I'm Going to Ruin Their Lives by Marc Bennetts

Author:Marc Bennetts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Russia's protest movement, Pussy Riot, Vladimir Putin, Corruption, Vote-rigging, Russian dissidents, Kremlin insiders, 21st-century socialism, modern day Russia
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2016-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

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When Occupy activists began setting up protest camps across world capitals in the autumn of 2011, there had seemed little prospect of the movement spreading to Russia, where a no-nonsense police force and a weak and divided opposition appeared to present insurmountable obstacles to any form of prolonged public display of dissent.

However, from the morning of Putin’s inauguration onwards, hundreds of protesters spent the next three days and nights roaming through central Moscow’s squares and boulevards, dodging police snatch squads, before – amid unconfirmed rumours of rank-and-file police discontent over mounting arrests – setting up camp in the fashionable Chistye Prudy area around a statue of nineteenth-century Kazakh poet-philosopher Abai Kunanbayev. ‘We’re at the monument of some obscure Kazakh,’ Navalny tweeted shortly before he was detained once more. Udaltsov, in a development greeted with mock astonishment by online activists, was also nabbed. Both men were sentenced to fifteen days behind bars for ‘disobeying police orders’.

Wary of provoking riot police who had strict orders to break up any Orange Revolution-type activity, activists refrained from pitching tents. Police surrounded the impromptu camp, close to where the first vote-fraud rally had taken place in the aftermath of the December 2011 parliamentary elections, but made no move to disperse protesters.

‘When Occupy started in America, we started discussing how it had all been organized,’ said Isabelle Magkoeva, a young, dark-haired activist, who played a key role in the running of the camp. The rising star of Russia’s new left, Magkoeva had become a familiar face as anti-Putin protests rocked Moscow. ‘After the protests against Putin’s inauguration, when everyone was still wandering the streets, we put our ideas into practice,” she told me.‌22

However, unlike the global Occupy movement, which was intended to draw attention to corporate greed and wealth inequality, the target of the Moscow Occupy activists was Putin’s political system. In a startling show of unity, anti-Putin activists from the far right and the hard left, and all those in between, worked together at the camp to provide security, a field kitchen and clean-up teams. Hatred of Putin, it again became clear, was stronger than any ideological differences.

Like the protesters at that winter’s mass rallies against vote fraud, the people at the camp were some of Moscow’s best-educated and richest residents. More than 90% had a higher education of some sort, while 60% described themselves as specialists (computer programmers, lawyers, translators and lecturers were among the more popular professions).‌23 From conversations, it appeared that most of them had been to the United States or Europe. It was tempting to draw comparisons between these well-travelled, middle-class protesters and the Decembrists, the nineteenth-century army officers who challenged Tsar Nicholas I after returning from the West full of liberal ideas. The Decembrists were crushed, with the majority executed or exiled to Siberia. But, for the authorities, their rebellion was a clear sign of dangerous discontent at the heart of the empire. The defiance of the young anti-Putin activists at Occupy sent a similar warning to Russia’s modern-day rulers.

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