Over 60,000 people went to ‘the swamp’ that day. An appalling sound-system meant that no one could hear the stage, but that hardly mattered. Mikhail Fishman, a prominent anti-Kremlin journalist, who had once been filmed in a compromising situation in what was believed to be a government sting, waved away suggestions that the emerging protest movement was badly organized: ‘the organization, the politics the programme didn’t matter that day, what mattered was the crowds who were looking into each others’ eyes, and seeing they were there.’
There was mild euphoria, with shouts of ‘clean elections’, ‘re-elections’ or ‘down with Surkovian Propaganda’. The Kremlin control of TV was suddenly relaxed and the rally was allowed to be covered, impartially, on national TV. Some claim that the costs of the rally were covered by dissenting MPs from the formerly tightly Kremlin-controlled Just Russia party, others pointed to the complete incoherence of those on the stage – from one man shouting for the restoration of ‘Soviet power’, to an angry nationalist being heckled – but it was the TV superstar Leonid Parfyonov who stole the show.
‘I was shaking,’ Parfyonov told me. ‘I had been waiting ages and I was incredibly cold. I had never given this kind of speech before, to a rally and I certainly had never spoken in the street before. I climbed onto the podium and I suddenly saw hands raise – each with an iPhone, each hand with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in their fists – and I instantly saw exactly what kind of people had come to the swamp.’
His nerves did not show. With a clear, rising tone, instantly recognizable and trustworthy to any Russian TV viewer, he told ‘the swamp’:
‘I’ve spent roughly half my life in my motherland, in the Vologda region, and half my life living in Moscow, and I can quite easily imagine the moods of these two regions. In the Vologda region United Russia received 33 per cent of the vote. Although this place is quite conservative and reliable, “Vologda guards do not like to joke”, and so on, this figure in general does not surprise me: one-third of the country boys for Soviet power, not more. And the governor of Vologda Pozgalev, yesterday, after a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, could honestly tell the press, “We had an honest election.” What could I do? But 50 per cent for United Russia in Moscow, this is utterly hard to believe. Vologda region is now for the first time more liberal than Moscow? It is not unlikely, it is just ridiculous.’26
This sense of the insult to Moscow, the insult to intelligent, liberal, clear-thinking people who cared about their votes as well as their cars, resonated out across ‘the swamp’. The official presidential twitter feed had re-tweeted the following: ‘It has become clear that if a person writes the expression “party of crooks and thieves” in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting fucked in the mouth :).’27 On television Putin himself sneered at ‘the swamp’. Asked what he was doing during the protests he replied, ‘I was learning how to play ice-hockey,’ adding that he thought the white-ribbons the crowds had starting pinning to their clothes as their symbol reminded him of ‘contraceptives’ – pale limp condoms.28
As activists threw themselves into a new round of protest planning it was becoming clear that Putin, with such comments, was not in control of events. It was also very clear which personalities he had lost. The glamorous elite of journalists and personalities like Parfyonov – who a few years ago had said, ‘my job is to report, not climb the barricades’ – had turned on Putin. The new dominant pole in the Russian chattering classes was now what you could call ‘champagne anti-Putinism’.
It was far harder to pin down who exactly were the ‘masses in the swamp’. Moscow struggled to put a name to them – ‘creative classes’ was too exclusive and classist and ‘new middle class’ was too narrow a term that didn’t capture the ranks of students, state employees, elderly or just simply ‘lower middle class’ that turned up. A large but broadly aspirational section of the population had broken off from the Putin majority. One poll suggested 70 per cent considered themselves ‘well off’, reading the news online, in a city where only half feel ‘well off’ and in a country where around a quarter do.29 This was the ‘insulted minority’.
In Moscow, their semi-revolutionary sentiment that winter may have, at times, even been dominant. What was so frightening about the rallies was constant chants of the slogan: ‘Russia has no future.’ The protests were the beginning of the rejection of the ‘Stability First’ national ethos driving politics since the default. ‘Stability’ had come for the Moscow middle class to mean stagnation – and the eclipse of the future.
In the bohemian club Masterskaya, with its stage, wooden tables and old-fashioned lampshades, I have watched an open mike and photo-slideshow on ‘tell us about your Soviet childhood’, overheard dull conversations about Moleskines and apps, listened to the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret describe Moscow as a ‘sexy kind of hell’, but before the protest movement I had never seen politics there. Not the stage filled with girls exhorting you to join their ‘anti-Putin metro flash-mob’, opposition activists explaining that ‘@wakeupru’ was their twitter feed and explaining the entry and exit points to the planned mass demonstration on 24 December. Everyone was so excited, even sharp minds such as Maxim Trudolyubov, the opinion-page editor of Vedomosti, Russia’s leading broadsheet. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘like in 1991 when the atmosphere… was the exultation of the nation. December 2011 was that… in miniature.’
This was mania. Bound up with a sudden sense of release after years of Putin and the delirious lives these young activists and opposition leaders were leading – mixing in all the alcohol, the late nights, the snow and the adrenaline rush of new technology. Later, I learnt that this behaviour was not real political enthusiasm, but similar to the ‘1968 revolution’, that everyone was ‘enjoying so much’, rejecting De Gaulle and his stuffy slightly authoritarian leadership in France over forty years ago. Once the Moscow ‘spring’ was all over, I told the ‘68 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit about this buoyant atmosphere. He smiled: ‘Revolutions where people seize the Winter Palace are now impossible, an illusion… the only kind of revolution possible now has to be a moment that changes values.’
On the metro – with the girls in the flash mob – as the North Caucasians pushed by in their uniform black leather jackets and the police in crash helmets looked on, we boarded the metro carriage. Stations may be marble, with colonnades, chandeliers of Siberian crystals or bronze-works of Socialist workers but the carriages are always the inverse, yellow lighting, cramped, Soviet 1970s, careering down tunnels with an aircraft-like roar that obscures the tinned woman’s voice asking you to ‘mind the closing doors’. Between the central stations the flash mob covered their mouths in stickers – ‘They stole our voice’, which is the same word as for ‘vote’ in Russian – and stickered the windows with exhortations to come to the mass protest on Sakharova – leaflets showing Putin’s face in a crossed-through red circle. Moving from one carriage to the next, with police coming after us in their tundra-blue uniforms, a friend said: ‘I now realize how absurd this is, that you can be arrested for anything, and that they are chasing stupid anti-Putin kids when they should be doing something about criminals.’ We got on another train, but for a while we were too nervous, without the flash mob, or for that matter of the police, to slap up the stickers. My friend croaks: ‘OK, yes I will slap it up then, I don’t want to be afraid.’