A Somewhat Oppositional Event

Heading back toward Miriam’s apartment after the opposition rally in Moscow the other night, she asked if I was going to blog about it. I don’t know if I can bore people with another non-event in Russian politics, I told her. But here I am about to do it anyway. It should have been really exciting. This marked the first time after a year and a half of protesting the fact that they’re not allowed to protest that the Russian opposition was legally granted permission to rally in Moscow. And none of what I’m about to say is meant to take away from the considerable passion and effort it must take for them to keep their little democratic ball rolling in Russia. But in the end the underwhelming nature of the spectacle seemed more of a win for the powers that be than for democracy proper, as if the regime finally figured out that letting a tiny fraction of the populace vent some angst in a tiny corner of the capital is not a threat to the status quo as propped up by the rest of the apathetic unorganized masses across the country.

We got to the square, which has been under construction for the past year as a deterrent to the heretofore illegal protestors, a little before the 6pm start of the “meeting” as they called it. It was a somewhat small, unexceptional concrete space between two big boulevards. And since the clocks had rolled back an hour for daylight savings that morning it was already very dark. It was also Halloween, which we’d thought might add some color and life to the event but aside from a number of Putin masks in the crowd, the atmosphere wasn’t particularly festive. The police had set up an elaborate check point like an airport security gate through which everyone needed to pass. However, they patted us down rather nonchalantly and didn’t even bother to look in the shopping bag I was still carrying around from the afternoon. I suppose it would only have been a boon for them if I’d had a bomb with which to take out a significant portion of the opposition rather than a new coat.

What struck me first about the crowd, who all very promptly arrived by 6pm, was the overwhelming number of video cameras interspersed throughout it. As we strode toward the small stage at the center of the square, it seemed as if there was a ratio of one reporter for every protester. Miriam explained that given the nature of the mainstream Russian media most of these “reporters” were either the international journalists we’d been swilling wine with the night before or Russians with their own blogs and live journal accounts who would post all of this coverage informally. It had a strange visual effect in the darkness though as the crowd wound up segmented into little clusters of bright camera lights honing in on someone of note that moved across the square like slow motion shooting stars. When I did go stand with the more concentrated crowd in front of the makeshift stage as things were about to begin, I found myself repeatedly filmed by the people around me who I imagined would then ironically post footage of me as a typical Russian protestor. I wanted to tip them off that I was American and didn’t count but then rationalized that a body is a body, out of place or not, once it’s made its way into protest space.

The second thing that was striking about the crowd was how good looking they all were. These were the very-well-washed not-so-masses of Russia’s educated middle class. Guys wore wire-rimmed glasses to complement the crisp white oxford collars poking out from under thick pea coats. Girls were similarly well-healed with fresh faces and minimal make-up. If I were living full time in Moscow and on the hunt for a Russian boyfriend or “normal” (i.e. non-sexpot) Russian female friends, I would by all means go looking for them at these events. Even the little old ladies were well-groomed, well-spoken and wearing modern coats as opposed to the crackpot pensioners one might expect in their place. However, the “mass” mobilization of this elite crowd felt like a weird contradiction in terms. It reminded me of fraternity parties at Columbia, a school where the vast majority of the, when I was there proto-hipster, now fully fledged hipster student population intentionally opted into college in New York to avoid the undiscerning masses and would rather die than wear togas and play beer pong without irony. The few times freshman year that I wound up roped into going to a frat party at some unfortunate upper west side brownstone or worse, the student center, there was this profound awkwardness of a very tiny, over-educated, somewhat out of place minority participating in what was meant to be a really unselfconscious mass phenomenon of revelry and energy. The “meeting” seemed to suffer from a similar mismatch of means and ends.  

The action began with the adorable 83 year old dissident head of the human rights campaign taking the stage. She and the colleagues who followed her spoke at length about the significance of their being allowed to demonstrate and the importance of human rights and political freedoms. But it was all somewhat procedural and stiff. At times the speakers would try to get the crowd shouting “Russia without Putin” or “This is our city,” “This is our country” but the response was not only half-hearted but would awkwardly die out and leave only a few people chanting and the rest filming and staring at them. Again, evidence that hipsters, the educated, the elite, the people who prefer to cerebrally watch from a far, analyze and write up their thoughts later, whatever you want to call them, don’t tend to “rally” particularly well.

The only action was occurring well away from the stage at a parallel protest where allegedly a few people set off firecrackers and were arrested. Hearing a commotion from that direction, Miriam and I left the platitudes of the rally to find out what was going on. As we neared the area where we’d entered another crowd had formed and walking into it we were swept up in a wave of people being pushed backward forcefully. I saw the glossy helmets of riot police pushing toward us and instinctively surfed my way to the side, leaving Miriam and her video camera to catch the action. I couldn’t entirely tell what was going on but settled in off to the side next to a cute mild-mannered blond guy in hipster glasses and an older police officer in a faded grey uniform who was on a phone and looked like he might be in control of things. All around us were scores of reporters filming the scene and I overheard one of them tell my blond friend that the protestors had knocked down the barricades and the police were now corralling them. The crowd however seemed to be composed of the same ineffectual intellectuals as before and I had a hard time imagining them intentionally breaking anything down beyond high level math problems and statistical functions in the front of a classroom.

From where I was standing, I could see a long line of militsia in camouflage uniforms linking arms like school girls to form a human barrier in an attempt to contain the crowd. But rather than standing still and forming a fixed border they kept pushing forward creating more of a problem then they were solving. And somewhat nonsensically at the end of this line near where I was standing people were coming and going in both directions, nonchalantly walking around the soldiers, as if “struggle with police” was just an optional box to tick on your protest experience card. The riot police were meanwhile somewhat chaotically lunging through the middle of the crowd tucking their heads and asserting their plastic shields but again there did not seem to be a logic to their movements and they created far more commotion among the relatively placid masses than they prevented. Just standing still and off to the side I watched the human barricade move from ten paces behind me to twenty paces in front of me, toward the stage, pushing scores of people with them, and then another daisy chain of soldiers appeared in their place leaving me in a no-man’s land between the two front lines. The blond guy and I made puzzled faces at each other and watched it all unfold, stepping back against the flimsy metal barricades meant to fence off the side of the space to let the forward moving soldiers pass. Though I know it never makes sense to impose western logic on the post-Soviet space, the only plausible explanation for these crazy maneuvers I could come up with was that these poor guys spend their lives training to take down crowds but don’t get much face-time with actual protestors so they were just out there practicing their moves on the only population available to them, like a border collie herding cats rather than cattle when stuck in a suburban home.

Eventually these theatrics were even more boring than the democratic rhetoric and I made my way back to the stage. At the end of the event, most people departed quickly and without any commotion. Though as I was strolling across the space looking for Miriam after most people had left, there did seem to be little groups of people, protestors and police alike, still milling around talking amongst themselves, hoping for some action like at the end of a rather sad high school dance. Better luck next time guys.