make the political system better by offering more choice, more competition. He’s fine. I have nothing against him.

You missed registering to participate in the 2012 presidential election because you were in jail. Did you want to participate?

Our goal is to have free elections. If we achieve this, if the 2012 presidential election is open to all those who want to participate, not just those who were invited and who negotiated the terms of their participation, if at this point, I have a level of support that gives me grounds to participate, I will, of course, participate.

And you want this?

Like any politician who is fighting for power, I want to fight for power in a real way and to get the kind of post that would allow me to change something.

The End of Putin [FP]

When I saw something on some people’s chests, I’ll be honest—it’s not quite appropriate— but in any case, I thought that this was part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that these were, pardon me, condoms.

Within minutes, the Russian-language Internet was overflowing with condom jokes, including a picture of a condom folded up like an activist ribbon, and a Christmas card from Putin, an unfurled condom hanging from his lapel. A joke started to make the rounds: a guy and a girl are getting hot and heavy, and, at the critical moment, she says, “Do you have a white ribbon?”

Russians have a long tradition of biting, bitter humor, a necessary steam valve when you live in a reality that could easily be mistaken for a joke. These days, with all the steam the system has built up over a decade of High Putinism suddenly billowing forth, humor has been front and center. KermlinRussia, a popular Twitter parody of Dmitry Medvedev’s Twitter feed, has been especially active of late. “Putin,” one of the recent condom-themed tweets went, “is a used president.” (He had been President before, and intends to be so again.)

Saturday, up to a hundred and twenty thousand people came out to demand electoral reform—a record for the infamously indifferent Putin generation. Partly because the last massive protest, two weeks ago, was so peaceful, and because Muscovites are getting the hang of this, Saturday’s protest was, more than anything, a festival of such classically wry Russian witticisms. Below, some of my favorites.

(Photographs: Max Avdeev)

(Photographs, above and top: Julia Ioffe)

Putin: A Used President? [TNY]

Crowd counting, especially from the ground level, is an inexact science at best, but it was clear to everyone — from police to journalists to the event organizers — that thousands more people came out today to Sakharov Avenue than did two weeks ago to Bolotnaya Square, which has become the new by-word for the still hard-to-pin spirit of change creeping through the Russian political system. The crowd — its estimates ranging from 30,000 to 120,000 — was also different from the protest of Dec. 10. If Bolotnaya was packed with the young and the white-collared (”office plankton,” as they’re known in Russia) today’s demonstrations brought out a more motley assembly.

Anarchists clustered by the gay activists, themselves within spitting distance from the radical young communists. Their elderly counterparts, with fur hats and voluminous, unkempt eyebrows (”You tell America,” one of them, an 83-year-old World War II veteran, said, looking at my press badge, “that Russia will never be its colony!”) were also nearby, flanked by the wry and rowdy hipsters from Leprozorium (”Leper Colony”), a closed and harshly meritocratic web forum famous for cultivating some of the Russian internet’s stickiest memes. Jumping up and down, they chanted “Fuck, you’re tall! Fuck, you’re tall!” at the 6-foot-8-inch Mikhail Prokhorov, the third-richest person in Russia and a newly minted opposition presidential candidate, whose head loomed over a scrum of people eager to ask him about orphanages, corruption, and Soviet history.

All around these islands was a sea of grandmothers, of the middle-aged, of the well-heeled, the more modestly compensated, and, of course, the office plankton. It was bitterly cold on Saturday afternoon in Moscow and, huddling under a steely sky flecked with white balloons, people drank whiskey from flasks and tea from thermoses; they jumped in place to keep warm. As on Bolotnaya, the speeches coming from the stage — though clearly audible because of speakers placed along the avenue — were almost of secondary importance. It wasn’t about the speakers, some of whom, like former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, were booed; people talked politics among themselves, periodically stopping to join in the chanting of a slogan echoing from the stage.

And yet, despite the obviously bigger numbers than the protest earlier this month, many of the people I spoke to today didn’t sound like they were at the biggest display of civic upswell in 20 years. Gone was the euphoria, the ebullience, the anger. The people who came out to Sakharov Avenue were more muted than the crowds of Bolotnaya a fortnight before, and despite the friendliness in abundance — a rare sight when so many Muscovites cluster so closely together — there was a calmness and a quiet that Bolotnaya, its air crackling, did not have. Even the polite and peaceful police presence, such a novelty on Dec. 10, didn’t even merit a shrug.

At Bolotnaya, when everyone was surprised by the fact that so many thousands of other traditionally atomized Muscovites coalesced to voice their frustrations, there was something of a sense of elation, a delight in discovering that people who share the same frustration existed, and existed in such large and friendly numbers. In the two weeks since, however, a lot has happened. That surprise, that “now-now-now” euphoria, has morphed into a firmer sense of civic entitlement. The opposition has banded into various squabbling organizational committees; it has learned how to handle negotiations with the mayor’s office; how to raise money for sound equipment; how to give people a say in the lineup of who will address them at the protest; and how to better harness social networks into disseminating information. Contrary to the near universal expectation that this amorphous and motley crew would fracture and do itself in by squabbling, the diverse movement has surprised everyone, including itself, with its growing sophistication.

Part of the reason is that it has also tasted success. In the two weeks since Bolotnaya, the government response has gone from messy and panicked to largely symbolic gestures — tossing the infamously crass Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov under the bus and handing some parliamentary committee chairmanships to the “loyal opposition” — to the beginnings of something that’s starting to look like actual concessions and, more shockingly, real change.

In his four-hour live question and answer session on Dec. 16, Vladimir Putin floated the idea that Russia may see a return of elected governors, though a strange device called a “presidential filter.” (Gubernatorial elections, done away with in 2004 under the pretext of fighting terrorism, have been the signature of Putin’s centralized — and now wobbling — political system.) This week, Dmitry Medvedev, still formally president, delivered his final state of the nation address to the country’s political elite. He laid out plans for political reform, including the direct election of governors, something that would begin to address the deafness, inflexibility, and ineffectiveness of Putin’s power vertical. “People are tired of having their interests ignored,” Medvedev said. “I hear those who talk about the need for change and understand them.”

Today, while however many tens of thousands stood around on Sakharov Avenue — a protest echoed in dozens of cities around the country — Sergei Naryshkin, until recently the president’s chief of staff and now the new Duma speaker, went on television to suggest that maybe they didn’t need a “presidential filter” after all, that maybe political parties’ own selection process was enough.

Even the official rhetoric has begun to shift away from insinuations of American provocation and Putin’s swat at demonstrators that their white protest ribbons reminded him of limp condoms. Today’s statements from top United Russia officials steered clear of insulting the crowd, choosing instead to focus on their leaders, and to hint that, maybe, they had come out not to get State Department money, but because they had legitimate grievances. “It’s obvious that there is a huge chasm between those Russian citizens who came out to protest, and those who address them from the stage,” said United Russia deputy Irina Yarova, in a press release sent around by the party on Saturday afternoon. The participants, according to Yarova, are “simple” and “sincere” — a far cry from Putin’s assertion that they had come out in exchange for money. Alexander Khinshtein, another United Russia deputy, spun it a different way. “I think that the existence of the opposition is testament to the health of the country,” he said, pointing to the “ripeness of our political system.” Compare that to the pre-Bolotnaya talk of provocateurs, traitors, and other characters unworthy of direct dialogue with the state.

That is not to say that many things, many of the most important things, will be left unchanged: The deeply fraudulent parliamentary elections of Dec. 4 won’t be nullified and held anew; Vladimir Churov — the odd and flamboyantly partisan “magician” in charge of the Central Election Commission — shows no signs of resigning (he’s a childhood friend of Putin); and, come March 4, unless things completely come apart, Putin will win the presidential election. He will still be the deeply conservative, change-averse, hands-on Putin; the system will still be deeply corrupt, unresponsive, and weak.

That said, there’s three months to go — and there’s still the chance, however much it shrinks with each peaceful protest protected by extremely civil police officers, that things could explode into violence and screw-tightening.

But, if the people who have been coming out despite the cold this month — 100,000, for Putin’s Russia, is still an unimaginable amount (most protests in the last decade drew no more than a brave few hundred) — don’t fall asleep on March 5 when their slim hopes are dashed by Putin’s victory, if these small victories make them hungrier rather than nauseous, if the surprise at discovering that one’s political opinions are not at all singular or marginal does not sour when the number at these protests inevitably plateaus, then Putin’s system, come 2012, will already be a very different one. It will find itself dealing with a new constituency whose wizened, suspicious regard for his maneuvers will make them harder and harder to trick, which will therefore make it more and more necessary for the system to actually deal with them, and take their concerns seriously.

And perhaps, if this new protest constituency can be trained by its experience to see small concessions as big successes, perhaps the political system and political life can finally become somewhat “normal” — the utterly subjective gold standard for Russians. “We’re setting a precedent,” said Alexei, a 25-year old computer programmer, shivering in the cold. “The reason the word ‘politics’ always had this negative connotation in Russia is because there was an understanding that we’re not going to get involved in it, especially not as decent people. We want to give the word a different connotation, so that a decent person doesn’t have to get red in the face when he says the word ‘politics.’”

Won’t Get Fooled Again [FP]

This self-imposed almost-silence ended today, in a four-and-half-hour telethon that marked Putin’s first real public appearance since his glitsy thermidorian system started to unravel at the edges, and in it Putin made sure to address the outrage that drew more crowds to the streets than Russia has seen since 1993. Soothing words were not what he offered. “To be perfectly honest,” he said, “when I saw something on some people’s chests, I’ll be honest — it’s not quite appropriate — but in any case, I thought that this was part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that these were, pardon me, condoms.”

Yes, that’s right: in case Russians hadn’t been offended by years of brazen maneuvers and bland television tailor-made for the lobotomized; in case they hadn’t been insulted by the glib switcheroo of Sept.24, when Putin and his handpicked successor as president, Dmitri Medvedev, announced they would simply swap positions; in case the crudely falsified elections and the baton-happy police hadn’t angered enough people; Putin compared their symbol of peaceful protest, those white ribbons neatly pinned on lapels, to an unwrapped and doubled-up condom. On live TV.

The Russian Internet, not surprisingly, was quick to fire back. First to circulate was a diaphanous condom in the shape of a folded ribbon; then came Putin standing stuffily in front of a Kremlin nightscape, an unraveled condom photoshopped onto his coat. (”Happy holidays, friends!” the postcard said.) Another web parody offered a prediction: a deficit of condoms in the city on the eve of Dec. 24, the day of the next scheduled protest. Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and one of the organizers of the upcoming demonstration, even proposed a new slogan for the rally: “You’re the gondon.” In Russian, gondon is slang for condom — or asshole.

Putin hardly stopped with his condom remark. Over nearly five hours in a TV studio taking questions from his public as part of an annual ritual, he often returned to his favorite theme: Western conspiracies to weaken Russia, to “push it to the side,” or, as he characterized the wave of protests now unfolding around him, “a well-tuned scheme to destabilize societies” that “doesn’t come out of nowhere” — like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. As for the protesters, Russia’s once and would-be future president pointed out that “there are, of course, people who have the passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation, but act in the interests of a foreign government using foreign money. We have to try to find common ground with them, too, even though it’s often pointless or impossible.” And then there were the mere mercenaries in those peaceful protesting crowds. Putin said he knew that there were college students who received money to come to Saturday’s 50,000-person protest — “fine, let them earn a little money” — even though the only college students reported to have received money were those populating the pro-Kremlin rallies of the last weeks. (I met one such young man, 23-year-old Mikhail, a member of the pro-Kremlin Nashi group who came with his opposition-minded friends to the anti-Kremlin protest on Bolotnaya Square. He told me had been paid to show up and talk people out of their anti-Putin sentiments. His logic explained Putin’s, to some extent. “I get paid for my time,” Mikhail told me, when I asked why he thought his friends were lying when they said they didn’t get money from the U.S. State Department. “Why shouldn’t they?”)

Leaving aside the constant repetition of this trope, as well as that of the evil West (which “underestimates our nuclear rocket potential”), and evil America (which killed Qaddafi), and evil John McCain (who “has blood on his hands”), the one topic — the “red thread,” according to the host — that Putin had to keep coming back to was Saturday’s protests across Russia. He tried, as best as he could, to leave aside the issue after offering bland blanket statements about citizens’ rights to express their views, as well as backhanded comments about the opposition, which, according to Putin, “will always say that elections were unfair. Always. It’s a question of political culture.”

But it kept coming back. For a while he tried to spin the protests. “There were different kinds of people there, and I was happy to see fresh, healthy, intelligent, energetic faces of people who were actively stating their position,” he said. “If this is the result of the Putin regime, then I’m happy. I’m happy that these kinds of people are appearing.” He said this twice, echoing the loyalist television celebrity Tina Kandelaki’s statement that those who came out across the country were “Putin’s generation,” a crowd of middle-class democrats made possible by his policies. (A fine theory, if one disregards the frequency with which “Putin, resign!” rolled loudly through the crowds.)

Eventually, Putin did his best to try to dodge the issue. “For God’s sake, if it’s so interesting to you, then I’ll discuss it,” he said after the host gently steered him back to it. If it wasn’t the host, it was the questioners themselves, who seemed less scripted than in previous years. And, if they weren’t asking about the protests and the falsified elections, they were asking about the deafness and corruption of their local authorities. Putin offered some promises of reform: Direct election of governors — eliminated in 2004 — but only, as he put it, through “a presidential filter” (i.e., only those candidates vetted by the president — him — will be allowed to stand for election.) No new parliamentary elections — which, of course, would be logistically impossible — but webcams installed at polling stations at the next one.

Clearly, this was an uncomfortable new position for Putin. The live question-and-answer session, a marathon of good-tsar populism, is a longstanding tradition and is Putin’s favorite format. For ten years, he has swanned through rehearsed, tee-ball questions from his adoring populace, using the occasion to graciously solve a crisis for an elderly veteran or punish an errant regional authority. He was used to being charming, confident, wry. He was Putin. This year, he approached this sublime state only when tossing figures and percentages around like confetti — one Russian journalist called him a “random number generator.” For the most part, he was less than fluent. He stumbled. He interrupted people with jittery, flat jokes. His spin sounded less like spin, and more like the excuses of a truant caught red-handed. He was, in short, nervous.

And yet, there was little Putin could do with his nervousness aside from channel it into insults (see: condoms) and paranoia (see: foreign funds). This is a telling response, and representative of the state’s reaction to the post-election furor: some dubious concessions — like removing the infamous Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov and promoting Kremlin ideologue-in-chief Vladislav Surkov out of his position — but, on the whole, retrenchment and reliance on classic Kremlin tactics. On Tuesday, for instance, we saw the owner of the Kommersant publishing house (which publishes the most important Russian daily) fire one of his top executives and the editor of the political magazine Vlast over a photograph of a ballot on which someone had written, in red ink, “Putin, go fuck yourself!” Two other top editors resigned in protest.

The unmistakable feeling, watching all this, is that either the Kremlin knows nothing else, can think of nothing else, or is too panicked to find its thinking cap and slap it on. Asked if it was true that emergency meetings were convened in the Kremlin after the initial wave of protests, Putin said, dubiously, “I was not invited to these meetings, I don’t know. I’ll say honestly that I didn’t notice any panic.” He was, he added, busy. “I was at that time, speaking frankly, learning to play hockey,” he said, referring to himself as “a cow on ice.” “I wasn’t really paying attention to what’s going on there. And I haven’t been there [in the Kremlin] for a while, frankly speaking.”

Outside the Kremlin, however, Putin’s insult-filled telethon had the unintended effect of galvanizing an opposition that had been showing signs of fracturing. During the Putin marathon on TV, RSVPs for the December 24 rally spiked on the Facebook page dedicated to it. Users barraged it with comments about how Putin’s snide and anxious performance had pushed them over the edge.

And it’s true that Putin had nothing but contempt for them. “Come to me, Bandar-logs,” Russia’s ruler told his perhaps befuddled viewers at one point in his bizarre show. Putin was comparing the newly energized opposition to the foolish, anarchic monkeys in “The Jungle Book.” The ones who chant “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful.” (”I’ve loved Kipling since childhood,” crooned Putin.) Facebook did not take kindly to this. “What say you, Bandar-logs,” one journalist quipped. “Shall we go prowling?

The Condomnation of Vladimir Putin [FP]

The run-in was not only broadcast on national television, it also provided the catalyst for a project Ternovskiy called A Country Without Stupidity. Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere. “Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb. Back then, every person felt himself to be in the thick of a nest of spies, there were enemies all around, everything was banned. Unfortunately, we still see this alive and well in the minds of many people today.”

Using his blog and Twitter, Ternovskiy has declared war on this archaic mentality. In the year since he launched A Country Without Stupidity, he has taught a growing number of sympathisers what to do if a guard in a train station tells you to delete that picture you just took: call the police, have them write a report, then write an official complaint to the Prosecutor General’s office. Thanks to Medvedev’s modernisation initiative, he points out, you can now file that complaint online. “It’s very simple and it uses legal methods,” Ternovskiy explains. “You don’t have to fight anyone, you don’t have to pitch a fit and yell at the guards. Just go home, and calmly register a complaint.” To everyone’s surprise, the prosecutor’s office stopped ignoring these complaints and began answering them – and finding in the complainants’ favour.

This may seem like a strange fight, but in a country where abuse of authority and brazen shirking of the law has become an accepted part of the daily routine even in the smallest things, Ternovskiy’s battle is a novel attempt not to fall into the sort of complacency that makes this kind of grim reality possible in the first place. “It’s a small thing, yes, but Russians are so indifferent and so convinced that you can’t change anything here, that what we’re trying to show people is that sometimes you just need a little effort to change something,” Ternovskiy explains. “And then maybe the next time, when this person encounters a bigger problem, not just something stupid, he’ll know that he can act, and he’ll know how to.”

With more than 50 million users, the Russian internet has this year become Europe’s biggest internet audience and Ternovskiy’s initiative is one of several that has used the explosion of the web in Russia to do something unheard of in its history: the mobilisation of civil society. “For many years, there was no means for people living here to do anything that relates to the organisation of society in any way,” says Anton Nossik, a pioneer of the Russian web and now the media director of SUP, the company that owns LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging platform. “In Russia, it was always the state that was in charge of dealing with social issues, never the people. It’s a situation that, on the whole, has lasted here for about a thousand years.”

The change came only recently, and only with the introduction of high-speed internet, first in the big cities, then in the countryside. Then came LiveJournal, which gave Russians a platform to discuss the things no longer being discussed in the state-controlled media. After that, the social networks – VKontakte, or Facebook for the urban elite – which Russians use more than any other people on the planet, connected like-minded citizens of a country spread across nine time zones. In the past year this trifecta – low-cost, hi-speed internet access, LiveJournal, and social networks – has given rise to a cluster of novel civic movements. One of the first was anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny’s RosPil, which used crowd sourcing to spot corrupt government tenders. Then, using Yandex.Money, the Russian analogue of PayPal, he launched an online collection of funds to hire young lawyers to help him fight corrupt state corporations in court. His goal had been to raise Rbs3m (£61,000). As of May this year he had raised Rbs6.5m. The next frontier in this movement is apps. Ternovskiy is currently working with developers to create an app that allows users to document and send a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s office right from their phones. “We want people to act,” Ternovskiy says, explaining that, in the time it takes someone to come home and get in front of a computer, the desire to register an official complaint may easily pass. Another potential hit, given the talk of fraud in Russia’s recent parliamentary elections, is RUGolos, an application that allows voters to register how and where they voted. The idea is that, given the penetration of smartphones in Russia, the app can collect enough data to serve as an independent counterweight to official election results.

Blue Buckets, another online movement, uses a different currency to achieve its aims: public shame. Loosely affiliated clusters of people have united in fighting the blue migalki, or sirens, which allow any car to which they are attached to circumvent all traffic laws. Predictably, they cause countless, often deadly, accidents, and given the sanctity of the car in Russia, they have become a major social irritant. Blue Buckets – named for the blue buckets activists tape to their car roofs as a spoof of these VIP sirens – gives people the means to fight back against the abuse of privilege. Drivers who capture this abuse – the VIP vehicle of a film director speeding in the oncoming lane, a bureaucrat turning on his siren to get to the dry cleaners – on camera, can submit the picture or video to Blue Buckets, which then disseminates it to its nearly 40,000 members and hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to its LiveJournal page. Inevitably, this makes it into the news cycle, fuelling more rage. This summer saw a spate of such small but loud scandals over migalki, and Blue Buckets was behind most of them.

“It’s the broken windows theory,” says Petr Shkumatov, one of the Blue Buckets co-ordinators, and a marketing specialist by day. “Since we’ve started the group, people have stopped being as brazen. A year ago, you saw these migalki everywhere but now they are more hesitant to turn on their discotheques,” he says, referring to the whoop of the sirens. “Of course, they’re allowed to by law, but the fact that society has become so angry at them, and they see the anger, has clearly been giving them pause.”

The point of Blue Buckets is to disincentivise ostentatious prestige, which is still so comically common in contemporary Russia. “The problem of migalki is not solved through laws because the sirens play to a very natural desire to be above other people,” says Shkumatov. He sees the legacy of the Soviet Union at play here, too, and he and his co-conspirators at Blue Buckets have tried hard to keep the group as decentralised and organic as possible, in order to prevent it from becoming “an instrument for realising someone’s ambitions”.

“The Soviet Union still exists in Russia because people are still repeating old patterns,” Shkumatov explains. “As soon as someone joins an organisation, he wants to become the general secretary of the Communist party.”

In the past few days, the Russian blogosphere has proved to be a powerful tool in organising such sentiments. A day after disputed election results delivered both a victory and a defeat to the ruling, vaguely Soviet, United Russia party – it won a majority of seats in the Russian parliament, but lost 15 per cent compared with the 2007 electio7 – some 6,000 young people took to Moscow’s streets. As in the case of protests seen around the world, from Cairo to Zucotti Park, they had been brought there by Facebook and Twitter. And they were angry about what they had read on the internet, information that rarely makes it into the “official” Russian press. In absolute terms, it was not a large number – Moscow is a city of at least 11 million – but it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom. Young Russians are thought to be apathetic and, even if they are not, rarely come out to protest, which they see as the realm of the shrill and the elderly.

The anonymous KermlinRussia duo, who write a wildly popular parody of Medvedev’s Twitter account, recently teamed up with Zhgun, a graphic designer, to create a campaign ad on YouTube for a fictional party called “F****** Amazing Russia”. The premise of the party was to leave behind the bad guys – Putin, Medvedev, and their cronies – and to mobilise what one of the KermlinRussia writers called “the party of the internet.” Hundreds of thousands of people watched the YouTube video, but nothing seemed to happen – until it suddenly did. “The internet is the new politics,” one of the duo told me. “It was able to organise the first serious protest in many years.”

Whether or not these protests continue as temperatures in Moscow drop is not clear, but they have already accomplished something very important: they have brought down the barrier between the online and offline worlds. When Navalny was arrested at the December 5 protest, thousands of his followers watched a live feed of the protest staged outside the police station where he was being held. At 4am on a weeknight, there were nearly four thousand viewers. When Navalny’s trace temporarily vanished, and when Navalny was brought into court and sentenced to 15 days in prison, it was Shkumatov who tweeted the proceedings to everyone who had not been allowed inside the courtroom: Shkumatov, too, had been arrested.

On December 10, around 50,000 of the young urban elite came out in Moscow for the biggest anti-government protest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands protested in dozens of cities around Russia. Addressing the crowd, Shkumatov thanked them for coming out, “for showing them” – the Kremlin – “that you’re not cattle”. “You guys are so wonderful!” he said, while recording a video of the crowd with his phone.

Activists Get Connected [FT]

“What we witnessed today was a democratic protest by a section of the population who are displeased with the official results of last week’s elections,” Peskov said. “In the past few days we also witnessed demonstrations by other segments of the population who were supporting those results. We respect the point of view of the protesters, we are hearing what is being said, and we will continue to listen to them. The citizens of Russia have a right to express their point of view, in protest and in support, and those rights will continue to be secured as long as all sides do so in a lawful and peaceful manner.”

Given the scale of the Moscow protest and the demonstrations by thousands more in dozens of cities all over Russia — the largest by far since Putin came to power nearly a dozen years ago — it was a strange and strangely muted response. It was not as strange, however, as what Putin said earlier that day, also through Peskov. “The government has not yet formulated a position,” he said.

One person, however, had. On Sunday, President Dmitry Medvedev took to his page on Facebook — the nerve center of the protest’s organization — and said the following:

Under the Constitution, the citizens of Russia have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. People have a right to express their position, which is what they did yesterday. It is good that all took place within the framework of the law. I do not agree with the slogans or the statements made at rallies. Nevertheless, I have given the order to check all instances from polling stations regarding compliance with the legislation on elections.

This was truly bizarre. What, after all, did the president of Russia — at least president until next year, when Putin proposes to swap jobs with him again — mean by it? And, odd too, not least because of the extraneous, redundant reminder that citizens have the right to freedom of speech and assembly, a right Russia’s rulers have not often been eager to proclaim. The equally strange worry — mostly on the side of the Kremlin — that Saturday’s protest, which had been permitted by the Moscow city government, would end in bloodshed seemed to imply that everyone, including Putin and Medvedev, needed this reminder. Then there was the constant marveling (including on state-owned Channel One, which on Saturday finally acknowledged that these protests exist) that the demonstrations had happened peacefully, in accordance with the law.

Perhaps the main issue was simply one of credibility: Medvedev, already about as lame a duck as a president can be ever since Putin announced in September his plans to return to the presidency in the 2012 elections, has personally, and grandiosely, ordered many investigations into scandalous things, and none has resulted in much. (Last fall, Medvedev promised to investigate the case of journalist Oleg Kashin, who was savagely beaten. He even promised to Kashin to “tear off the heads” those responsible. “Sitting here, smoking my pipe,” Kashin joked on Facebook.) Perhaps this is why so very many of the nearly 13,000 comments on Medvedev’s Facebook post this weekend were negative. “This is called detachment from reality,” one commenter said. “You need to go see a psychiatrist.”

“The president’s response is ridiculous,” Igor Yurgens, head of a Moscow think tank closely associated with Medvedev, told me. “‘I don’t agree, but we’ll figure out.’ That’s not an answer.” So far, none of the protesters’ demands, from registering new parties to freeing those arrested in protests earlier last week, Yurgens pointed out, have been taken seriously.

Indeed, the trickle of official statements since the Saturday protests implies that the Kremlin is either stalling or brushing these demands aside. One of the protesters’ demands was that Vladimir Churov, Putin’s childhood friend and head of the Central Election Commission, be fired. He has denied well-documented election fraud and said the reams of video evidence being put forward by activists since the elections were faked by being filmed in apartments made to look like polling stations. For his services to the state, Medvedev, to his everlasting Internet shame, called Churov “a magician” last week. Yet on Sunday, the Central Election Commission shot down a proposal to consider Churov’s dismissal.

Another demand was new elections. On Friday night, the eve of the big protest, the commission certified the results. On Monday, Peskov dismissed not only the possibility of new elections but the possibility of a recount. “If we take into account this so-called evidence, then they’ll account for about 0.5 percent of the overall number of votes,” he said. “Even if, hypothetically, every single complaint is proved in court, they would still not affect the overall outcome of the vote.” Russia’s prosecutor general voiced a similar view.

And speaking of the Russian Constitution, the ruling United Russia party had a rally in Moscow on Monday called “Glory to Russia!” to celebrate Constitution Day. The party promised a crowd of 30,000 people, perhaps to prove Putin right that there were just as many happy with the elections as there were who were outraged. According to the police, 25,000 people showed up. According to various reporters on the scene — and according to photographic evidence — there were at most 2,000. Many attendees had been bused in, a common tactic. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m here,” one young man told a reporter. “It’s for television. These fucking KGB guys, they’re lying to people on television, promising everything and doing nothing. I don’t fucking need this. They canceled our classes for us to come here.”

Given the money poured into loyalist youth groups — and the money spent on busing in young bodies — Monday’s rally was an epic flop. It is also a testament to the ineffectiveness of United Russia’s stubbornly sticking by its old and less-than-convincing tactics. The staged rallies are complemented by rhetorical gymnastics, parroted up and down the United Russia food chain, that smack of denial at best. Never mind that Saturday’s were the largest anti-government demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union, the line goes; they were nothing unusual. What’s 50,000 people, after all, in a city of 12 million?

Putin and Medvedev, meanwhile, are clearly trying to buy time, though in a less-than-organized fashion. “Putin is obviously stalling,” said political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky, who until recently worked for Medvedev and helped Putin win his first presidential election, in 2000. “Medvedev rushed to say something negative, but Putin said he’s thinking about it. I think that’s the right way to go about it. They’re frightened, and this has been good for the state because it has forced them to start thinking about its actions instead of going with the usual knee-jerk reactions.”

Pavlovsky, who has told me he is deeply disillusioned with an uncharacteristically mistake-prone Putin, also pointed to the lack of violence and chaos at Saturday’s rally. “This was maybe Putin’s first correct step this whole year,” he said of the Kremlin’s decision not to crack down on protesters the way they did on Dec. 5 and 6, arresting nearly 1,000 people in two days. “The day of [Saturday's] protest, everything was done right from the point of view of maintaining power. If the Kremlin tried to fight it, it would now be in a deep, deaf, and probably bloody siege. Will it continue to do the right thing? — that’s the question.”

Certainly, the Kremlin has shifted its rhetoric, starting out after the first post-election rumblings with vague warnings of “provocations” and civil war, to the more recent claim that many who came out on Saturday were simply curious, one-off rubberneckers. Still, there’s a sense Russia’s rulers haven’t fully grasped the scope of the dissatisfaction they’re dealing with among a largely well-heeled, well-educated, white-collar crowd.

Some insiders clearly sense trouble. On the eve of Saturday’s protest, Vladislav Surkov, first deputy presidential chief of staff and the man who micromanages Russian politics and media, summoned a who’s who of the loyal intelligentsia to discuss unfolding events — a sign that he gets it. Yet those present at the meeting haven’t exactly been offering soothing words about compromise. Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Russia Today, said dismissively that the next protest, planned for Dec. 24, will draw fewer people “because people have to go buy presents.” Maxim Shevchenko, an anchor on state-owned Channel One, in a riposte titled “Answering Fools,” said the best course is to let the opposition have its protests in order not to make martyrs of them. “They are no one and have to remain no one,” he wrote.

Still, Monday brought some evidence of compromise. United Russia announced it is ready to cede some of the leadership posts in the Duma to the parliamentary opposition. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who was fired by an irate Medvedev in September, said in an interview with the Russian business daily Vedomosti that he was ready to head up a liberal political party, presumably one catering to the largely white-collar crowd — lawyers, doctors, consultants, finance workers, graphic designers, engineers, and the like — that came out on Saturday.

Then, in a surprise and very telling twist on Monday afternoon, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced his intention to run for president in March 4’s election. Over the summer, he tried to run exactly the kind of party Kudrin is now suggesting, but quit in frustration as the project quickly and loudly jumped the rails, for reasons that seemed to boil down to the Kremlin’s insistent desire to control it and Surkov’s rather intensive curation of the project. At the time, Prokhorov announced that he wasn’t planning on leaving “big politics,” and his return suggests that the Kremlin has allowed him back in order to distract from Saturday’s events or to give people an option of a somewhat credible alternative. This would help defuse tension so that protests don’t further mar Putin’s one-man presidential race — which, let’s not forget, he will win — and which will allow him to campaign without further antagonizing the already antagonized white-collar crowd.

As for the white-collar crowd (”office plankton,” as they’re known in Russia), many of these newcomers to political activism are now promising to come out again in two weeks, on Christmas Eve. Most likely there will be fewer people than there were on Saturday because it will be colder, because the Kremlin will throw them some scraps, because they will lose interest, or because there’s still no one on the Russian political field who represents them. As most of them take pains to point out, this is no Arab Spring, and they are no revolutionaries, just some people who have woken up and who want into the system. “Alas, it will be a protest vote,” said one young office worker when I asked him about what new elections — should they happen — would look like. “And, unfortunately, there still won’t be anyone in the Duma who will represent my stance for the next five years. But it’s a step. It will happen in steps, and that’s OK.”

That, despite its alarmist rhetoric, is exactly what the Kremlin is banking on now. As Pavlovsky put it to me, “This doesn’t smell of revolution.”

Nine Days That Shook the Kremlin [FP]

The Russian word for a protest is miting—meeting—and, for once, this was the more apt word for it. There was speechifying and chanting—“Putin, resign!”—and demands for new elections, but the sound equipment didn’t have the juice to reach all those ears. And yet, people stayed, and instead of listening, they talked to each other. I chatted with a group of young Russians—who worked in finance, marketing, insurance, engineering—about who in the political landscape reflected their views. No one, it turned out, because most Russian political parties, to their minds, are fakes. A young man, a consultant, sidled up. “Excuse me, I heard you talking,” he said, the snow falling on his tweed and leather cap, “and I just want to say that today’s parties are marionettes because they know that it is more effective for them to deal with [Vladislav] Surkov”—the Kremlin’s Karl Rove—“than with the people.”

“You say [old-school liberal] Yabloko is a party of the system, but I have to disagree with you,” said yet another young man who happened to be squeezing past us. And off they went.

Throughout the gray afternoon, as the snow turned to hail and back to snow, people talked politics, and talked about them intelligently, with nuance, with substance, with facts and figures and names. It was a far cry from the conventional wisdom, often Kremlin-sponsored, of Russians’ apathy and disgust for politics. Today, it turned out that no one’s been apathetic, that everyone has been reading and watching and following. Today was just the first time that all of these people came out and discovered each other’s existence.

And for all the talk in recent days, mostly from pro-Kremlin forces, of bloodshed and chaos and violence, the protest felt more like a holiday. Women tied white ribbons—the protest’s symbol—in their hair; people carried balloons and flowers. (Some were even spotted on the dashboards of police cars in the area.) People laughed, they smiled at each other, they were polite and didn’t push and when this correspondent tried to move through the crowd, they were beyond accommodating. “The press!” one man said. “We’d carry you on our shoulders!” There were no injuries, no arrests, no disorder. Even the march of several thousand people from the protest’s old venue (on Revolution Square) was peaceful, and orderly. The police didn’t harass, they didn’t yell. They too were polite. Some smiled at the protestors, others looked shocked. They didn’t act, as they did on Tuesday, as if the protestors were their enemies. (Their work got a special report on state television, which, after ignoring the growing protests for days, finally showed the crowds, though without really saying what they were there for. State-controlled NTV finally acknowledged the protests, too—by showing live footage.)

At Monday’s protests, the organizers and the participants surprised themselves when six thousand people came out. Today, it wasn’t so much the numbers that shocked, or even the fact that thousands of people in cities all over Russia came out and voiced their anger over rudely falsified elections. It was the discovery, after a decade spent living in an atomized society, believing the worst about themselves and each other, that Russians weren’t so bad after all.

“You guys are so great!” said Petr Shkumatov from the stage. He is one of the coördinators of the Blue Buckets movement, which you can read about in David Remnick’s dispatch from Moscow, out this week in the magazine. As he spoke, he filmed the crowd with his phone. “Really! You guys are so great! Thank you so much for not staying home on your couches and drinking beer! Thank you for coming out, and showing them that you are not cattle. Thank you for coming out! You are all so wonderful!”

Photograph by Alexander Zemlianichenko, Jr/AP Photo.

Snow Revolution [TNY]

If even half that number shows up tomorrow, it will be unprecedented for a regime that has become expert in disenfranchising, disincentivizing, and marginalizing anyone who disagrees with it—all without spilling much blood at home or jailing more than the occasional example victim. All it took, really, was distracting people with the trappings of Western prosperity: sushi bars, vacations abroad, cars, iPhones, and a semblance, however thin, of normalcy.

The events of the last few days have been utterly astonishing and radically different from anything Putin’s Russia has seen before: thousands of young, educated, middle class Russians who have something to lose have come out into the streets simply out of a feeling of being utterly fed up, in spite of that prosperity—and, quite probably, because of it. People who have either never cared about politics, or have been afraid to dabble in it; people who have businesses or who cannot be seen publicly engaging in opposition politics; and even people who had been complicit in cynically, opportunistically spreading the United Russia gospel—all feverishly discussing the protest, putting up white ribbons (the protest’s new symbol), and rallying their friends and family to come on Saturday. Tomorrow, we can expect to see not only the obvious faces—civil-society activists, liberally inclined journalists—but investment bankers and even bureaucrats. The spirit of the last week has been surprising and moving in a way that an objective reporter should not admit to being moved by. But even without rooting for either side, and with the full understanding that these protests may easily come to naught, one can’t help but marvel at the spontaneous, utterly organic outburst of civic feeling, and the fact that, for lack of a better term, a point of no return has very clearly been passed.

And, by the looks of things, the Kremlin is either in denial, scared, or both. Thursday, Vladimir Putin dismissed the protests, saying that they had been instigated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this after days of him and President Dmitry Medvedev pooh-poohing allegations of widespread, well-documented ballot stuffing and vote rigging. (The country’s top election official, who openly agitates for Putin and the United Russia Party, said the series of videos of electoral fraud circulating on the Internet were filmed in residential apartments fixed up to look like polling stations.)

Behind the scenes, there’s been a massive Kremlin effort to lean on the media. The liberal television project and Medvedev darling, TV Rain, has come under bureaucratic pressure for broadcasting Monday and Tuesday’s protests. (Worst of all, Medvedev unfollowed the channel on Twitter.) The F.S.B. has been pushing Pavel Durov, founder of VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook and most popular social network, to block opposition sites. He refused, and today was summoned to the prosecutor general’s office. (In retaliation—and in another sign of who is manning the opposition’s barricades—opposition-minded computer whizzes have started hacking and shutting down loyalist sites, like the Web page of United Russia’s Duma faction.)

Further down the power hierarchy, the Moscow city government has spent days maneuvering to move the protest away from the symbolic Revolution Square, near the Kremlin ramparts and the site of massive protests on the eve of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. First, there was urgent plumbing work and excavation that needed to be done on the day of the protest. In the face of a public outcry, the mayor’s office backed down. The next day, there were reports of an ice theatre—“a little mouse, a frog, a little rabbit”—opening up, conveniently, on the square, also on the day of the protest. Finally, the mayor’s office thought of a better way. It offered the diffuse group of organizers the chance to move the protest to Swampy Square, and to allow all thirty thousand people to show up. This had the effect of instantly splintering the opposition, which descended into bickering and trading accusations of treason, collaborationism, and self-defeating idiocy. (The rift has been mostly patched up, with most everyone agreeing to compromise.)

All the government’s resources have kicked into panic mode, it seems. The police have leaked reports saying that the protests will be scoured for those dodging Russia’s military draft. Those arrested will also be drafted. Suddenly, Saturday has been made into a mandatory, full day of school for Moscow high schoolers. To ensure attendance, students will be given an important Russian test. (This after reports that students were forced to populate pro-United Russia protests on Tuesday instead of going to school.) Most bizarrely, the health minister has warned people to stay home lest they go to the demonstration and catch the flu.

There have also been more insidious forces at work. Twitter—the site of most of the discussion and planning—has been full of pro-Kremlin users conjuring up the spectre of bloodshed and civil war. An exceptionally well-produced YouTube clip has been released, explaining how (lots of dollars) and why (lots of oil) America goaded a vocal Libyan minority into provoking violence and imposing their views on a satisfied majority. This, tellingly, has been the exact language that United Russia officials have used publicly, as well as in conversation with me: Most people are satisfied; this is just a vicious and vocal minority that seeks to, yes, provoke bloodshed and, yes, impose its views on everyone else.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin seems to be the side threatening and provoking. Today, a memo detailing the ways to get a rise out of the opposition—to push them into the line of riot police, to push them out of public view—surfaced online. Putin’s press secretary promised organizers that anyone who showed up to Revolutionary Square, instead of Swampy Square, would be beaten so badly that their kidneys would fly off. Medvedev’s representative suggested that organizers would be held responsible for any bloodshed—you know, should there be any. Today, Kirill Schitov, a young parliamentarian in the Moscow city Duma and the man connected to this summer’s “Tear It Up for Putin” campaign, warned people reading his Twitter feed, “To those who have something to lose, do not give in to provocation and do not go to Revolutionary Square. Think.”

Perhaps because this is a generation that has not been inculcated with the fear of Homo sovieticus, and perhaps because they are, on the whole, very young—and the young, as we know, are always invincible—few seem to be falling for the bait. If anything, these attempts to stanch and divert the tide of anger, rather than doing the more difficult work of dealing with it head on, has served to galvanize—to say nothing of humoring—the people who are coming out of the woodwork and into the street tomorrow. And by all accounts, there will be a lot of them.

Photograph by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Photo.

“Tomorrow, They’ll Shoot Us” [TNY]