Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

City workers have hastily started repairs of some kind in Revolution Square, where Saturday’s protest is slated to take place—a classic tactic of last resort to keep demonstrators away.

I am anxious. Driving the kids to school, I listen to the radio and worry—even as the newscaster reports that more than twenty-five thousand people plan to come on Saturday. It is like that moment early in a passionate love affair when all the same words are being said as yesterday, but somehow the heat seems to have been turned down a notch. I drop the kids off, go home, and go back to sleep.

But when I wake up a couple of hours later, the revolution is still on, and passions are just as high as they need to be. The issue of concern now is that, while Saturday’s protest is technically legal, the organizers’ original application—filed ten days ago—specified three hundred participants. In the past, those in the overflow have been detained. Yet it will be impossible to detain an overflow of thousands, or tens of thousands—and that may translate into police violence.

Two organizers—a career politician and a magazine editor—go to Moscow city hall to try to negotiate. In the middle of the afternoon, the editor, Sergei Parkhomenko, posts the result of their negotiations on his Facebook page: the city has offered a new location for tomorrow’s protest, granted the organizers license to have as many as thirty thousand participants, and extended the duration of the protest from two to four hours. Soon the city also agrees to provide all those who mistakenly go to Revolution Square with unimpeded passage to the new location, a half-hour’s walk away. The only bad news is that instead of the fabulously named Revolution Square, the protest will take place at Bolotnaya (Swampy) Square. A friend, prominent poet and political commentator Lev Rubinshtein, immediately terms this “a linguistic challenge.”

The country’s best-loved best-selling author, Grigory Chkhartishvili, who pens historical detective novels under the name Boris Akunin, writes in his blog:

Why does everything in this country have to be like this? Even civil society has to wake up when it’s most inconvenient for the writer.

I went away to the French countryside for some time in peace, to write my next novel. But now I can’t concentrate.

I guess I’m going home. That’s 500 kilometers behind the wheel—and then wish me luck getting on a flight.

I hope I do make it and get to see the historic occasion with my own eyes and not via YouTube.

But the reason I am writing this post is that I have been asked to warn all those who don’t yet have this information:

THE PROTEST WILL TAKE PLACE IN BOLOTNAYA SQUARE (not in Revolution Square).

At parent-teacher conferences in the evening, I notice many of the other children’s parents are wearing white ribbons.

When I put my daughter to bed, she asks if she can go to the protest with me tomorrow.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take kids yet.”

“But this is a legal protest, right?” She knows that otherwise I could be detained.

I assure her that it is and that nothing bad is likely to happen to me. “I’ll probably be going to a lot of protests these coming months,” I say, “and I probably won’t be able to take you with me. But I’ll take you to the last one, when we have a celebration.”

“You mean, when there is no more Putin?” She catches her breath, as if the thought were too much to contemplate. She is ten; she was born after Putin came to power, and she has heard conversations about him her entire life. When my kids were little, they made Putin into a sort of household villain, the bogeyman who would come get you if you did not mind your table manners. I put a stop to that, and as they have grown I have tried to give them a reasonably nuanced picture of politics, but I think I may have neglected to say that no one rules forever.

Driving in from our dacha, where the children and Darya will be while I am at the protest, I listen to the radio and fret. So what if thirty-five thousand people have stated on Facebook that they are going to the protest? I have heard of people getting seven hundred Facebook RSVPs for a party—and not a single actual guest. It is the weekend, after all: people will be feeling lazy, they will want to sleep in or stay at their dachas, and they will figure someone else will go to the protest.

As I get closer to Bolotnaya Square, I see people flowing to it from every direction: in groups, in couples, alone; young, old, middle-aged. People wearing white ribbons, white scarves, white hats, even white trousers, carrying white balloons and white carnations. It still has not snowed, so the white they wear and carry has to compensate.

I meet up with a group of friends, including Andrei and two of his brothers. At the metal detectors, the police are calm and polite. Inside, we wander the square, scanning for familiar faces. At Monday’s protest, I knew everyone was there because I could see them all; today I know they are all here because I cannot see them for the crowd. Even texting becomes impossible, as the volume exceeds the capacity of Moscow’s cellular networks.

We gawk at homemade banners people have brought. One features a graph of the official results reported by the Central Election Committee, overlaid with a bell curve that tells a different story: it shows what normal distribution of support for United Russia would look like. “We Don’t Trust You, We Trust Gauss,” says the poster, referring to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who gave the world the bell curve.

“I Did Not Vote for These Assholes,” proclaims another banner, carried by a young man with a reddish beard, “I Voted for the Other Assholes. I Demand a Recount.”

“There are so many people here!” a very young man shouts into his cell phone. “And they are all normal! I’ve heard like a million jokes, and they were all funny!”

If you have spent years feeling as if your views were shared by only a few of your closest friends, being surrounded by tens of thousands of like-minded people really does feel like hearing a million funny jokes at once.

Somewhere in the distance, there is a stage. I cannot see it, and I can hardly hear any of the speakers. One of my friends remembers a trick from the early 1990s, when people would bring portable radios to rallies and use them to listen to the speakers: she turns on the radio on her cell phone (cellular service may be overtaxed, but this public square features free wireless) and gives us the highlights of speeches. We look around, and occasionally join in chants: “New Elections!” “Freedom!” “Russia Without Putin!”

The speakers include Boris Akunin (he made it from the south of France in time), a well-loved, long-blacklisted television anchor, and assorted activists. Darya’s father speaks about election fraud. None of those who pass for opposition politicians—“the other assholes”—are here. They have not yet gotten the message that power has shifted away from the Kremlin. Navalny is still in jail, so a journalist reads his address to the protesters. And Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire who suspended his political career two months ago, is still silent. On Monday he will announce that he is running for president, but by then it will be too late to win cred with the revolutionary crowd: he will immediately be branded a Putin plant.

I am wearing thermal underwear, two jackets, and moon boots; there is no way to dress for standing still in a Russian winter. After a couple of hours my friends and I decide to leave. Other people are still arriving. Walking away from the protest, I stop on a pedestrian bridge to look back at the crowd. There are a lot more than thirty-five thousand people; later estimates will range as high as a hundred fifty thousand.