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Is the Russian Opposition Just a Bunch of Losers?

Four years ago in December 2011, I wrote, "I Don't Have a Good Feeling About Tomorrow's Demonstration."

It was about the first big anti-Putin rally.

It's funny to read it now. I was right about every single thing in it. This "white ribbon" movement, as it was called never really got it together, and it was brutally crushed, and today is a shadow of its former self — like a lot of big mass things that don't have staying power, and we have examples of this in our own country (and I don't mean Occupy — it was a good thing that bunch of anarchists and thugs failed). But Darfur Action, anybody? Where are those millions spent to "help the people of Darfur," now, in their hour of need?

My uneasiness about the "white ribbon" movement then was that it was too superficial and hipster and not grounded enough in social action and outreach but I certainly thought it was better than Putin. It's just that I thought it was up against some really fierce state machinery about which it almost seemed naive.

Now, fast forward to today, three years later – and five years after the resumption of small human rights demonstrations.

If you watched the timeline of David Herszenhorn of the New York Times lately, you would have seen a startling proclamation about the end of the Russian opposition movement that so captured the media's attention three years ago at a time when the Arab Spring was already turning problematic.

 

This was retweeted mainly by Ukrainians, who like self-fulfilling prophecies of weak Russian opposition that they mainly have contempt for, because they aren't as sturdy as Ukrainian protesters.  They're right. Here's a "meme" that expresses some of the problems with being right, however, which I'll get to at the end:

Avtozak

This shows the difference between Russia, on the left, where Navalny is sitting in a bus — a police van — and Ukraine, where a Ukrainian protester has commandeered a bus torched during Maidan protests. The dialogue:

"Where are you?"

"I'm in a bus!"

"Send a picture!"

"OK!."

And who can blame Ukrainians for not particularly caring for Navalny, because he's only mildly critical of the war in Ukraine and is happy to keep the Crimea.

 

But even an establishment figure generally supportive of Putin like Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Foundation was given pause by this tweet — and got a pushback from Hershenhorn to ensure that he really did mean to be stark:

 

 

Well, merciless unrelenting force, meet the Russian people, who may surprise you. It's not over yet, merely because it's the end of the year and one demonstration "fizzled," and it's not the only form of dissent. Save these tweets, and come back next spring. Just like you had to bookmark my blog three years ago to see that it might be right, now you have to bookmark this one and come back in three years. Things move in cycles or parabolas — and I think Russia is better off after each cycle, no?

It's good that Herszenhorn recognizes that there are "merciless unrelenting force" here — because other journalists are willing to blame the opposition themselves for this "failed demonstration" — although at least it's still a debate. Some are trying to indicate that the forces arrayed against these people are staggering, so it's understandable if they lose. In any event, you can see reporters don't agree how to cover these people:

 

 

Remember how more than 50 people in Minsk got crushed to death on the metro stairs when they were pushed down them during a huge crowded festival some years ago? People in this region might. I sure do — I went to interview the relatives.  The US played a part in this — it was a US cigarette company that sponsored the radio ads that brought people in droves to this concert, where free beer was promised. 

 

 

When Mouzikantskii said there was little notice for preparation, he wasn't kidding — there was a day. Originally the verdict was expected January 15 and everyone figured even the oppressive judges and prosecutors would take a New Year's break after their busy year jailing opposition members, but they were wrong — the capacity for podlost' (lowness, baseness) is high with Putin, and the verdict — and I hesitate to use a word that means "truth-telling" about this mendacious exercise — was suddenly moved to the 30th — and so fast, the entire sheet was not read out properly, as lawyers noted later.

So organizers amazingly still got a huge response to their re-organized event — more than 18,000 as of that day — but the "maybe" column on Facebook of 3,900 on that day was really the more accurate figure. This "disbalance" caused some to complain that well-wishers abroad or in other Russian cities shouldn't "confuse" the numbers — and to question the numbers ahead of time:

 

Since Russians began using Facebook to organize demonstrations in 2011 — the first group was called "We Were On Bolotnaya and We Will Come Again" — the gulf between "attending" and "actual" has grown. Where once, 28,000 really meant 28,000, today, it means a fraction of that, and that's been clear for a long time. 

 

But take a look at this Facebook event posted by none other than the City of Moscow for New Year's Eve — and notice that it only got a few hundred responses. Why? It's cold out, people have gone out of town to relatives, or they want to stay in their kitchens and chop up that famous Olivier salad.

Dances on Tverskaya

 

There have been large demonstrations on Manezhnaya Square — Manezhka as it is nick-named — as many as even 100,000 or 200,000, and I've been to some of them in the past. This prompted some snarky comparisons — gosh, in the old days, when men were men, people came out to stand up to tanks — now they are twittering fabulously inside a Christmas ornament.

Manezh January 20 1991

Manezhnaya, January 20, 1991

There's reasons for all of this — let's think about them.

First, take a look at Manezhka from the eyes of a drone — and yes, the drone operator was arrested shortly after getting this great footage. I don't know his fate yet.

 

As you can see, this square is packed with junk — there are the gardens and paths and street lamps and the giant Christmas ornament but also a "Gnome City" — the source for a lot of jokes — and the New Year's bazaar booths that are something like the Christmas village fair we have here on Union Square in New York. So you can see it's a good thing 18,000 people did not show up or there might have been serious accidents — there was no room to fit them there.

The top (northern and northeast) three entrances were shut off by police, and dozens of police buses stand at the ready for holding demonstrators — and police barriers block off parts of the square. The southern two entrances were left open. No, there is no army deployed, as was misleadingly reported by some "conflict reporters" — at any time of the day or night on any day of the week you can find army vehicles in Moscow, especially around Red Square, as it is heavily guarded — "Kremlin" means "fortress" and it is a stronghold, for sure.

The authorities don't need to deploy the army to handle a demonstration even of 30,000 people (they haven't all year with that many showing up) and they seldom have in the past (the August 1991 demonstrations being one big exception, and the 1993 White House Rebellion another) because they simply don't have to — the Interior Ministry has its own troops, it's a far more militarized agency than Western police forces about which there are increasing complaints of militarization. Interior Ministry *troops* fought in Chechnya, they are highly seasoned. Riot police, OMON, are very competent.

They don't usually "kettle" demonstrators — this is a notion that Westerners are applying as a  layer over events in Russia because they're used to it. As you can see just from watching the live feed, police don't encircle demonstrators, i.e. put a big ring about them, like the cops in Berkeley who infamously sprayed pepper spray at Occupy radicals putting on a sit-in.

In Moscow, they form *rows* — and link arms. These phalanxes move like a machine across the square and push people off it, rather than encircling them. They have only one place to go — into the two remaining exits, one of which is near a metro entrance — or into the waiting police buses if they aren't quick about it. You can hear on the videos "Davka! Davka!" which means "Crush! Crush!" — and people fear getting crushed to death as people were in Belarus — or China just now. So they move. They don't stand around waiting to see if there is a "kettle" to complain about, like kids in London complaining about tuition raises actually protected by police  — they run. And don't come back.

 

No, the Russian police didn't "learn kettling" from the British — and it isn't kettling anyway. For a century or more, first the tsarist, then the Soviet, then the Russian police have used the same technique — forming solid rows, on horseback, or linking arms or lining up close with shields, and pushing forward against demonstrators. That's a different technique that can still trap demonstrators between a wall and them, or between a "City of Gnomes" and them, but it's not encirclement or coralling into a small space, because they are pushing them out into the open – in this case, either the road or down the metro steps. It's called "pushing." You have one way to go: away.

Even if in some circumstances cops form a circle, they sure didn't learn this from the British — they are perfectly capable of repressing demonstrators all on their own without any lessons and have for decades and decades. Russian police have been dispersing demonstrations long before Occupy, or the Arab Spring, or any other kind of modern protest movement, you know?

Did I mention the cold? General Frost defeated Napoleon's army, and it defeats demonstrators, too. It was -19 Celsius, which is 2 below 0 in Fahrenheit. Few people would go out drinking even on Times Square at that temperature, let alone to a demonstration to get their head clubbed. Also, cell phones don't work, so the efforts to get Firechat working were in vain for many — and of course ill-wishers pointed out that Firechat never really took off anyway.

Ilya Azar is a former Lenta.ru correspondent who now works for the best of former Lenta.ru in exile in Riga at a new publication called Meduza.io created by the dismissed editor-in-chief and journalists who quit in solidarity. He points out — and few seemed to have understood — this demonstration was organized from the diaspora. This event measures how well virtuality — the online diaspora plus social media read by internal users — influences the "masses" in Russia. (Answer: nothing like the Egyptian equivalent did.)

Leonid Volkov — Navalny's campaign manager in September 2013 — left Russia and moved to Luxembourg. That was a wise move, because most of Navalny's chief lieutenants, not to mention his brother, have been faced with spurious criminal charges. And no, there's nothing wrong with organizing protests inside Russia from the diaspora, although lots of people will soon be available — as they have been for years in Uzbekistan — to bitch about exiles in comfort risking the lives of people inside. No one complained when an affluent Google engineer organized Egyptian protests from outside Egypt, but they do in this region because hatred of emigres is stoked mightily by state TV. There's this to consider: an emigre who organizes a protest is in safety, and if he does come back, he can leave, and possibly avoid jail. Why do you insist in having domestic organizers go to jail? As they already have — by the dozen.

It was quite a brave thing for Volkov to do to return and organize this protest — and of course some ill-wishers were quick to broadcast the fact that he was back in Russia by looking carefully at his iPhone message locations and giving them more attention to their thousands of followers on Twitter — which include the FSB. I don't know whether they imagine they are being clever doing that, or whether their seething hatred of those who challenge their favourite "realist" status quo is enough for them. In any event, they never had lessons from the hardened Soviet dissidents about what is considered "zapodlo" and what isn't. Yes, it's a police state. No, you don't do the secret police's work for them.

Some people think the Russian opposition movement is clueless, doesn't have clear messages, is vain or stupid, is easily coopted, and so on. I actually heard people complaining that some people didn't stick to the "message" of this December 30 action and drifted off from the protest specifically about the sentencing of the Navalny brothers into shouting "No to war in Ukraine!"

Good Lord, you should be goddamned grateful that Navalny supporters are doing this — given that he himself hasn't been a big KrymNash fan but has been tepid in condemning the war.

And I heard also the idea that people are fair-weather friends if 600,000 voted for Navalny in the nicer weather of September 2013 but won't come out to freeze their asses off now and get pushed around by riot cops — and worse, NOD thugs.

I think this reveals a lack of understanding of what the Navalny phenomenon is. Let me try to explain it with the example of one man nobody has ever heard of, although 50 of my friends are his friend. His name is Mikhail Kriger. He's a middle-aged member of the Moscow intelligentsia who is a typical protester. Here he is at the Peace March:

Take Children Out of War

Mikhail Kriger with sign, "Take your children out of the war!" and "Cargo 200" on the bus — which means the dead bodies of soldiers killed in combat.

He's Jewish, but Navalny's antisemitic crack about Putin meeting with the "financiers" when he met with Jewish leaders at the Kremlin recently, and Navalny's stated intent of not returning the Crimea, and his unsavoury connections with the Russian March types wasn't enough to deter Kriger from coming out to protest Navalny's sentence — just as he protested the annexation of the Crimea, the war in the southeast, and other issues.

It was simply the right thing to do; it is the moral life of a Muscovite still not afraid to "Live Not By the Lie." As he put it on his Facebook, "the only moral place to be on December 31 was inside a police station" — and that's where he was. Unfortunately, he got 14 days of arrest and is still there, while the hipster Pussy Riot and KermlinRussia are free to jet off to Europe again as they were let go after their shar sit-in. Likely that's because he has been arrested before, but I don't know the specifics. There are absolutely no reasons to believe he used any force or did anything wrong — he never has and has numerous people to testify to this.

The people who voted for Navalny included liberal intelligentsia who want nothing to do with Russian nationalists, but find the people actually in power — Putin and his thugs — to be worse. Many Western journalists don't get that. They fail to see that the worst kind of Russian nationalism right now is the one in the Kremlin, in power, that launched a war on Ukraine. The second worst is the kind like Dugin or Kurginyan or Zhirinovsky who actually send aid — guns and people — to cause havoc in Ukraine.

Only after these two groups, does Navalny come, who is not interested in campaigning to return the Crimea which he views as a Soviet state and a beach-head for the Russian Black Sea Fleet that never really was part of Ukraine. Naturally, we could explain some things to him about the Crimean Tatars whose homeland it is, and the Ukrainians who lived there for ages, but it's not a priority for him. We can be grateful he's not worse. And he's not. As I indicated, he's third, after people who actually send fighters and weapons and kill people in Ukraine.

But the other constituents for Navalny are in fact nationalists — and nationalists who are breaking with him, and nationalists who do support the war on Ukraine. They don't like the loose and largely passive opposition that makes moral protests that he is the de facto head of for lack of other leaders. There are Western journalists and bloggers who make the same critique and think the Navalny troops should have used the hardened tactics of Occupy or Maidan and they just aren't very organized — and it's their own fault.

Be careful what you wish for. Here's a very interesting article by a former Russian March organizer and former Navalny supporter who wants to do protests differently — cells of 10 people, underground tactics, radical methods, civil disobedience and so on.

Everybody happy now?

I've watched movements like that in the US — like Occupy, which I observed multiple times. I'll never forget a largely peaceful rally, with only a few basic signs. Then the antisemitic sign carriers showed up — Alan Greenspan, then head of the Fed, a caricature with blood-dripping fangs and a hooked nose — and the Zionist conspiracy to blame — for the economy, and Palestine, you see. International Action — know those folks? Then suddenly, bursting at the same time out of four subway exits, some men in black with kerchiefs over their faces came running out and screaming and yelling, climbed up utility polls and waving signs or shouted even more radical slogans, then went running through the crowd, hollering and provoking. These are the people you want to run your government some day?

I've watched protest movements in Russia for a long time, too, and other countries in the region. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was Gldyan and Ivanov, remember? Who remembers Gldyan and Ivanov anymore! But in their day, thousands used to pour out to rally with them — they were prosecutors seeking anti-corruption measures, some of them harsh. Navalny fits in this tradition to some extent, as an anti-crusading lawyer and minority shareholder.

Then there were the Ampilovtsi — followers of Ampilov, head of the movement Trudovaya Rossiya, or Laboring Russia, and the Limonovtsi, the followers of Eduard Limonov of the National Bolshevik Party who still have a following, although less so today — they were at the 1993 White House Rebellion, and they've stayed to form both supporters and fighters for "Novorossiya" which is actually what they've always believed in (Boroday, the "prime minister of the Donetsk People's Republic" was at the White House rebellion as an 18-year-old). Then there were the Barkashovtsi, the followers of Alexander Barkashov of the Russian National Unity or RNE — their numbers dwindled by they still exist and still find funds to help the Russian militants in Ukraine. They're the ones Pavel Gubarev — "the people's governor of Donetsk" — trained with:

Gubarev

 

I remember interviewing Barkashov in the 1990s when I worked as a translator for CNN. He was a short man — fascists often are. He thought the Zionists and the "certain circles of imperialists" were responsible for all the world's evils, just like a Soviet newspaper.

"Toxic!" was what our producer said, turning away from him at the end. Then we went to interview a Russian nationalist in the parliament who had a poster of Marx on one wall and a poster of St. George and the Dragon on another wall in his office. It was the first time I saw St. George used in this way — and in combination with communism.

All of these movements didn't go away in the 1990s although they were suppressed here and there with the closing of Zavtra (which oddly enough I learned recently *was* supported by Berezovsky) — and they're back. And they don't seem to have a huge following either, given that they only get a few thousand out on the square but then…

…that brings me to my final point. What it takes to make change, and who will bring it, whether you like it or not. There is this conditioning that journalists have had in the last 20 years in this region — and the world — that all change has to have the following formula:

o at least 100,000 people in the square

o willingness to go to jail, maybe for a long time

o willingness to fight the police and be beaten up and even killed — willing to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails or more.

In part, it's that Western media expectation — and every demonstration in the world plays to the Western media with their English-language signs — that has burned in this idea that only demonstrations, and only police clubbings, bring change.

That's how it is, it won't be different.

I'm not a big fan of prolonged urban camping (Occupy, but then Maidan, too) or "self-defense" which is really low-level violence (Occupy, and even more, the later chapters of Maidan). This is what it took, however, for Maidan (which isn't at all like Occupy) to bring about the change which made Ukraine finally turn a corner now. One hundred people had to become the "Heavenly Hundred." People had to get beaten and injured – and they had to beat and injure back. The contribution that Maidan brought to the world's democracy movements was the miner's hard-hat. It's a great thing to prevent head injuries which is what are most common at events like this.

Many people find something glorious about all the determined head-banging at Maidan and the grit and smoke and gunfire. I don't. But I'll be the first to say — this is what it took. And that's a terrible thing for people to digest about democracy movements in this region. This is what it took — and illusions about broad-based, loose and liberal coalitions that remain peaceful are just that — illusions.

Yanukovych started putting in jail the young men prepared to use violence in self-defense of the protest movement. He didn't succeed, and fled the country. Putin is different — he's already put those people in jail, and if there are any left, they'll be going in soon.

The problem with taking the hard-hat approach, however, is what kind of movement you get afterwards. This was always my critique of Occupy, because hardened communist/socialist/anarchist cadres don't make for good civil societies. I don't want a society in which "the General Assembly" is how things work, by people waving their hands or shouting down others or intimidating them with doxing, harassment, or even rape and beating.

The kind of methods you adopt along the way are the ones you are stuck with in the society afterwards — see the Bolsheviks, see Russia, or see Romania, after Ceaucescu was executed.

By and large, Maidan was peaceful, and by and large, the parliament and presidency they have as a result is moderate and peaceful as well. But there were key elements that were not, and that's what it took, and that doesn't go away.

Here's what I mean:

 

What's going on in this video, in case you don't know Russian? A group of Right Sector or Svoboda activists — they're in masks, so you can't tell — are beating up some pro-Moscow Russians. One of them believes that during a demonstration in Kharkiv recently, a guy was reporting on Right Sector to the police. So afterward, they surround him and beat him up. He urges them to look at his phone, and they will see he called no one but his grandmother.

The police arrive — they do arrive, despite everyone always saying they "do nothing" — and they kettle the beaten Russian — and kettle for his own good to protect him from being beaten. The others say they have good reason to beat him — he was one of the Russians bringing them to their knees and humiliating them during pro-Russian demonstrations in Kharkiv earlier this year. It's the red wheel, it keeps on turning.

If you don't use beating, if you don't use prolonged urban camping and self-defense violence, it takes a lot longer to convince your fellow human being to pull away from the zombie box — especially when there are no other TV channels but Russian state TV — and see things as they are and do something about them.  For lots and lots of people, the lesson of the Navalny trial will stick: Putin is ready to touch family. That means he might get yours, if you get involved.

 

Even so, 250 people were willing to get arrested — and did — and Putin's police had orders not to keep most of them and let them spend New Year's with their family. Except Kriger and a half dozen others.

As we've learned from the Bolotnaya trials, the punishment can be 4 years and not 14 days; as we learned from Pussy Riot, it can be at least 2.5 years, and from Navalny, it can be 3.5 years. That's a long time for a little boy to be without his father:

Translation: I'm hanging out with Zakhar Alekseyevich and Stepan Olegovich. They don't want to look at the New Year's TV entertainment and demand an iPad.

"Alekseyevich" means Zakhar is Alexey Navalny's son and "Olegovich" means Stepan is his brother Oleg's son. Oleg is in jail.

Hundreds of thousands of people turned out on Manezhka in the late 1980s and early 1990s because Gorbachev started and promised reforms, and people thought they were going backward when Lithuania couldn't declare its independence without getting shot at — an independence that the West insisted on for 50 years and decent Russian intellectuals agreed with. It was a time when the liberalization was moving forward, not receding backward as it has been for the last 10 years.

The problem of the late 1990s — and it was a long decade with media and travel freedom and legal reforms in it which still hasn't been entirely taken away — as well as plundering of the state and organized crime — is that the chaos of gangland was only stopped by a bigger mafia lord, Putin himself, as the KGB and the mafia became intermingled. It's not just while oil prices were high that Putin could let a middle class grow and keep them loyal; it's with the constant threat of arrest of any businessman who could turn out to be on the wrong side of organized crime/the criminalized state in a heart-beat. People forget that part of it, although they'll admit Khodorkovsky's case is largely a political case.

People also forget that it was only 2009 — six years ago — when there were no big demonstrations. At all. When a very hearty band of old Soviet-era dissidents plus some perestroika-era politicians like Nemtsov turned out to demand the right to assemble in the public square — the Art. 31 movement. Ludmila Alexeyeva, the grandmother of the Soviet human rights movement now in her 80s, was arrested with some 30 people on New Year's Eve back then in 2009 wearing a "Snegirochka" costume ("Snowflake" is the helper to Ded Moroz, Father Frost in the Russian winter holiday tradition).

Luda Snegurochka

Alexeyeva arrested by OMON riot police on December 31, 2009 in Pushkin Square.

Dissidents then, as they did this year, said they weren't having a demonstration, but were instead having a "people's celebration." I remember calling Ludmila Mikhailovna that night to see if she was okay — imagine, the police arrested an elderly woman over something like this — peacefully standing in a park — ridiculous. She was cheerful and optimistic as always. "Listen to Grandmother Lyuda," she would tell me in the darkest days of the Andropovshchina in 1982 by which time all our friends were put away in the GULAG for a very long time — 7 years of maximum-regimen labor camp and 5 years of remote exile — and anyone left was experiencing things like having the wheels of their car unbolted by the KGB. "It will get better, it will not last forever."

"They did not free us; we made them free us," as Suzanna Pechora, another grand dame of the Stalin-era resistance movement told me who was arrested as an 18-year-old girl in a "subversive" literary and discussion circle and spent many years in the camps — until the labor camp uprisings of the Khrushchev era. She died a year ago today and I will never forget her.

Today, Alexeyeva has to fend off libelous articles in state newspapers and the crushing "foreign agent" campaign, and recently said she was forced to curtail her group's important civil rights defense and prison work because they couldn't take foreign grants — or risk being closed as a "foreign agent." The rapacious NTV followed some possible philanthropists to her house and implied that if they supported this venerable group that has been around since 1976 (!), a creature of detente and the Helsinki Accords, that they'd be doing something "political" themselves. In the end, MHG took a presidential council grant — but their work is still curtailed.

Then back in December 2011, just after Julia Ioffe told her readers at the old The New Republic they should be realistic and accept Putin because that's what people wanted, the white ribbon campaign started because Putin went too far. They were allowed to demonstrate because Putin knew that it wouldn't matter, they would give up, and a few strategic arrests could be made.

I didn't have a good feeling about this movement and sure enough by May 2012 it was crushed by having the Bolotnaya defendants get huge sentences, with one man Razvozzhayev even being kidnapped in Ukraine and brought back to Russia.

What we have to realize is that the Russian opposition movement actually did amazingly well after that, better than they have in years and was actually quite impressive this year. They pulled out 20,000 or 30,000 people for rallies to protest the annexation of the Crimea, and later to protest the ongoing war against Ukraine. There is a conscience of Russia. It is active. There are people who are even willing to go into the hell-hole of Chechnya and try to help people whose homes are burned down if their relatives are caught committing terrorist attacks.

Are you?

The man who used to march at the head of the Democratic Russia throngs in the 1990s, one of the leaders who pulled out the hundreds of thousands you can see in that photo above — Lev Ponomarev — and who remained active in prison rights and human rights work all throughout the last decade — the man Michael McFaul visited — is now declared a "foreign agent" because his group, "For Human Rights" once got a foreign grant from the EU — and believe me, getting that was hard, because Lev got clubbed over the head and seriously injured after meeting once with an EU representative.

Would you do that to get a grant from the EU?

Even the Sakharov Foundation, which once got its building from the city and used to get telegrams marking Sakharov's birthday from Medvedev, is also now called "a foreign agent." When public opinion polls were run earlier this year, the "greatest moral authority" selected was Putin, at 36%, but Sakharov still got 2%. That's something. That's all you need to get started. I looked on Twitter recently and noticed a number of young people willing to come to events at the Sakharov Center and learn about him and the dissident movement. And even those who don't ever learn about their democratic heritage have other ways of getting an education and learning right from wrong — and they did come to Manezhka.

So I will make some predictions for 2015:

o The opposition demonstrations are not over, just because the New York Times thinks they are and Pussy Riot left the shar under custody, even as a bunch of Twitter hipsters sneered at them. Not only will they be back, but tens of thousands of people around the country — Russia isn't just Moscow — will keep turning up for protests.

And yes, we get it that this cartoon speaks volumes — some people get arrested, but more people merely stand by and take pictures, even selfies.

Watchers

 

It doesn't matter. They are the heirs of Akhmatova — "Can you describe all this? I can…"

o Here's Russia — a big, frozen place with lots of time zones — but you'll be hearing more from some of these cities next year as they go through more economic and social difficulties.

New Year's Map

o When the taxes start to bite on small businesses this month, there will be economic protests, as there will be about health care cuts and the ruble crash, which Putin and his cronies will be blamed for. Navalny's anti-corruption narrative will stick, and new Navalny's will appear who will be harder to discredit or arrest on trumped-up charges because they won't have businesses or assets.

o A good portion of these demonstrations will be nationalist, even resentful of the West for causing hardship through sanctions and will not be liked by Western journalists and will therefore be discounted. It doesn't matter. They will demonstrate anyway, and they won't always discredit themselves by picking up anti-migrant or "Crimea is Ours!" rhetoric but will stick to the economic privation and corruption themes. Yes, some of them will tsk at the Lezgvinka being danced on Red Square and become the butt of hipster snarking.

o Liberal intellectuals might emigrate, but some will stay and will continue to write blogs and put on plays — the Teatr.doc arrests on the same day as Navalny's protest — for showing a film about Maidan — were overshadowed, but they moved into new premises, and even if chased out of those, will find other ways to exist.

I don't feel a kinship with these people. They're anti-Western and anti-capitalist and they aren't really liberals. They remind me of Dr. Zhivago's daughter — creative, with a balalaika, but Soviet:

 

But they're the future. The old pro-Western liberals aren't.

o Facebook is going to cave to Russian demands — and Russian Facebook users aren't going to care because they know the government already reads everything they do online anyway. The question is whether the government will block enough blogs like Nemtsov's and all kinds of persons of conscience you've never heard of — or leave them just under surveillance.

o Twitter isn't going to cave to Russian demands, and Twitter will likely be blocked as a whole, or so many accounts, that we'll only be left with @rogozin and @rykov. There might be a smattering of demonstrations about this but not enough to stand out because 2/3 of the population have Internet access, but of these, the Twitter users are a small percentage. Someone will make a Russian chat app that will take its place, or people will use Durov's Telegram or VKontakte will be good enough.

o All that will happen when social media is shuttered or shut down is that it will make it harder for Westerners to follow dissent the easy way, online, and they will then write it off as failed and gone. It won't be. The people who tweeted up a storm will either write from outside the country while still keeping in touch or will merely chat in their kitchens and pass around the equivalent of samizdat as they did in the old days, but that's enough. They've weathered much worse. They will again.

o Russian intellectuals and dissenters will move to Kiev or Riga or Tallinn — it's a lot cheaper than New York or London — and these governments will be happy to have liberals instead of the left-overs — or descendants of the Soviet military, KGB and red directors and their families who today form a launching pad for Moscow intrigues, which is mainly what they have now. If the West helps enough with this, there might be enough of a wall of shame built around the Kremlin that change a la Gorbachev and Yeltsin will be brought again. Whoever comes to power is not going to be people the West like, they'll be more like Orban, or worse.

 The important thing is to keep moving and realize there is no shame in taking the picture and not getting arrested — and to have a movement succeed, the leaders will have to be tolerant of any level of involvement. After all, they don't have Western journalists to please, or diaspora politicians, but themselves.

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