What Russia’s protesters believe.

Maxim Katz is an unlikely Russian politician. There is his Jewish surname, his youthful age of 27, and his long, flowing dark hair. There is also his choice of profession: A former poker national champion, Katz now makes his living by staking promising poker players to big-pot tournament games, in return for a cut of the winnings. He didn’t even live in Russia for an eight-year stretch, from 1993 to 2001, when he resided in Tel Aviv. (“I didn’t like Israel—it’s hot,” he told me, explaining why he came back.) And yet, on March 4, the very same day that Vladimir Putin claimed a presidential election victory, Katz won a seat on a local district council in Moscow.

I met Katz at his office suite a week after the vote. Like many twentysomething Russians, Katz was active in the grassroots movement that has emerged in recent months to challenge Putin’s autocratic rule. Indeed, the day before our interview, he had spoken at a street rally attended by thousands of Muscovites disaffected with Putin. But, contrary to what you might expect, Katz is not particularly strident in his criticism of Russia’s longtime leader. “Putin is not an enemy,” he told me in his fluent English. “Life in Russia is much better than twelve years ago”—at the dawn of the Putin era—and “this is a fact.”

Katz is hardly unusual. Americans might be tempted to assume—based on the Arab Spring–style protests that have recently taken place in Moscow—that the young people of Russia have turned completely against Putin. But the generation of Russians who form the backbone of the protests have political instincts that are actually quite complicated. These are people—call them the Putin Generation—who came of age during the near-chaos of the 1990s and have known no leader other than Putin for perhaps the entirety of their adult lives. Having grown up in an atmosphere of upheaval, they are generally wary of dramatic change—and are more apt to sound like pragmatic gradualists than fervent revolutionaries.



CONSIDER A RUSSIAN born, like Maxim Katz, in 1984. Glasnost and perestroika are remembered as positive developments in the West, but what many Russians recall about those times were the food shortages. With his affinity for numbers, Katz, the future poker champ, used to count in his head the number of people in the queue to buy eggs at Moscow stores. There was the threat, too, of civil war, when, in August 1991, a group of hard-line Russian leaders attempted a coup to depose Mikhail Gorbachev. Katz’s mom brought the six-year-old to the city center to see the tanks.

The traumas were just beginning. Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, embarked on a series of free-market experiments that, however well intentioned, ended up turning over control of the economy to a band of oligarchs who manipulated the state to their own selfish ends. The experiment collapsed with the financial crisis of August 1998—when the ruble plunged in value against the dollar and the banks failed, causing many Russians to lose their life savings.