Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

I am driving my family to see a vapid American comedy at an expensive shopping mall in central Moscow. Snow is late this year, and the city feels like it has been plunged into a permanent wet darkness. Excessive lighting on the Garden Ring, the eight-lane road that circles the city center, does little to change that feeling. But I am struck by a giant illuminated structure. One might call it a poster or a billboard, but neither description would do justice to the scale of the thing. It sits atop a two-story building from the eighteenth century, and it appears taller than the building. It is backlit and also illuminated brightly around the edges, some sort of King Kong digital photo frame. Inside the frame, Putin and Medvedev, one wearing a red tie and the other a blue, look resolutely past each other, over a giant caption: UNITED RUSSIA. TOGETHER WE WILL WIN.

Tomorrow is the parliamentary election. That makes today, by law, a “day of silence,” meaning any and all campaigning is banned—outdoor advertising included. I pull over at an intersection, take a picture of the monstrosity with my cell phone, and upload it to Facebook. Within an hour, the picture collects seventeen comments—no world record, but more reaction than I expected on a Saturday night. Even more surprising, those commenting are not my usual gang of politically engaged friends. “Pigs!” writes a marketing manager. “You’d think we’ve seen worse, but it still makes you want to throw up, doesn’t it?” writes a former political reporter who gave up journalism fourteen years ago.

I have not voted in a parliamentary election for more than a dozen years, because Putin’s laws rendered elections meaningless: political parties could no longer get on the ballot without the Kremlin’s approval, members of parliament were no longer elected directly, and the results were rigged by election officials anyway.

But a couple of months ago, when a group of well-known liberal writers, artists, and political activists called on people to go to the polls and write an obscenity on the ballot, I criticized the idea online as a losing tactic. The government had made a mockery of elections, but, I argued, you cannot outmock a cynic. What we really needed was a meaningful alternative to the mockery—like, perhaps, a reason to vote. In the back-and-forth that followed in various publications, a few people chimed in with actual reasons to go to the polls: first, to make sure the Party of Crooks and Thieves did not vote in your name; second, to vote for one of the quasi-opposition parties on the ballot, so that Putin’s United Russia did not win a constitutional majority in parliament. Amazingly, these geeky exhortations went viral.

Having written her dissertation on elections, my girlfriend is a principled always-voter. She woke up the other day and asked me, “Did I dream it, or did you say you were going to vote?”

“Yes, I am going to vote.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I can’t quite explain it,” I said. “But I feel something is afoot.”

I said this because over the last few days I have had several discussions with my friends, who are also going to vote: we have been trying to decide which so-called party to pick. And thousands of people, including a number of my friends, have registered and trained as volunteer election observers either on their own or as part of an effort called Citizen Observer, organized by a prominent political scientist, Dmitry Oreshkin (who also happens to be my girlfriend’s father). They will be spending tomorrow at the polls trying to forestall attempts at falsification. And people are discussing the picture of Putin and Medvedev on my Facebook page as if, all at once, they really cared.

I go to the polls a half-hour before they close, as the geeks told me to, so that I can catch the election thieves red-handed if they have already used my name to vote. But no, neither I nor my ninety-one-year-old grandmother, registered at the same address, has voted. Nor do I observe any other violations. I cast my vote uneventfully, photograph it, post it to Facebook as a potential aid in exposing vote-count violations (another geek idea), and go to a former colleague’s fortieth-birthday party.

It is a mixed crowd: book-publishing people, journalists, designers, and at least one wealthy manufacturer—my friend is one of those people who seem to know everyone. And everyone is talking about the election. Thirty-somethings come in declaring, “I voted for the first time in my life!” After a while it gets predictable that anyone who reached legal majority after Putin came to power will utter this phrase within minutes of walking through the door. A couple of guests who worked as volunteer election observers regale us with tales of violations: young people who were paid to hide prepared ballots under their clothing and slip them in along with their own; election officials who removed observers once the counting began. (Tomorrow we will find out that many officials simply forged their final tallies, with no regard for the actual ballots.)

None of this is news to me or Darya.

What is new is the fact that we are talking about all this at a party, late into the night. And that we all voted. And something else, too: the election observers tell us that their fellow observers included a schoolteacher, a businessman’s wife who arrived in a Range Rover, and other people who are… not like us. Something has shifted, and not only for us media junkies glued to our Facebook pages.

“What do you think it will take for people to take to the streets?” Vladimir, a smart young reporter from the leading business daily’s presidential pool, asks those gathered in the kitchen.

“I’m not sure,” I say, “but I feel like something is in the air.”

Driving the kids to school, I listen to reports of partial returns on the radio. United Russia supposedly has just under 50 percent of the vote. I know this is not an accurate figure, but it is considerably lower than the similarly falsified results of the previous parliamentary election, when United Russia supposedly got 66 percent. Perhaps this time the true numbers are so low that some local election officials felt they could take the lie only so far. As I will also find out later today, some precincts resisted altogether the pressure to cook their numbers. Citizen Observer’s five hundred election observers, posted at 170 precincts in Moscow, saw no major violations of voting procedures at thirty-six of them. When the results from just those precincts were tallied, United Russia came in second, with just over 23 percent of the vote, trailing the Communist Party. Assuming this selection of precincts was representative, it would appear that the official count more than doubled the real one. Citizen Observer also reports that 49 percent of eligible voters took part—far more than in any other recent Russian election.

A protest is planned for tonight, and I plan to go. I do not want to: protests in Moscow are dreary or dangerous, or both. The way it works now, anyone planning to stage any kind of public rally or demonstration has to notify the authorities ten to fifteen days in advance; the city can then deny permission or grant it, for a specific location and a specific number of participants. If permission is denied but the demonstration goes on anyway, participants are likely to be arrested, and roughed up in the process. If permission is granted, the police set up cordons marking off space for the expected number of participants, and metal detectors at the perimeter. Protesters have to undergo a sometimes unpleasant search procedure and then hold their rally behind the police cordon, quite literally talking to themselves. I dislike the legal gatherings even more than the illegal ones, but once every few months, I feel I must go. This is one of those times.