The protest needed a hero and it found it in Navalny. His slogans were the ones they chanted, his ideas were the ones they talked about. It was a spontaneous protest: these were not his people, but they looked to him with fascination, as something just short of their leader. The rise in discontent, the exasperation with the old opposition, had turned his into a household name in Moscow in 2011. They called him a phenomenon. Shouting into the snow, he was yelling, ‘They call us “micro-bloggers” and “network hamsters” – I am a hamster and I will gnaw through the throats of this cattle.’
That somebody unknown could organize this rally, said two things. First, there was a huge desire for somebody, anybody, to do something. Second, that yet again, the old establishment opposition of Nemtsov, Milov and Yavlinsky were missing in action. Faybisovich, the unlikely Facebook spark, thinks that three things brought people together that evening:
‘It’s a simple thing really. Before there were not enough people who had enough to eat to care about where the country was going, but now there are enough people who have enough to eat to care about what kind of country their children will live in. You throw in the fact during the 2007 elections that we had no smartphones, now all kinds of electoral violations are recorded and spread over the Internet and then finally the slogan – the campaign from Navalny branding United Russia the “party of crooks and thieves”.’
Clean Ponds was instantly dubbed the ‘rally of the ruined shoes’ because under 5,000 pairs of feet, the snow had given way into liquid mud. But the name also said something about the kind of shoes these people were wearing. It was rather the ‘rally of the ruined expensive shoes’. Those there were pleased to see that it was a rally of the ‘right sort’. Over 80 per cent had some sort of post-secondary-school education, compared to just 30 per cent of Russians at large.25 There was also a faint echo of the Decembrists, the failed 1825 elite uprising of St Petersburg’s finest aristocratic officers who, having experienced the West during the Napoleonic wars, wanted a constitution. That night in December was a demonstration from inside the Schengen visa-holding Moscow elite, but unlike the tsar’s officers they were far from the point of picking up their muskets. This was a protest to say ‘we exist’, not ‘we want power’.
Then it seemed it had all gone wrong – with arrests and the Moscow riot police wielding batons, grabbing Navalny into custody as he pulled back shouting, ‘all for one, and one for all’.
The police had not quite jumped the protests. Navalny and his friend, the opposition activist Ilya Yashin, well-known for stunts including anti-Putin bungee jumps off Moscow bridges, decided to walk to the Lubyanka, the KGB turned FSB headquarters. ‘Why?’ groans one organizer, ‘Because they wanted to feel shivers run down their spines.’ This was not in the permit and the organs reacted clumsily, arresting over 1,000 people, not realizing they were scoring an own goal. ‘It helped us massively, but I do not feel guilty about this as their police brutality is what they have been doing every day for years,’ grins Faybisovich. Police, brutality ignited a protest movement out of the Facebook-fuelled gathering. The mood combusted out of a mix of elation and surprise in Moscow’s small world of ‘the right sort’, overjoyed to have found itself on the streets, sparked by their outrage at the castling and industrial ballot stuffing.
‘Looking back I don’t think we made any mistakes in the winter wave. It was so spontaneous. It was completely grassroots, totally chaotic and spontaneous, it was real…’ smiles Navalny. ‘But I am certain I did one thing right. It was absolutely the right thing to go and be so aggressive that night with my speech about the “killer hamster”.’ He smiles to himself, as if about to giggle at the words ‘killer hamster’. ‘It was absolutely the right thing to do to go on the illegal march.’ Navalny says that thrown into custody and cut off, he had no idea what was happening outside. ‘In prison we heard that things were getting exciting outside. And we were thinking, ‘Oh, it would be so cool if 10,000 people came to the next protests. Oh, we thought it would be incredibly cool if 15,000 people came to the next protest. We were sitting in prison and just had no idea.’
Over the next few weeks a wave of elation tore up the Putin consensus in the Moscow bourgeoisie. There was a raw gas in the air of the cafes – that left those who breathed it in dizzy, then giddy, with the sensation that their energy was mounting, that it would simply prevail, that they were winning. The activists who had thrown together the rally at Clean Ponds threw themselves into a Facebook feed about further protests. By one big stroke of luck, the hard-left skinhead activist Sergey Udaltsov was holding on to a permit for a protest on 10 December. All they needed now was permission from the authorities to carry it off and enough people to turn up. What became known as the ‘Orgkomitet’ began to take shape. Senior editors at the glamour magazine Afisha came on board, joined by celebrity reporter Oleg Kashin and the well-known publisher Sergey Parkhomenko, who is Faybisovich’s stepfather, and other bloggers and ‘men-about-town’. Together with the activists from the old, ‘political’, opposition they began negotiating with Moscow city hall and publicizing the gathering. With RSVPs hitting over 20,000, big-name celebrities started to come on board: from the singer Yury Sevchuk to the TV personality Leonid Parfyonov and the writer Boris Akunin. Parfyonov says he felt he had no choice: ‘I decided I had to be there, when Akunin phoned me. He said, “We just have to go. The people who are protesting are our audiences, our auditorium. We have to be there for them.” ’
All those writers, hipsters and TV presenters previously uninvolved in politics were rushing to make suggestions to the ‘Orgkomitet’, urging people to come out to shout Navalny’s slogans because they felt sure the ‘old opposition’ was feckless enough to let the moment slip with its ugly 1990s faces who would inspire no one to show up. The tense, last-minute negotiations with the Town Hall and the deputy Kremlin chief of staff to get the final go-ahead for the rally, and the Facebook groups to get people out, were not only about clean elections. It was a revolt against the old opposition – and with it the birth of a new opposition.
Across town Boris Nemtsov had been taken by surprise by the lead-up to ‘Clean Ponds’, but he was sure that a generational change was under way. The former deputy prime minister who most Russians associate with the liberal cabinet during the 1998 default, told me he was sure that the younger generation were now immune to Putin’s endless refrain – ‘Without us we’ll be back in the 1990s’. As he said this, he turned to the blonde beside him: ‘My girlfriend is born in 1990… she does not know what is Yeltsin… she thinks that Yeltsin – is me!’
We Went to the Swamp
Despite announcements from the police they would be ‘looking for draft dodgers’ at any protests, official health warnings that the mass gathering could trigger a SARS outbreak, sudden orders that the planned protest day was a compulsory school test for all city students, and cries for Internet censorship inside the ‘organs’, the authorities relented – the rally could go ahead at ‘Bolotnaya’, or ‘the swamp’, a thin strip of land between the Moscow river consisting of a walkway and a small park, home to thirteen ghoulish bronze statues called ‘Children are the Victims of Adult Vices: sadism, theft, ignorance, violence…’