Less than three metro stops from the bohemian idealism of Masterskaya, where the previous day an overexcited radio host had told me he could be the ‘next’ foreign minister, the city was neither completely free, nor completely afraid. Most people were deeply uncertain. It was unclear in the arguments I had with friends that lived at stations beyond the Garden Ring, but also in most Russians minds, what was more frightening – stagnation or a revolution. Long-supressed arguments had come to the surface. About the Soviet collapse, about the Americans, about the Chechens, about whether Russia was even worth saving. People began discussing if the regime might actually fall.
Prospect Sakharova – an auspicious name for a venue hosting a mass rally on 24 December 2011 – is so called after the nuclear physicist, who had watched Soviet hydrogen bombs explode like giant red balloons on the steppes of Kazakhstan, then mutated into a dissident and moral sage whom the intelligentsia rallied around during perestroika. Prospect Sakharova – the place where Nashi came to trample, rally, shout out ‘Putin, Putin’ and drum their trademark drums. Those who came out of the metro station came out with a gulp in their throats. The enormity of the crowd, its fur coats, ski jackets, craning its neck to see the stage, wide-eyed and legs sunk on the sidewalk into the dirty, pollution-singed piles of snow they call ‘porridge’, seemed frightened of its own size. A crowd large enough to lose mobile coverage in, to lose friends in, or children. Right ahead were anarchists putting on balaclavas, a gang waving a banner inscribed with ‘all power to the Soviets’, some girls in pink lipstick with a cardboard placard ‘Yes We Can Too’, racist football hooligans waving the Romanov flag, the yellow-black-white of the nationalists, a small cluster shouting ‘Bring back the tsar’.
‘Oh my God,’ winced a nuclear technician, ‘I have come to a rally with, ‘Bring back the tsar? Bring back Soviet power? So what is it – after Putin – the deluge? This is too populist…’
Maybe not quite: over 100,000 people came to stand on Prospect Sakharova that day, the temperature a few degrees below zero.30 Many more came to take a look, then left. Out came those who had broken off the Putin majority. Countless thousands had meandered in and out during the long afternoon rally. Though the flags of the nationalists, the communists, the hard-leftists and the other parties of cranks and fools together were about even with the orange and green banners of the democrats, most of those who came were ordinary Muscovites who had come to make a moral point. A lot of interest was being paid to the ‘make your own poster’ tent and the ‘free protesters tea’ stand. The politicians were wooing them, not the other way round. It was a carnival of political naivety. Faybisovich, worried about nationalists at the front, put it this way: ‘This is what happens when you don’t have politics for ten years.’
Those clusters of flag-wavers and leafleteers were a parade of the politicized, upon whom the sleeping pills named ‘Zyuganov’ and ‘Zhirinovsky’ had worn off. This agitation was a sign that the hegemony of the Kremlin’s two tame parties, the KPRF and the LDPR, was slowly wearing off on the Left and the Right. The most popular leftists were the ‘Left Front’, who scrawled ‘1917–2017 COMING SOON’ on the side of railway tracks, wore leather jackets and flew the red star. They worshipped their leader, Sergey Udaltsov, the skinhead great-grandson of a Bolshevik general, who in shades and leather had the punk look, they crowed, ‘of a guy who really knows what its like inside prison.’
Their guys mostly came from the industrial towns around Moscow and in the Urals, gang-like brotherhoods that held ‘study sessions’ with Marxist thinkers and staged rallies, where they rattled chains at policemen, started fights and on the ground were indistinguishable from the KRPF youth, whom in Ekaterinburg I found completely out of control and dreaming of the day Udaltsov would seize the party – ‘So we can smash OMON!’ Their policies included shutting down the stock exchange and their banners read ‘1991 – Never Again.’ This was their protest too.
The Romanov flag was flying, the shouts of ‘Russians, onwards’ as they marched holding it before them, waving it above them, announced the nationalists. These were men shouting ‘Russia for Russians’, young men whose fathers could have been tempted into voting for Zhirinovsky the populist – ‘because he tells the truth’. These were men led by the likes of Vladimir Tor, who believes all illegal immigrants should be deported, that Chechnya should lose its autonomy and be subject to direct rule and that the ‘Russian state should work for the Russian ethnos’. As he told me all of this he snapped – ‘I love the mosaics of Samarkand, but in Samarkand… we cannot have these 15 million migrants in the country that belongs to my children. I love my children!’ Those shouting ‘Russia, Russia’ on the square were those that Putin could no longer fool with patriotic tough-talk: for all his nationalist posturing, it was hard to argue with Tor when he said, ‘this clique rules not in the interest of Russians, but in its own interests’ or that ‘they have done nothing to stop this tidal wave of Muslim immigrants, because we don’t even have a visa regime with Central Asia.’
That day there were protests of over a thousand people in St Petersburg, Perm, Samara, Kazan, Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk – but Moscow to Russia is like Paris to France, and this was the only protest that mattered. From the back of the stage, watching as first Boris Nemtsov spoke and was booed, waiting for his turn to speak Navalny could have been forgiven for feeling vindicated – the idea he had tried and failed with NAROD – was coming together right in front of his eyes. There was indeed a huge constituency out there against Putin, but it was heavily made up of nationalist and leftists that the democrats needed to compromise and unite with. Only 60 per cent of the protesters considered themselves ‘liberal’.31 These were the slogans on Sakharova that day:
‘Down with the party of crooks and thieves’.
‘Don’t forgive, don’t forget’.
‘Russia has no future’.
‘Russia will be free’.
‘All for one, one for all’.
‘Putin – Thief!’
There was no euphoria in this crowd, but a serious sentiment, mixed with concerns and resignations. It was then that Navalny came to the stage. His performance, mesmerizing and at times shrieking, for a moment held the crowd. Everyone but him had been booed by some of those present. This was the moment he became beyond doubt, the opposition’s pre-eminent leader. But on stage Navalny himself was in a huge panic. ‘I climbed onto the stage and I… it was really cool actually, there were so many people, I had never seen so many people in my whole life. And then as I grabbed the microphone I realized that I had forgotten everything I was going to say… there were no words there…’ He sighs and looks at his shoes. ‘Out came these strange words’:
‘I read a thin little book. It’s called the Constitution of the Russian Federation. And it is clear that the only source of power is the people of Russia. So that is why I do not want to listen to people who say we should now appeal to the government. Who is power? We are the power here.’32
Navalny, pulling himself back slightly, moves into a softer cadence before shouting out:
‘Do we want their blue-bucket lights on our cars? Do we want their privileges? Do we want to drink oil? I see enough people to take the Kremlin and the White House right now. But we are peaceful people – we do not do this. But if these crooks and thieves continue to deceive us, continue to lie and steal from us, we will take back what is rightly ours.’33