Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Before I went to bed last night, the number of people who clicked “I’m going” on the coming Saturday demonstration’s Facebook page was nearing three thousand. This morning, it is over five thousand. Eighty-year-old ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev has called for a revote. In a post for the International Herald Tribune opinion blog, where I am a regular contributor, I describe Monday’s protest and try to put into words what is by now the unmistakable sense that Russia has passed a turning point.

The problem with the Soviet regime—and the one created by Vladimir Putin in its image—is that they are closed systems whose destruction is unpredictable. There is no obvious cause-and-effect relationship between street protests and the ultimate fall of the regime because there are no mechanisms that make the government accountable to the people.

Even the most obvious recent parallel, Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, fails as a model: There the stand-off between street protesters and the government that had stolen an election was resolved by the Supreme Court, which ordered a recount and a re-vote. But Russia has no justice system independent of the executive branch. And worse, neither a recount nor a re-vote would work, since election laws have long since been rigged to allow only Kremlin-sanction parties on the ballot.

So the people who are protesting the stolen election are, in effect, demanding the dismantling of the entire system. And that, for lack of better parallels, brings us back to the fall of the USSR.

That process took five years and proceeded in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back manner. Protests were allowed, then banned, then allowed again. Dissidents were freed, then their apartments were ransacked by the police. Censorship was lifted in fits and starts. At the height of the protest movement, hundreds of thousands flooded the streets, defying not only the police but tanks, and yet it was impossible to tell whether their actions had direct consequences—because, just as now, the people had no mechanisms for holding the government accountable.

But one thing is clear in retrospect: Once the process was underway, the regime was doomed. The more hot air it pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it also became to growing pressure from the outside. That is exactly what is happening now. It may take months or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst.

What will happen next? The Kremlin seems to be flailing. Yesterday tens of thousands of young people bused in from out of town were herded into the center of Moscow for a United Russia victory rally. They were issued bright vests and blue drums, which they discarded unceremoniously after the event. Pictures of the drums, dented, stained, and soaked, piled on the sidewalk, flooded the blogs. They seemed to symbolize the regime perfectly: a lot of noise and pomp, then an inglorious abandonment in the dark freezing rain. What are the government’s other options? Most of the people detained on Monday and Tuesday are still in police holding cells, and they have already overtaxed the facilities’ and the courts’ capacity: mass arrests at Saturday’s protest are simply not an option. Violence is possible but feels doubtful, because Putin, I suspect, has not yet realized how desperate his situation is. More likely, he will attempt to mollify the protesters by throwing them a bone. Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s chief puppeteer, has already suggested that a new party be formed to accommodate “irritated urban communities.” Putin and his inner circle seem unaware that the whole country is irritated with them, so they probably think that allowing a handpicked ersatz opposition candidate on the ballot in the March presidential election will let off enough steam. The protests will have to continue until those in power realize that they are a tiny and despised minority—and then they will act like a cornered animal. What is in their limited repertoire—a terrorist attack that will allow Putin to declare a state of emergency? Such a move will not save his regime, but might delay its demise by a year or two.

In the evening, I go to a meeting of Rus’ Sidyashchaya (Russia Behind Bars), an organization formed a couple of months ago by Olga Romanova, a former business writer who became a full-time prisoners’ rights activist after her entrepreneur husband was arrested and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for fraud. After bribery failed to set him free, Romanova launched her own investigation, turning up evidence that her husband was sentenced on the basis of forged documents—provided, she believes, by his former business partner, who also, until last year, was a senator. Romanova made it to the Supreme Court, which overturned the verdict—and after Moscow City Court ignored that decision, she made it to the Supreme Court again, and again got the verdict overturned. She then flew to a distant prison colony to collect her husband, who had been behind bars for more than three years already. The video of their reunion instantly went viral.

Rus’ Sidyashchaya meets at a café in the center of town, the sort where thoughtful young men and women choose among eighteen varieties of excellent tea before proceeding to a few varieties of mediocre wine. But these Wednesday-night gatherings are mostly of women who look like they work as accountants or middle managers. Except they are working full-time to get their “business prisoner” husbands out of jail. I sit at a table with Svetlana Bakhmina, a former mid-level Yukos lawyer who served four and a half years in prison, and a shy young bespectacled woman who tells me her husband has been sentenced for alleged fraud.

“And here is Irek Murtazin!” shouts Romanova, who is forty-five and heavyset, with dyed red hair.

A slight man in his late forties enters. He is a former television executive from Tatarstan who was fired in October 2002, over his coverage of the theater siege. He became a popular blogger, and in 2009 was arrested for allegedly libeling the president of Tatarstan. He was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison for libel and, the court ruled, for “inciting enmity against a specific social group,” defined as government officials.

“I have good news and bad news,” says Murtazin. “The bad news is, a Tatarstan judge who hit and killed a young man while driving drunk last summer has just been acquitted.”

The room issues a collective sigh: this bad news is hardly news at all, so common are accidents involving state officials—and their acquittals.

“The good news,” says Murtazin, “is that nearly half the justices of the peace who were getting cases of those detained in the protests Monday and Tuesday called in sick today. That’s eighty judges with the flu.”

Now, this is news. And it turns out that because detention facilities are overflowing, some of the detainees are being released and casually instructed to show up for court at a later date. Corruption fighter Alexey Navalny, however, appeared before a judge today and was sentenced to fifteen days for his role in leading the illegal march on Monday.

One of the women at the meeting is handing out white ribbons to everyone. In less than twenty-four hours, the revolution’s symbol has become official.

When I get home, the number of people who have clicked “I’m going” on the Facebook page for Saturday’s protest has passed ten thousand.

More than twenty thousand Facebook users now plan to attend the protest on Saturday.

I talk with someone who is in daily contact with members of the presidential administration and the federal government. “They are hysterical,” he says. “No one knows what to do, they make decisions based on the mood in which they wake up in the morning. Yesterday, Medvedev wanted to turn off [the independent cable television channel] Dozhd. We were barely able to stop him.” In a few days, I will learn that cable providers did get calls directing them to stop providing access to Dozhd, but decided to resist the request, citing contractual obligations. No one was more surprised than the owner and director of Dozhd. President Medvedev, meanwhile, has un-followed Dozhd on his Twitter account.