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

by Masha Gessen

  “Yeah,” I respond. “Something is afoot, but it isn’t going anywhere.”

  And I go to the protest. It is still unseasonably warm for Moscow, which means it is cold and miserable: temperature around freezing, and pouring rain. Who is going to brave this kind of weather to fight the hopeless fight for democracy?

  Everyone.

  At least, everyone I know. I approach the park where the protest is slated to take place with two friends, Andrei and Masha, and as we walk, people attach to our small clump. One of Andrei’s younger brothers, and then another. Two of my former reporters—the ones who took turns calling in from the scene of the theater-siege disaster nine years ago. One of them, Anton, is now a radical art activist, and has spent a fair amount of time in jail for prank protests. The other, Grisha, recently quit his editorial job in a dispute over preelection censorship: he had been instructed to exclude critical articles from his digests of foreign media coverage of Russia. As we draw closer, we cannot even make out the metal detectors through the crowd. Then word spreads: The cordoned-off area has filled up, the police will not be letting any more people through. This means there are at least five hundred people in the park—and that, by contemporary Moscow standards, is huge.

  We walk in the street along the park, looking in over a low fence. There are not hundreds but thousands of people in the park. We find ourselves in an informal phalanx about ten across. Parked all along the street are buses that brought the police here, and waiting prisoner-transport vehicles. “We are blocking traffic,” Andrei says. “They’ll detain us.” The police look on indifferently as about a dozen of us climb over the fence to join the demonstrators. The rain keeps coming. My hair is soaked, and my feet feel like they are about to fall off. I am happy to be standing there freezing and endlessly saying hello to friends appearing from every direction.

  There comes my friend the photographer, with whom I traveled the war zones in the 1990s. There, arriving separately, is his son, a college sophomore born a year after the Soviet Union collapsed. And now Tatyana, who was my editor more than fifteen years ago. “I’ve lost it, you know,” she tells me. “Remember how we used to count the number of people at a demonstration in the nineties, by mentally breaking the crowd into quadrants? I can’t do it anymore.” Neither can I: I cannot remember the technique, nor can I distinguish anything in the thick crowd, in the rain, in the dark. But I am certain there are more than five thousand people here—estimates will range up to ten thousand—and that makes this the largest protest in Russia since the early 1990s.

  As the rally breaks up, I invite the group to my apartment, which is just down the block. The women accept the invitation, but the men say they are going to join a march to the Central Election Committee building. The march is clearly illegal, and I fear they will be arrested. Indeed, there will be about three hundred arrests, and there will be violence. But there will be something else, too: in about an hour, when I am cooking a late supper and people are sipping cognac in my apartment, still trying to warm up, Grisha will tweet that Andrei has just pulled his two younger brothers out of a prisoner-transport vehicle by their coat collars. In another hour, six young men—Grisha, Andrei, Andrei’s two brothers, and two men I have not met—will be at my apartment, disheveled and self-satisfied in a romantic, revolutionary way, embellishing the story of the prisoners’ rescue as they tell and retell it.

  I think, I have seen this before. This is the moment the fear lifts. Someone enters a prisoner-transport vehicle to rescue his brothers, and the police in riot gear move aside and let him. It is a tiny moment of great change.

  The young men eat and decamp to the police precincts where their less fortunate friends are being held.

  Tuesday, December 6

  Driving the kids to school, I choose the route that takes me past a police precinct where some of last night’s detainees were taken. I see a small crowd just outside: about a hundred people spent the wet, freezing night here, demanding—unsuccessfully—that lawyers be allowed into the building.

  Another, illegal protest is called for tonight. All day I debate whether to go, and finally decide against it. I have taken part in illegal protests before, and have always managed to slip away (once sliding between a riot cop’s legs). But my girlfriend is seven months pregnant, and it seems a particularly bad idea to risk fifteen days’ administrative arrest, which is what many of the detainees will get.

  I go about my business with a strange feeling. I go to the gym and then to a café, to meet with the general director of the publishing house where I am going to start working next week. The café is not far from the square where tonight’s protest will take place, and because of this my phone’s reception keeps fading in and out: word has it, cellular service is being jammed. Driving home, I pass armored vehicles and police buses, which now seem to be parked in every square in the center of town. According to radio news reports, tens of thousands of police have been pulled into Moscow from other cities.

  I do not register where I learn this—from a friend, from Facebook, or from the radio—but another legally sanctioned protest is scheduled for Saturday. That makes the troops and the jamming feel more exciting than ominous: Monday’s protest was not a fluke. Perhaps this is not necessarily going nowhere after all.

  I worry, though, that the brewing revolution has no unifying symbol, no clear slogan. At 2:43 a.m. an advertising executive named Arsen Revazov writes a Facebook post:

  The Snow Revolution, or A Clean Slate

  When and if several million people put white ribbons on their arms or tie them to their cars, to their handbags or their lapels, etc., it will become impossible to forge or falsify anything at all. Because it will all be out in the open and everyone will know.

  It will snow. The entire city will turn white. Citizens don white ribbons. First they are ten percent of the population, then thirty, then fifty, then seventy-five. Once it’s more than thirty, no one is afraid anymore. And suddenly everyone—or almost everyone—loves and respects everyone else because of this….

  We have to keep this up through March. Then God will decide. I am convinced that if several million people don white ribbons (or even paper napkins) in our city, everything will change for the better fast and without violence.

  Within hours, nearly a thousand people “like” the post and more than seven hundred repost it. Moreover, it turns out that a separate white-ribbon effort began a couple of hours earlier. The revolution now has a symbol.

  Another three hundred people have been detained at the illegal protest. A friend starts a Facebook group to coordinate aid efforts for the detainees. I join, as do several hundred others. By tomorrow, there will be regular food deliveries, courtesy of the café where I had my business meeting today, and sleeping bags and blankets will be bought or donated for all the detainees, who are otherwise reduced to sitting on hard benches or standing. The group is called HELP-Revolution, and at three in the morning I am bursting with pride to have been made an administrator.

  Wednesday, December 7

  Before I went to bed last night, the number of people who clicked “I’m going” on the coming Saturday demonstration’s Facebook page was nearing three thousand. This morning, it is over five thousand. Eighty-year-old ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev has called for a revote. In a post for the International Herald Tribune opinion blog, where I am a regular contributor, I describe Monday’s protest and try to put into words what is by now the unmistakable sense that Russia has passed a turning point.

  The problem with the Soviet regime—and the one created by Vladimir Putin in its image—is that they are closed systems whose destruction is unpredictable. There is no obvious cause-and-effect relationship between street protests and the ultimate fall of the regime because there are no mechanisms that make the government accountable to the people.

  Even the most obvious recent parallel, Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, fails as a model: There the stand-off between street protesters and the government that ha
d stolen an election was resolved by the Supreme Court, which ordered a recount and a re-vote. But Russia has no justice system independent of the executive branch. And worse, neither a recount nor a re-vote would work, since election laws have long since been rigged to allow only Kremlin-sanction parties on the ballot.

  So the people who are protesting the stolen election are, in effect, demanding the dismantling of the entire system. And that, for lack of better parallels, brings us back to the fall of the USSR.

  That process took five years and proceeded in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back manner. Protests were allowed, then banned, then allowed again. Dissidents were freed, then their apartments were ransacked by the police. Censorship was lifted in fits and starts. At the height of the protest movement, hundreds of thousands flooded the streets, defying not only the police but tanks, and yet it was impossible to tell whether their actions had direct consequences—because, just as now, the people had no mechanisms for holding the government accountable.

  But one thing is clear in retrospect: Once the process was underway, the regime was doomed. The more hot air it pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it also became to growing pressure from the outside. That is exactly what is happening now. It may take months or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst.

  What will happen next? The Kremlin seems to be flailing. Yesterday tens of thousands of young people bused in from out of town were herded into the center of Moscow for a United Russia victory rally. They were issued bright vests and blue drums, which they discarded unceremoniously after the event. Pictures of the drums, dented, stained, and soaked, piled on the sidewalk, flooded the blogs. They seemed to symbolize the regime perfectly: a lot of noise and pomp, then an inglorious abandonment in the dark freezing rain. What are the government’s other options? Most of the people detained on Monday and Tuesday are still in police holding cells, and they have already overtaxed the facilities’ and the courts’ capacity: mass arrests at Saturday’s protest are simply not an option. Violence is possible but feels doubtful, because Putin, I suspect, has not yet realized how desperate his situation is. More likely, he will attempt to mollify the protesters by throwing them a bone. Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s chief puppeteer, has already suggested that a new party be formed to accommodate “irritated urban communities.” Putin and his inner circle seem unaware that the whole country is irritated with them, so they probably think that allowing a handpicked ersatz opposition candidate on the ballot in the March presidential election will let off enough steam. The protests will have to continue until those in power realize that they are a tiny and despised minority—and then they will act like a cornered animal. What is in their limited repertoire—a terrorist attack that will allow Putin to declare a state of emergency? Such a move will not save his regime, but might delay its demise by a year or two.

  In the evening, I go to a meeting of Rus’ Sidyashchaya (Russia Behind Bars), an organization formed a couple of months ago by Olga Romanova, a former business writer who became a full-time prisoners’ rights activist after her entrepreneur husband was arrested and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for fraud. After bribery failed to set him free, Romanova launched her own investigation, turning up evidence that her husband was sentenced on the basis of forged documents—provided, she believes, by his former business partner, who also, until last year, was a senator. Romanova made it to the Supreme Court, which overturned the verdict—and after Moscow City Court ignored that decision, she made it to the Supreme Court again, and again got the verdict overturned. She then flew to a distant prison colony to collect her husband, who had been behind bars for more than three years already. The video of their reunion instantly went viral.

  Rus’ Sidyashchaya meets at a café in the center of town, the sort where thoughtful young men and women choose among eighteen varieties of excellent tea before proceeding to a few varieties of mediocre wine. But these Wednesday-night gatherings are mostly of women who look like they work as accountants or middle managers. Except they are working full-time to get their “business prisoner” husbands out of jail. I sit at a table with Svetlana Bakhmina, a former mid-level Yukos lawyer who served four and a half years in prison, and a shy young bespectacled woman who tells me her husband has been sentenced for alleged fraud.

  “And here is Irek Murtazin!” shouts Romanova, who is forty-five and heavyset, with dyed red hair.

  A slight man in his late forties enters. He is a former television executive from Tatarstan who was fired in October 2002, over his coverage of the theater siege. He became a popular blogger, and in 2009 was arrested for allegedly libeling the president of Tatarstan. He was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison for libel and, the court ruled, for “inciting enmity against a specific social group,” defined as government officials.

  “I have good news and bad news,” says Murtazin. “The bad news is, a Tatarstan judge who hit and killed a young man while driving drunk last summer has just been acquitted.”

  The room issues a collective sigh: this bad news is hardly news at all, so common are accidents involving state officials—and their acquittals.

  “The good news,” says Murtazin, “is that nearly half the justices of the peace who were getting cases of those detained in the protests Monday and Tuesday called in sick today. That’s eighty judges with the flu.”

  Now, this is news. And it turns out that because detention facilities are overflowing, some of the detainees are being released and casually instructed to show up for court at a later date. Corruption fighter Alexey Navalny, however, appeared before a judge today and was sentenced to fifteen days for his role in leading the illegal march on Monday.

  One of the women at the meeting is handing out white ribbons to everyone. In less than twenty-four hours, the revolution’s symbol has become official.

  When I get home, the number of people who have clicked “I’m going” on the Facebook page for Saturday’s protest has passed ten thousand.

  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 o
f 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).