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

Driving in from our dacha, where the children and Darya will be while I am at the protest, I listen to the radio and fret. So what if thirty-five thousand people have stated on Facebook that they are going to the protest? I have heard of people getting seven hundred Facebook RSVPs for a party—and not a single actual guest. It is the weekend, after all: people will be feeling lazy, they will want to sleep in or stay at their dachas, and they will figure someone else will go to the protest.

As I get closer to Bolotnaya Square, I see people flowing to it from every direction: in groups, in couples, alone; young, old, middle-aged. People wearing white ribbons, white scarves, white hats, even white trousers, carrying white balloons and white carnations. It still has not snowed, so the white they wear and carry has to compensate.

I meet up with a group of friends, including Andrei and two of his brothers. At the metal detectors, the police are calm and polite. Inside, we wander the square, scanning for familiar faces. At Monday’s protest, I knew everyone was there because I could see them all; today I know they are all here because I cannot see them for the crowd. Even texting becomes impossible, as the volume exceeds the capacity of Moscow’s cellular networks.

We gawk at homemade banners people have brought. One features a graph of the official results reported by the Central Election Committee, overlaid with a bell curve that tells a different story: it shows what normal distribution of support for United Russia would look like. “We Don’t Trust You, We Trust Gauss,” says the poster, referring to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who gave the world the bell curve.

“I Did Not Vote for These Assholes,” proclaims another banner, carried by a young man with a reddish beard, “I Voted for the Other Assholes. I Demand a Recount.”

“There are so many people here!” a very young man shouts into his cell phone. “And they are all normal! I’ve heard like a million jokes, and they were all funny!”

If you have spent years feeling as if your views were shared by only a few of your closest friends, being surrounded by tens of thousands of like-minded people really does feel like hearing a million funny jokes at once.

Somewhere in the distance, there is a stage. I cannot see it, and I can hardly hear any of the speakers. One of my friends remembers a trick from the early 1990s, when people would bring portable radios to rallies and use them to listen to the speakers: she turns on the radio on her cell phone (cellular service may be overtaxed, but this public square features free wireless) and gives us the highlights of speeches. We look around, and occasionally join in chants: “New Elections!” “Freedom!” “Russia Without Putin!”

The speakers include Boris Akunin (he made it from the south of France in time), a well-loved, long-blacklisted television anchor, and assorted activists. Darya’s father speaks about election fraud. None of those who pass for opposition politicians—“the other assholes”—are here. They have not yet gotten the message that power has shifted away from the Kremlin. Navalny is still in jail, so a journalist reads his address to the protesters. And Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire who suspended his political career two months ago, is still silent. On Monday he will announce that he is running for president, but by then it will be too late to win cred with the revolutionary crowd: he will immediately be branded a Putin plant.

I am wearing thermal underwear, two jackets, and moon boots; there is no way to dress for standing still in a Russian winter. After a couple of hours my friends and I decide to leave. Other people are still arriving. Walking away from the protest, I stop on a pedestrian bridge to look back at the crowd. There are a lot more than thirty-five thousand people; later estimates will range as high as a hundred fifty thousand.

We take a large table at a restaurant that, like all the eateries in the neighborhood, is filled with protesters ordering mulled wine in an attempt to warm up. Friends and strangers are shouting the latest news across tables. Andrei is the first to read a couple of lines from a radio station’s website: “The protest is drawing to a close. A police representative has mounted the stage. He says, ‘Today we acted like the police force of a democratic country. Thank you.’ There is applause.” At our table there is a momentary silence. “This is great,” all of us start saying then, looking at one another incredulously. “This is great.” How long has it been since any of us was able to say, unequivocally, “This is great” about something happening in our city?