AppId is over the quota
In the old stories, crowds are a brutal, elemental force, and it is no wonder that Russian rulers sought to suppress them. They are part of the Kremlin’s collective memory, and they hang over the protests today.
Peter the Great, at 10, newly declared the czar, cowered with his mother while rioting guardsmen impaled his relatives on spears. Czar Alexis came out to address petitioners and found himself engulfed, seized by the buttons of his caftan.
But the most instructive tale is probably that of Czar Nicholas II, whose troops fired on 8,000 workers who came to the Winter Palace in 1905 to ask for better working conditions.
The attack so scandalized the circles around Nicholas that he adopted the reforms the protesters had demanded, like the creation of a parliament. When new protests welled up 12 years later, he decided to take a different tack, allowing women and children to rally peacefully over a shortage of black bread. But those protests spread like brushfire, to strikers and to troops who refused to fire on them. A week after the first sanctioned rally, Nicholas was forced to abdicate the throne.
The Soviet premiers and general secretaries who came after Nicholas took his experience to heart: the best way to deal with mass demonstrations, they concluded, was to prevent them from happening at all. Vladimir V. Putin, who took power in the years after the massive demonstrations of the perestroika era, adopted a similar nip-it-in-the-bud approach, though for the most part he avoided using violence.
Richard E. Pipes, a longtime scholar of Russian history at Harvard, said Mr. Putin had learned his history well. Once demonstrations start in Russia, he said, they sooner or later get out of control.
“If I were in charge I would first of all reform the government,” Mr. Pipes said. “If I did not want to do that, I would forbid the demonstrations, simply forbid them, and I would arrest anyone who did not comply.”
Echoes of this theory could be heard after the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, when it became clear that young Russians were ready to protest in greater numbers than any time since Mr. Putin rose to power in 2000. Before a demonstration at Bolotnaya Square on Dec. 10, officials dusted off Aleksandr Pushkin’s line: “Please God, don’t let us see that classic Russian revolt — pointless and merciless.”
The Kremlin-friendly novelist Sergei Minaev warned protesters that if they died there, even their close friends would forget the cause for which they had laid down their lives. “If I believed in God,” wrote the liberal politician Leonid Gozman on the eve of the gathering, “I would pray to him to bring reason to the generals, and, more importantly, to those who give them orders.”
What occurred, of course, was something fundamentally, jarringly different.
To anyone who has spent time in Mr. Putin’s Russia, the sight that unfolded on Bolotnaya Square on Dec. 10 came as an almost physical shock. It has been so long since Russians went out in the streets in large numbers demanding political change that the crowd — an estimated 50,000 people, calmly watched over by the police — resembled a natural wonder, like the aurora borealis.
People in the crowd, instead of listening to the speakers, most of whom had the tinny vehemence of party agitators, were peering around at each other. They were neither wild-eyed nor downtrodden. They did not smell of fear or aggression. The critical mass of middle-class professionals that has existed on the Internet for years was suddenly a physical fact, close enough to feel the body heat. It seemed like the birth of a new organism.
Nothing scary happened that day, or at a repeat demonstration on Dec. 24, when the crowd was significantly larger. Yevgeny S. Gontmakher, an economist who has advised the government on social unrest, said that Russian leaders had no formula for dealing with protesters whose demands cannot be addressed with money, because that kind of crowd has not existed here, as a rule. That it has appeared now “is a sign that Russia is becoming a Western country, in its own way.”
“It’s public politics,” Mr. Gontmakher said. “It is no longer marginal to be involved in public politics. I think this is happening for the first time in Russia. It suggests that Russia has to choose a European path. People say Russia is not Europe. No — Russia is Europe.”
It may be that these latest protests have marked a change in the relationship between the Kremlin and crowds.
After an initial burst of acid hostility, Mr. Putin and his officials began to speak of the protesters with a modicum of respect, perhaps because it became clear that they represent a wide swath of the capital’s media and business elite. Last week, Vladislav Y. Surkov — the Kremlin official who for 10 years made it his business to stifle any street politics that might grow into a threat to Mr. Putin — said the protesters at Bolotnaya represented “the best part of our society, or, more accurately, the most productive part.” (Mr. Surkov was reassigned to a nonpolitical position a few days after his remarks were published.)
Still, the tug of history is strong in the Kremlin, whose red brick fortifications date to the Middle Ages. Some contend that the basic structure of Russian society has changed little in that time. Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote a novel superimposing Mr. Putin’s Kremlin on that of Ivan the Terrible, put it this way: “As a rule, in Russia, the authorities fear the people, and the people fear the authorities.”
That thesis is called into question by the events of the last month. The crowd is pausing now, as for a deep breath, and Moscow will usher in a new year less predictable than any in recent history. This much is clear: Russians are hurtling toward something — something as old as confrontation, or something as new as dialogue.
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