Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin's Moscow by Michael Idov

Author:Michael Idov
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Publishers, Social Science, Editors, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Personal Memoirs, Political Science, Biography & Autobiography, World, Media Studies, Journalists
ISBN: 9780374715922
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Anatomy of the Protest

On Monday, May 7, Vladimir Putin put his hand on the very Constitution his rule had helped undo and officially became the president of Russia for the third time. Old friends Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi looked on, as did a visibly miserable Lyudmila Putina, the wife he hadn’t trotted out in public in years and would eventually divorce in 2014. But it was the run-up to the oath that proved more telling than the ceremony itself. To millions of viewers, Putin’s re-re-ascension that day began with a televised spectacle so surreal that one might presume it to be a work of sabotage by a highly placed rogue—had all rogues not been swept out, and all television not stacked with loyalists, two presidential terms ago. Seven TV channels beamed out one image: Putin’s motorcade cruising down a completely empty Moscow, cleared not only of potential protest but of all life.

As the presidential limousine and its escort—twelve motorbikes and two Mercedes SUVs in a wedge formation—rolled down Novy Arbat Avenue, filmed from a hundred heroic angles, not a single unauthorized car or pedestrian tarnished the purity of the picture. It looked nothing like a celebration and a lot like a straight parable of tyranny, whose logical end result is a kingdom with no one to rule over. In this dead stillness, even the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, foregrounded in sweeping drone shots for some extra “God has willed this” symbolism, began to look like a computer graphic. The motorcade drove right into the Uncanny Valley.1

I spent the same morning calling up reporter friends detained in the Sunday protest—everyone had been safely released—and maniacally checking Twitter for updates. That perfect emptiness on the TV screens was hard-won—the OMON troops were on the loose throughout the city. In what had to be an act of symbolic intimidation, they even raided Zhan-Zhak, space helmets and all, dragging customers out of liberal Moscow’s ultimate safe space into the boulevard. Over at Alexei Navalny’s house, a thirteen-hour-long police search had just wound up with a procession of black-masked men parading out all of his family’s archives, computers, tablets, SIM cards, and mobile phones. Spontaneous protests were supposedly flaring up at Pushkin Square. Anonymous International, the hacker collective, meanwhile, retaliated for the previous day’s DDoS attacks on opposition news portals by disrupting the government site Premier.gov.ru.

My apathy vanished without a trace, replaced by a touch of guilt. Pushkin Square was a few minutes from my house by foot. I walked there and immediately ran into my deputy, Roman Volobuev, who had the same slightly crazed look as, I assumed, I had.

“It’s dead here,” Roman said. “Just some Nashi bullshit.”

Indeed, a few clean-scrubbed guys and girls of the Tomorrow Belongs to Me type trawled the square handing out St. George ribbons in honor of the inauguration. Back to the phones. Our heavily overlapping social-network feeds redirected us to Clear Ponds, a couple of Metro stops away: now something was brewing there.

The crowd at

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