Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

My friend Ana instant-messages me with a quote from today’s New York Times article on the Russian election. Ana, whom I met in Kosovo, spent several years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, and now lives in The Hague. “‘Democracy is in action,’ Mr. Medvedev said, standing with Mr. Putin at United Russia’s campaign headquarters, where both appeared a bit shaken.” She adds: “If it wasn’t sooo sad, it would be quite funny.”

“Yeah,” I respond. “Something is afoot, but it isn’t going anywhere.”

And I go to the protest. It is still unseasonably warm for Moscow, which means it is cold and miserable: temperature around freezing, and pouring rain. Who is going to brave this kind of weather to fight the hopeless fight for democracy?

Everyone.

At least, everyone I know. I approach the park where the protest is slated to take place with two friends, Andrei and Masha, and as we walk, people attach to our small clump. One of Andrei’s younger brothers, and then another. Two of my former reporters—the ones who took turns calling in from the scene of the theater-siege disaster nine years ago. One of them, Anton, is now a radical art activist, and has spent a fair amount of time in jail for prank protests. The other, Grisha, recently quit his editorial job in a dispute over preelection censorship: he had been instructed to exclude critical articles from his digests of foreign media coverage of Russia. As we draw closer, we cannot even make out the metal detectors through the crowd. Then word spreads: The cordoned-off area has filled up, the police will not be letting any more people through. This means there are at least five hundred people in the park—and that, by contemporary Moscow standards, is huge.

We walk in the street along the park, looking in over a low fence. There are not hundreds but thousands of people in the park. We find ourselves in an informal phalanx about ten across. Parked all along the street are buses that brought the police here, and waiting prisoner-transport vehicles. “We are blocking traffic,” Andrei says. “They’ll detain us.” The police look on indifferently as about a dozen of us climb over the fence to join the demonstrators. The rain keeps coming. My hair is soaked, and my feet feel like they are about to fall off. I am happy to be standing there freezing and endlessly saying hello to friends appearing from every direction.

There comes my friend the photographer, with whom I traveled the war zones in the 1990s. There, arriving separately, is his son, a college sophomore born a year after the Soviet Union collapsed. And now Tatyana, who was my editor more than fifteen years ago. “I’ve lost it, you know,” she tells me. “Remember how we used to count the number of people at a demonstration in the nineties, by mentally breaking the crowd into quadrants? I can’t do it anymore.” Neither can I: I cannot remember the technique, nor can I distinguish anything in the thick crowd, in the rain, in the dark. But I am certain there are more than five thousand people here—estimates will range up to ten thousand—and that makes this the largest protest in Russia since the early 1990s.

As the rally breaks up, I invite the group to my apartment, which is just down the block. The women accept the invitation, but the men say they are going to join a march to the Central Election Committee building. The march is clearly illegal, and I fear they will be arrested. Indeed, there will be about three hundred arrests, and there will be violence. But there will be something else, too: in about an hour, when I am cooking a late supper and people are sipping cognac in my apartment, still trying to warm up, Grisha will tweet that Andrei has just pulled his two younger brothers out of a prisoner-transport vehicle by their coat collars. In another hour, six young men—Grisha, Andrei, Andrei’s two brothers, and two men I have not met—will be at my apartment, disheveled and self-satisfied in a romantic, revolutionary way, embellishing the story of the prisoners’ rescue as they tell and retell it.

I think, I have seen this before. This is the moment the fear lifts. Someone enters a prisoner-transport vehicle to rescue his brothers, and the police in riot gear move aside and let him. It is a tiny moment of great change.

The young men eat and decamp to the police precincts where their less fortunate friends are being held.

Driving the kids to school, I choose the route that takes me past a police precinct where some of last night’s detainees were taken. I see a small crowd just outside: about a hundred people spent the wet, freezing night here, demanding—unsuccessfully—that lawyers be allowed into the building.

Another, illegal protest is called for tonight. All day I debate whether to go, and finally decide against it. I have taken part in illegal protests before, and have always managed to slip away (once sliding between a riot cop’s legs). But my girlfriend is seven months pregnant, and it seems a particularly bad idea to risk fifteen days’ administrative arrest, which is what many of the detainees will get.

I go about my business with a strange feeling. I go to the gym and then to a café, to meet with the general director of the publishing house where I am going to start working next week. The café is not far from the square where tonight’s protest will take place, and because of this my phone’s reception keeps fading in and out: word has it, cellular service is being jammed. Driving home, I pass armored vehicles and police buses, which now seem to be parked in every square in the center of town. According to radio news reports, tens of thousands of police have been pulled into Moscow from other cities.

I do not register where I learn this—from a friend, from Facebook, or from the radio—but another legally sanctioned protest is scheduled for Saturday. That makes the troops and the jamming feel more exciting than ominous: Monday’s protest was not a fluke. Perhaps this is not necessarily going nowhere after all.

I worry, though, that the brewing revolution has no unifying symbol, no clear slogan. At 2:43 a.m. an advertising executive named Arsen Revazov writes a Facebook post:

When and if several million people put white ribbons on their arms or tie them to their cars, to their handbags or their lapels, etc., it will become impossible to forge or falsify anything at all. Because it will all be out in the open and everyone will know.

It will snow. The entire city will turn white. Citizens don white ribbons. First they are ten percent of the population, then thirty, then fifty, then seventy-five. Once it’s more than thirty, no one is afraid anymore. And suddenly everyone—or almost everyone—loves and respects everyone else because of this….

We have to keep this up through March. Then God will decide. I am convinced that if several million people don white ribbons (or even paper napkins) in our city, everything will change for the better fast and without violence.

Within hours, nearly a thousand people “like” the post and more than seven hundred repost it. Moreover, it turns out that a separate white-ribbon effort began a couple of hours earlier. The revolution now has a symbol.

Another three hundred people have been detained at the illegal protest. A friend starts a Facebook group to coordinate aid efforts for the detainees. I join, as do several hundred others. By tomorrow, there will be regular food deliveries, courtesy of the café where I had my business meeting today, and sleeping bags and blankets will be bought or donated for all the detainees, who are otherwise reduced to sitting on hard benches or standing. The group is called HELP-Revolution, and at three in the morning I am bursting with pride to have been made an administrator.