The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Thursday, December 8

More than twenty thousand Facebook users now plan to attend the protest on Saturday.

I talk with someone who is in daily contact with members of the presidential administration and the federal government. “They are hysterical,” he says. “No one knows what to do, they make decisions based on the mood in which they wake up in the morning. Yesterday, Medvedev wanted to turn off [the independent cable television channel] Dozhd. We were barely able to stop him.” In a few days, I will learn that cable providers did get calls directing them to stop providing access to Dozhd, but decided to resist the request, citing contractual obligations. No one was more surprised than the owner and director of Dozhd. President Medvedev, meanwhile, has un-followed Dozhd on his Twitter account.

City workers have hastily started repairs of some kind in Revolution Square, where Saturday’s protest is slated to take place—a classic tactic of last resort to keep demonstrators away.

Friday, December 9

I am anxious. Driving the kids to school, I listen to the radio and worry—even as the newscaster reports that more than twenty-five thousand people plan to come on Saturday. It is like that moment early in a passionate love affair when all the same words are being said as yesterday, but somehow the heat seems to have been turned down a notch. I drop the kids off, go home, and go back to sleep.

But when I wake up a couple of hours later, the revolution is still on, and passions are just as high as they need to be. The issue of concern now is that, while Saturday’s protest is technically legal, the organizers’ original application—filed ten days ago—specified three hundred participants. In the past, those in the overflow have been detained. Yet it will be impossible to detain an overflow of thousands, or tens of thousands—and that may translate into police violence.

Two organizers—a career politician and a magazine editor—go to Moscow city hall to try to negotiate. In the middle of the afternoon, the editor, Sergei Parkhomenko, posts the result of their negotiations on his Facebook page: the city has offered a new location for tomorrow’s protest, granted the organizers license to have as many as thirty thousand participants, and extended the duration of the protest from two to four hours. Soon the city also agrees to provide all those who mistakenly go to Revolution Square with unimpeded passage to the new location, a half-hour’s walk away. The only bad news is that instead of the fabulously named Revolution Square, the protest will take place at Bolotnaya (Swampy) Square. A friend, prominent poet and political commentator Lev Rubinshtein, immediately terms this “a linguistic challenge.”

The country’s best-loved best-selling author, Grigory Chkhartishvili, who pens historical detective novels under the name Boris Akunin, writes in his blog:

I Could Not Sit Still

Why does everything in this country have to be like this? Even civil society has to wake up when it’s most inconvenient for the writer.

I went away to the French countryside for some time in peace, to write my next novel. But now I can’t concentrate.

I guess I’m going home. That’s 500 kilometers behind the wheel—and then wish me luck getting on a flight.

I hope I do make it and get to see the historic occasion with my own eyes and not via YouTube.

But the reason I am writing this post is that I have been asked to warn all those who don’t yet have this information:

THE PROTEST WILL TAKE PLACE IN BOLOTNAYA SQUARE (not in Revolution Square).

At parent-teacher conferences in the evening, I notice many of the other children’s parents are wearing white ribbons.

When I put my daughter to bed, she asks if she can go to the protest with me tomorrow.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take kids yet.”

“But this is a legal protest, right?” She knows that otherwise I could be detained.

I assure her that it is and that nothing bad is likely to happen to me. “I’ll probably be going to a lot of protests these coming months,” I say, “and I probably won’t be able to take you with me. But I’ll take you to the last one, when we have a celebration.”

“You mean, when there is no more Putin?” She catches her breath, as if the thought were too much to contemplate. She is ten; she was born after Putin came to power, and she has heard conversations about him her entire life. When my kids were little, they made Putin into a sort of household villain, the bogeyman who would come get you if you did not mind your table manners. I put a stop to that, and as they have grown I have tried to give them a reasonably nuanced picture of politics, but I think I may have neglected to say that no one rules forever.

Saturday, December 10