A revolution scare went through the population. Little-known voices on the blogosphere put it better than any politician. From Kazan one young woman, a United Russia activist, if a surprisingly eloquent one, wrote about her horrible feelings of history repeating itself. It was hardly a tone of hope:
Of course the collapse of the Soviet Union was a complete shock to them. A large family in which the cities of Minsk, Riga, Kerch, Frunze and Moscow were suddenly divided by international borders and suddenly the phrase ‘rights of the Russian speaking population’ entered into their lexicon. Then the research institutes, where mom and dad worked, stopped paying wages. That’s all, but mom and dad still went to work every day, hoping that their salary was about to be paid. I was small and I did not understand. Then I grew up and I thought this would never be permitted to happen to me and that we had found our place in the new reality. I had not become a millionaire – but I had not slipped into poverty. But more importantly, in contrast to the generation of my parents, who were dissatisfied, who watched in silence during the looting and destruction of the country, I thought my generation would never allow it – never. I was 13, 15 and 17 and I thought I knew everything, but actually I didn’t understand. Now I’m 27, almost 30. And I was horrified to realize that I cannot do anything. And my generation, pushing its completely valid claims, printing out slogans on A4 pieces of paper – without any irony – means my country is getting closer to the abyss. Now, at the rally for ‘Clean Elections’ in Kazan, my Russian friends have come face to face again with those weird-looking guys, shouting separatist slogans on the stage and speaking about the special status of the Tatar language… I am taking the most valuable thing and trying to escape – just like my relatives when Soviet Frunze became Kyrgyz Bishkek.39
Andrei Zorin, an eminent Russian cultural historian from the University of Oxford, avoided the protests. That December he came to Moscow and felt ill at ease looking at the leaders of the opposition movement and the young anti-Putin journalists organizing the protests, the talented circle behind Bolshoi Gorod, Dozhd and Afisha. He personally taught half of them before he emigrated:
I didn’t go to Bolotnaya. I have this feeling that the situation is actually extremely grave. I don’t think this pleasant joking manner with everyone going to the protests to enjoy them is right. There need to be specific political goals. There need to be specific measurements of the risks, evaluated against those goals. I don’t think that any of them properly realize that this may end in blood sooner or later. One can even argue – it will be OK, that it would be revolution – but I do not sincerely think this is what they believe in. If you ask any of them if Putin’s Russia is really worth giving your life for just to get rid of it – I am not sure any of them would say ‘yes’. It’s like a game and it’s one that is separating them from the fears of the rest of the country… But I am an old man, and I should not say that the creative, modern youth are flawed.
The newborn protest movement was unable to answer these questions. It was not ready to run into the Kremlin, as it could barely walk. Without structure, without a policy platform, it was not resistance ready to break through the OMON to force a recount – it was the very beginning of resistance to Putin. In Moscow, around 50,000 people showed themselves ready to come out every few weeks until summer 2012. Yet even if the protest leaders kept the pressure up with street parades, human chains and escalating Internet activism it could not really answer six simple questions:
1 Who appointed you as the opposition?
2 What have you got to say to people who are not Muscovites?
3 What would you do if you took power?
4 Who exactly is your leader?
5 What exactly do you believe in?
6 What policies to do you have to fix a broken state?
Without a clear answer to these questions, in a country where the oldest voters were born under Stalin and the youngest under Yeltsin, even the protesters themselves did not want a revolution. They did not want to seize the Kremlin; they wanted managed democracy to evolve into democracy. Even those on the streets were frightened at what mass violence or confrontations with the police might bring. At many protests, right at the back of the crowds, sometimes wearing a hat just to make sure he was fully disguised, was Dmitry Polikanov, the chubby-cheeked deputy head of the Central Committee of United Russia. ‘I went as an observer, to see what was happening,’ he told me, ‘but I was calmed, when I observed that the crowds did not treat those on the stage as their leaders.’
He was right. Fears like this kept Putin in power and stopped the protest movement turning into a full-blown revolution. But the protest movement illustrated just how unstable Putinism really is. It illustrated that the Putin consensus was over and that the Putin majority had dissolved. The regime, for all its attempts to build a vertical of power and enthusiastic support with youth groups like Nashi, was forced to pay people to attend its rallies and to use the most fearmongering rhetoric to clinch victory in the ‘plebiscite-election’, despite Putin’s only permitted opponents being ones who could not seriously challenge him.
The official results of the March 2012 election came in at 64 per cent, but independent experts placed his true share of the vote somewhere between 45 and 50 per cent.40 This would include all those state employees paid or compelled to vote for him. Almost all the votes used to make up the difference had been shifted from the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who according to one independent estimate saw his vote-share shrink from over 21 per cent to 7 per cent.41 In an open contest these votes would have been cast for a liberal anti-Putin candidate. Perhaps this is why – standing in front of a crowd of 110,000 – as the exit polls came in that he had, after all, ‘won’ the election, Putin had to wipe tears from his eyes. Imitating Navalny he shouted over the crowd bused in from the sticks and given free vodka, ‘We won,’ and the ‘enemies of Russia that only want to bring chaos to our country’ had been defeated. ‘Glory to Russia,’ he finished, with tears in his eyes. Tears of exhaustion?42 Or realization at how fragile his ‘stability’ was after all? Russia had changed, but the regime had not.
Over the weeks that followed, the blogosphere seemed to drown in elegies, but not for Putin. One bitter blogger posted a few days later the reasons that the movement failed to stop Putin’s return:
The answer is very simple: the ‘swamp’ was not really directed against the political regime, but against the country with the name of Russia, as it has existentially been for centuries. On the ‘swamp’ people came out to say that they are tired of living in the novels of Gogol and Shchedrin’s stories, in this darkness, in this filth with the heads of fools. It was a real testament (paradoxically) to the success of Putin’s modernization: the political class had emerged capable of forming the demands of civilization, including the rules of civilized politics. On the ‘swamp’ was born a new country, but it was not this pained baby that won on 4 March. Putin raised up the old Russia in its boots and galoshes, wife-beating and vodka-tippling. They came and destroyed our iPhones.43
The winter protests were not an earthquake on a Richter scale strong enough to bring down the Kremlin walls, but tremors unsettling enough to make cracks appear in the rooms of the palace, exposing the fault lines under the regime. They were the birth pangs of a new opposition, of a new Moscow – the first malfunction at the beginning of the unravelling of managed democracy. The demonstrations ended the Putin consensus and the Putin majority. They exposed that all was not well, in a system with no ‘the dictatorship of law’ and an incompetent ‘vertical’.