Alexey Kudenko/RIA Novosti

Published in the March 2012 issue

DECEMBER 4, 2011: Voting Station No. 1 in the center of Moscow, across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, 8:30 A.M., half an hour after voting in the most explosive parliamentary election in the history of New Russia began: An independent observer is removed by the election committee because he "took pictures and asked questions." Nobody seems to care too much about this incident: not the voters waiting in line, not the police who escort the observer from the premises, not even the other observers — the very people who are supposed to ensure a fair and open election on behalf of the media and various participating political parties.

More than a thousand miles away, well before the first vote was even cast, the authorities of Levoberezhnaya District in North Ossetia had a simple plan for how the elections would turn out. United Russia, the ruling party and the political instrument by which Vladimir Putin (and, nominally, Dmitry Medvedev) has exercised total control over the state for the past twelve years, was supposed to get about 74 percent at each voting station; the Communist party, the always-second main rival of UR, was supposed to get around 20 percent. And so they do in most of the district, except where heads of several voting commissions give 74 percent to the Communists and 20 percent to UR. The only reasonable explanation: They mixed up their instructions, attributed the wrong percentages to the wrong parties, and revealed that the fix was in from the very beginning.

Weird things happen all over the country. In Chechnya, according to official results, voter attendance is 99.5 percent, and yet according to the preelection polls, more than 60 percent of the people in the republic said they never or almost never vote. In Moscow, two voting stations in the same school report vastly different findings — one has 90 percent for United Russia, the other only 26 percent. Independent observers in Russia's capital who weren't removed from voting stations tell incredible stories about election officials who escape the stations with bags full of ballots — never to be seen at the station again. Ilya Azar, a correspondent for the news site Lenta.ru, manages to go undercover with two other journalists to reveal a fraud scheme called the "merry-go-round": People are hired to go around to several voting stations with falsified absentee ballots, and with the help of local election commissions, they stuff the ballot boxes. This is either the sloppiest case of election rigging in history or proof that some acts of fraud are simply too massive to succeed.

By nightfall it becomes clear that United Russia will carry the day and retain control of parliament, but by a much slimmer margin than anybody expected. People start to read about allegations of fraud and abuse. On blogs. On Facebook. They watch videos on YouTube that document ballot stuffing. They question whether United Russia would have prevailed in a free and fair election. They question how far Putin and Medvedev will go to stay in power. And for the first time in a long time, some of them decide to do something about it.

DECEMBER 5: Thousands of people, perhaps as many as ten thousand, gather in the center of Moscow, on Chistoprudny Boulevard, to protest election fraud. It is the largest gathering of protesters in a decade, and among them is Alexei Navalny, a lawyer, political activist, and blogger who became famous last year when he branded United Russia "the party of crooks and thieves." Navalny gets up onstage and makes a speech, most notable for the remark: "They call us little hamsters from the social networks. Yes, I am a little network hamster! And I'll gnaw through the throats of these cads!" — meaning the regime. "It was clear that we couldn't just stand there for a while and leave," says Navalny. "We needed some act of civil disobedience that said: We exist. So some people decided to go to the Central Election Commission building, which was about a mile away. The first couple of cordons were pretty easy to pass — internal troops, silly little soldiers with their silly shields: You push him, and he either falls down or steps aside. But then came the OMON, special-purpose police units. Those guys are pretty big and well trained, they stand in two rows, and they know how to hit you — first a real tricky one with a knee, then with their helmet. I got one right on my nose. If you want to break a cordon like that, you must have tenfold the people, which we actually had, but we were too spread out. So we didn't get to the CEC building — they just squeezed us in and packed us into buses." The police arrest several hundred people, Navalny among them, who goes on to serve fifteen days in prison for "disobedience to the police." "The overall mood at the rally was aggressive," Navalny told us a few days after he was released. "Of the seventy detainees who were arrested after the rally, 80 percent were observers at the elections. They were expelled from their voting stations, they witnessed ballot stuffing and all kinds of fraud, and they came to the rally not to support any oppositional party, association, or person — they came because they were filled with very personal, furious rage."

(Top) Denis Sinyakov/Reuters; (bottom left) Max Avdeev; (bottom right) GREENFIELD/SIPA

DECEMBER 10: As more evidence of fraud and abuse from courts, police stations, and prisons hits Facebook, protesters organize another rally. Fifty to sixty thousand people (half of them registered in a Facebook event called "Rally for Fair Elections") come to Moscow's Bolotnaya Square, right across the river from the Kremlin, and meet under banners that vary from serious to silly: "No Taxation Without Representation," "I Didn't Vote for These Bastards, I Voted for the Other Bastards," "We Don't Believe Churov, We Believe Gauss" (the former referring to the head of the CEC; the latter referring to Gaussian distribution, a mathematical concept that fueled accusations of fraud among Russian bloggers). Even though the protesters chant, "Putin, Leave!", the mood of the whole movement is decidedly less aggressive. And even though the protesters' demands are clear — cancel the election results, fire Churov, punish those responsible for fraud, and set up fair elections — nobody really listens to the people who speak from the stage, mostly old-school oppositional leaders, from the Right and from the ultra-Left, who have fiercely fought Putin's regime for the last decade without much success and without many followers. Most of the protesters simply stand there, talking to their friends about where to go on YouTube to see fresh evidence of election fraud and where they should meet for drinks after the rally. It is the first anti-Putin event in ten years that doesn't end with mass arrests, and the vast majority of protesters — young, middle-class, decently dressed — do in fact end up in the nearest bars, where they continue their mundane conversations. Not exactly an October Revolution. Had Putin gone through the motions and given lip service to the protesters' demands, there is a good chance that the title of this article would be "Two Days in Russia." But a few days after the Bolotnaya rally, Putin referred to the protesters as Bandar-log, or "monkey people," and referred to himself as Kaa, the python from The Jungle Book. He also suggested that the opposition in Russia is controlled by the U.S., and, with his usual grace, compared the protesters' symbol — a white ribbon — to a condom.

DECEMBER 24: Seventy thousand to eighty thousand people meet on Sakharov Avenue, and this time they are pissed. They meet under banners that read "We Are Not Monkey People, and Russia Is No Jungle" and play on Putin's "condom" comment by referring to him as a "scumbag." They reiterate their calls for free and fair elections, and in theory the authorities could easily go through with all these demands. In the twelve years of Putin's reign, the Russian parliament has become totally dependent on the presidency, its members — irrespective of party affiliation — voting according to instructions from the government, and if Putin (or Medvedev, acting on Putin's behalf) had given the green light, they could have recognized the fraud, voided the election results, and set about doing it right. But Putin does not do that, mostly because of the nature of his power: He doesn't leave things to chance. Or, put another way, he doesn't believe in democracy. In the end, the authorities concede that the people have a right to speak out, but they won't admit the fraud itself. They promise small reforms in the electoral process — a return to the direct election of regional governors, for instance, and an easier path for party registration — but that just isn't enough anymore. For years Russians have forgiven Putin his annihilation of an independent parliament and judiciary system, and his brash, embarrassing personal style. (He's started to cause a sense of mild embarrassment among the educated classes, not unlike the Italians probably felt for Berlusconi. Apart from their love for bad jokes, the two leaders share a love for Botox.) Russians willingly accepted all of this in return for the comfort of stability and illusion of democracy. But between the insults and the electoral fraud that he and his party can barely bother to conceal, the people have decided that enough is enough — and God knows how much Putin will have to give up to get them back into bed again. And whether that is possible at all. The protesters, meanwhile, don't really have (or need) a leader, although several competing "organization committees" have already formed, and more rallies and marches are planned for before the presidential elections. The hope is a repeat of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people went out in the streets and helped bring down the Communist party. Most of the people who came out in the streets in December were too young to take full part in the protests back then. Now it's their turn.

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Dmitry Golubovsky is the editor in chief of Esquire Russia. Andrey F. Babitsky is the opinions editor of Forbes Russia.

THE POLITICS BLOG: An Interview with Alexei Navalny and Inside the Protests

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