A resolution, not revolution -- a sedate call to "free political prisoners" (i.e. Navalny, jailed for 15 days, but it's not clear they mean Khodorkovsky or Lebedev); fire the head of the electoral commission; investigate and punish fraud; hold new elections.
Ima call it as I see it -- I find a lot of the stuff around the latest Russian "Snow Revolution"...managed. You know, like "managed" democracy. This is a "managed revolution."
We're being scolded by various knowier-than-thous not to call it a revolution -- we've heard the leaders (yes, there are leaders) of the rally tell us that this isn't a revolution, because revolutions mean bloodshed and extremism -- and they're right, and let's hope there isn't. (See above resolution -- all very managed and docile.)
We're being told scornfully that "the Western media" is calling this...resolution meeting a "revolution". Evil Western media! Well, yeah. But start with the leader of the Russian pack journalism for Western consumption, Julia Ioffe, who coined the term "Snow Revolution" by positioning her blog about it in The New Yorker. White ribbons, snowy weather -- hence "snow revolution". You know, white. Not like those awful coloured revolutions that were all instigated by westerners and bring upstarts like Ukrainians or Georgians who don't appreciate Russia into power!
I had this to say to Julia -- I'd been wanting to comment on her Foreign Policy article back in September as being way too docile and complacent about her fellow Russians' ability to reject the swap-out of the tandem:
Julia, I do have to wonder why you gave us no glimmer of your enthusiasm for anti-Putin movements a few months ago, when you seemed more to lean toward explication of realpolitik here and here on Foreign Policy.
There, you made Kolesnikov's monarchic praise of Putin sound like it had "more than a few supporters," and you hastened to tell us that "This, by the way, will also make American foreign policy easier: just one man to deal with."
You concluded quoting [former Kremlin advisor Gleb] Pavlovsky (!) cynically telling us that power will remain with those who depend on it for wealth, not indicating Just Russia -- or anybody -- might see it otherwise.
Are you opportunistic?
I'll go La Russaphobe one better -- it's too bad *you* didn't discover these people's existence before now! It's too bad *none* of you showed up to protest -- and cover in The New Yorker -- the failure to register PARNAS [the liberal opposition party with Yavlinsky, Nemtsov, etc.].
This photo from a helicopter doesn't look like 50,000 or even 35,000. It looks like perhaps 15,000-20,000. It still makes a point, without having to claim that "more people came" than those who pledged on Facebook.
Except not everyone is doing so well -- this kid in Syktyvar is sent off to the army directly from a demonstration, [UPDATE]; he believes he is unfit for military service and should be let go; the medical commission thinks otherwise; he's awaiting a delegation of human rights defenders and parliamentarians]. Milov reports that his people were fired from their jobs for reporting on the elections.
Well, you have to break eggs to make an omelette.
Let's look at the numbers. We were promised 30,000 or 35,000 "Facebook people" (Russians have increasingly moved to Facebook, you know? Because their Live Journals get pulled, or all of Live Journal is "down" because of...whatever. Forces that cause these things to go down.)
Then, the numbers that actually came sure didn't look like 35,000 to me, it looked more like 15,000, judging from that panoramic photograph taken by helicopter. Yet other observers argued it was indeed more like 30,000 or even 40,000. You know, crowd counting isn't exactly that much of a science. I've been in marches in Moscow that had 250,000 or more in the 1990s, and you sure could tell, streams of people going for miles. I've been in marches in New York City with 50,000 or 250,000, so I do feel the difference. The Occupy Wall Street area of Zucotti Park could hold -- packed to the gills -- say, 3,000. 4,000, if you spread out into the streets around it. So you could see what a demonstration of 5,000 looked like -- it was those city blocks. If you want to see a march of 40,000 or 50,000 -- it's what stretches from Union Square to Washington Square, like the first anti-war march when Iraq was invaded. The NYPD gives out these totals, and the New York Times does, and it really isn't so wildly disparate. Organizers always inflate, and police always under report but the media doesn't do that by and large.
In Russia, we are hearing people tell us that there were 50,000 or more, and it's clearly an exaggeration, possibly by double.
The organizers said there'd be more than 30,000, which is why they were moved from Triumfal'naya (where for a long time small "31" demonstrations have been held to insist on enjoyment of Art. 31 of the Russian Constitution to be able to assemble) -- to Bolotnaya (the word comes from the Russian word for "swamp," which is what the Moscow intelligentsia always calls people who don't have their sophisticated views). A letter from the mayor's office, which gives out the march permits, authorizes the move to Bolotnaya.
There's an interesting detail that I haven't seen western news media report: all those thousands of people streaming to Bolotnaya had to go through metal detectors as these extremely calm and collected NTV announcers tell us. Police set up a checkpoint and made people go through metal detectors to remove possible guns or knives. It was very orderly. People didn't object. These are not lefties and libertarians ranting about the TSA, for the most part, these are docile middle-class Muscovite intelligentsia, educated computer engineers and financial managers. So the police know how many people went through those metal detectors.
Some upsurge of popular sentiment, going through metal detectors!
Everyone had written each other on ZhZh or FB the night before to be excellent to each other, be nice, be peaceful, don't be extreme, don't be rigid. So they arrived trying to keep in good cheer and not yield to inevitable provocations. Funny, there don't seem to have been any. Not with those police checkpoints, anyway!
And if you saw who was on the podium, there were no excesses, so to speak. Leonid Parfenov gave an excellent speech, really normal and yet moving. It made me feel a tad bit better about the Snowed Revolution, but I didn't think Putin would be gone any time soon.
Would to God we had people like Lyonya running Occupy Wall Steet, instead of the Leninists and loons that we did get. Leonid is intelligent, experienced, and credentialed -- he was kicked out of NTV in 2004 (which was by that time no longer independent) for a number of things that culminated with management's displeasure at his interview of the Chechen leader Yandarbiyev's widow, in her burqua. The Kremlin told his bosses they couldn't run a thing like that. He insisted on running it, it was news. Then he insisted on getting a written decision. Then he published it in Kommersant. Zakonik takoi. A stickler for the law. And that got him fired for violating "corporate ethics" which is how they "explained" it.
Lyona is wonderful, I remember him from the 1990s and subsequently and watching him on TV. But Lyonya didn't exactly sell matches and cucumbers on the corner after being expelled from NTV. He kept writing articles and books and I think he succeeded in making a living. He wasn't forced into exile. He describes himself as a journalist, not a professional revolutionary.
(Russians hate professional revolutionaries -- the other day I was giving an interview to RFE/RL about the late Andrei Tverdokhlebov and his important contributions as a colleague of Sakharov's in the Committee of Human Rights, the first Russian NGO to be recognized by a Western international organization, the International League for Human Rights -- and when I kept saying that Tverdokhlebov did his civic duty in Russia, and did what he could for awhile after before forced to emigrate after serving a term of exile, but then he retreated to private life as a professor and didn't keep up with the dissidents -- the reporter was relieved -- "oh, in other words, he wasn't a professional revolutionary.")
Russians hate professional revolutionaries because they remind them of the cunning and manipulative Bolsheviks and all Soviet leaders and post-Soviet red directors transformed into oligarchs. But professional revolutionaries are in fact what we're getting here.
So on that platform at the Snow Revolution, we had Yavlinsky (who couldn't get enough votes to get into the 7 percent needed for parliament, but I maintain that's in part due to being smeared or ignored on state-controlled TV). We had various other folks of impeccable liberal credentials. I didn't see the communists but then I didn't watch all the Youtubes out there. Certainly the communists were there, in full force, waving their hammer-and-sickle red flags. CBS discretely called this "a symbol of revolution," as if Russians, getting active and demonstrating again after 10 years, couldn't find any other "symbols." No, CBS, this is a symbol first and foremost of *communism* and *communism* is in fact what is represented at the Snow Revolution in full force. You know, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. We were all told that the revo is going to be all international civil servant liberals like ElBaradei or Google engineers like Wael Ghonim -- but stay tuned, it's more complicated.
This protest was about the co-opted Just Russia, the communists and the fascist "libertarians" not getting their vote, so make of it what you will.
So...about Just Russia. Now, what did they do on the eve of this huge march? You may not have noticed, in between Alena Popova's tweets about earning a badge on Four Square! before heading into a party meeting. They changed their leaders at Saturday's convention, as Moscow News reports, Duma deputy and well-known St. Petersburg politician Oksana Dmitriyeva was passed over to bring on Sergei Mironov, a Kremlin loyalist amicable enough to United Russia. I imagine these parties will merge, or form a "tandem" or create some kind of condominium. Everyone will get to feel like a revolutionary -- they won't really be.
The New York Times and others were startled that official TV reported on the demonstrations. No accident, comrades. They were allowed to. Duh! You don't transform *those* people -- the kind of people who fired Parfenov and never cover anything about human rights activists until they are dead -- overnight. Of course they had permission.
Of course it was "letting off steam." This technique is so well-rehearsed from the Soviet era, and so well known in this region to the point of making people's teeth hurt, that I wonder why Western reporters don't get it. Partly, some of them are younger and didn't live through the Soviet era and don't get. Some like Ellen Barry who covered the coup collapse for CNN in 1991 does know better, but she's caught up in the moment, and as I know from experience, she has the fervent expectations of her editors back in New York for it to look a certain way and they edit news copy in a certain way.
I didn't see a single speech or news coverage or sign complaining about Surkov. And that wasn't an accident either. They complained only about the head of the electoral commission -- as if another Kremlin-compliant figure wouldn't be found if you got rid of him.
This non-system opposition didn't attack the system itself. They said they had a wide variety of people at their march -- vegetarians, leftists, communists, greens, pagans, whatever. The reality is, they didn't go *too* far. The New Age loony Svetlana Peunova was there demanding to be let on the platform. Some beefy men in ski masks firmly and forcefully told her to get lost. She made a youtube about this horrible censorship of the democratic opposition. And in essence, she's right. The entire thing is very well-manicured and very well scripted. Navalny was helpfully in jail for 15 days.
If I were running the meeting, I'd have led off with a demand for Surkov to go -- not that he couldn't be replaced with another Kremlin-compliant but because he is now so wired up with the levers of repression and so integrated with "managed democracy" that he really has to go as a symbol of all that. But of course, he'll likely stay on to run the "managed revolution" as well.
And if I were carrying a sign about Surkov, I'd likely be shivering with Navalny on a splintered wood bench staring at a pail of other people's shit.
The nice managed people wore nice white ribbons. It shows you just how far we've come (or have we) from the days of severe allergic reactions to the colour "white" because of its association with the White anti-Bolshevik movement, the anti-communist armies led by Danikin, Kolchak, etc.
Here's another very funny thing. Evgeny Morozov -- you would think -- coming from this part of the world (Belarus and Bulgaria) and a native Russian speaker -- would have something to say. Either in praise, or to condemn Hillary Clinton for meddling with circumvention technology and funding Golos, the independent monitoring agency. But...crickets.
Here's what Zhenya is reading and tweeting about: A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.
Surkov, call your office!
Hilarious, eh? You would think this would be Evgeny's moment. Finally, a Facebook revolution (Facebook more than Twitter seems to have led it) that you could say is perfectly attuned -- not too Westernized (despite Hillary--Golos seems to have retired from view during the big demonstration), not *too* rooted in technology (it's about the organic-world issue of voting), and perfectly well-behaved. So...no comment? Or is the comment, "Everything's going according to plan, so I'm not needed."
I read Vyacheslav Igrunov -- a huge wall o'text on Facebook that I think doesn't know how to cut off status updates in Cyrillic or make paragraphs or even make the typeface legible. But it's worth pasting into Word, reformatting, and reading (here Download Igrunov).
And interestingly, my old friend Vyachik says that the thing *was* managed -- TV couldn't have covered it without permission, so it was indeed letting off steam.
Even so, he says that it will gain momentum and will become more real.
He blamed the regime for not creating opportunities for upward mobility by energetic, creative people. By that he meant not the society at large, which may or may not do that, depending on which place you look (generally not). He meant the ruling class around the Kremlin itself. Instead of marginalizing or even jailing people like Nemtsov or Khodorkovsky, Putin couldn't find a place for them where they'd have at least "power over 2 percent" or something as Igrunov puts it. Indeed. And that's because such people are like water -- I guess there's fear that all their beautiful wickedness will melt.
And just as we had to do with the Egyptian revolution, enduring all kinds of sneers and catcalls, so we have to look at Russia the same way. Russians, even good, liberal Russians, have this strain of nationalism and xenophobia in them that is hard to take (Navalny).
Or even this example: Oleg Kashin, who I perfectly well admire, and have defended against the likes of A Good Treaty who was bashing him last summer for flip-flopping and being "bi-polar," posts a Youtube that is a perfect example of anti-Western propaganda combined with anti-Putin propaganda. If you want a flavour for how nationalists can be anti-Western *and* anti-Putin, have a look.
But...you get the feeling that Kashin posted that not because he wanted to say "here's an example of hysterical anti-Western propaganda," but because the propaganda was sort of acceptible to him. Consciously or unconsciously, out of ignorance or out of lack of exposure. The agitprop has scene after scene of evil lurid US and European planes and bombs bringing "democracy" to Libya and Afghanistan, getting rid of leaders like Qadaffi, and concludes very pragmatically: you watch out, Putin, they'll get you next. You sense that Oleg both wants that ending -- getting rid of Putin -- and might actually think that "the US" or "the West" could deliver that result as it did with bin Laden and Qaddafi -- or perhaps he means to say "go quietly, Putin, so that the evil West doesn't do to you what they did to Qaddafi"). Of course, many Internet-bred forums freaks think the same thing, evil West, evil tyrants now supported, now toppled by said West. Of course it's more complicated than that.
Parfenov took care to say scornfully that Hillary had not inspired his protest or pulled his strings. Lavrov thinks otherwise...
The blogger Oleg Kozlovsky said the West should just stop supporting Putin and "we'll do the rest." All well and good and sound advice. Except...Which "we"? Coopted Just Russia? Zyuganov or Zhirinovsky?
And guess what, it turns out that all we had to do to get rid of nasty Putin was for Julia Ioffe to essentially flip-flop on cue, and to help create a Snow Revolution...
Thank you for your kind words about my stepfather, Andrey Tverdokhlebov. He was a genuine, kind man and we miss him greatly.
Maria Fyodorova
Washington, DC
Posted by: Maria Fyodorova | December 27, 2011 at 08:11 PM