On the night of November 20th, two weeks before elections for the State Duma, Vladimir Putin set aside the cares of the Kremlin and went to the Olympic SportComplex for an ultimate-fighting match—a “no rules” heavyweight bout between a Cyclopean Russian named Feodor (the Last Emperor) Yemelianenko and a self-described anarchist from Olympia, Washington, named Jeff (the Snowman) Monson. The bout was broadcast nationally on Rossiya-2, one of the main state television channels. Putin, wearing a blue suit and no tie, was at ringside. He has always been eager to project the macho posture of a muzhik, a real man. He has had himself photographed riding horses bare-chested, tracking tigers, shooting a whale with a crossbow, piloting a firefighting jet, swimming a Siberian river, steering a Formula One race car, befriending Jean-Claude Van Damme, and riding with a motorcycle gang. Once, on national television, he tried to bend a frying pan with his bare hands. He did not quite succeed, but the effort was appreciated. And now ultimate fighting: the beery crowd of twenty thousand—some prosperous, some less so—were his own, Putin’s people.

Vladimir Putin, in 2007, when he was President of Russia. Photograph by Platon

Yemelianenko and Monson were of a rough equivalence: heads shaved, two enormous sacks of rocks, though the Russian was distinguished by his unstained skin; Monson had tattoos from ankle to neck, including two in crowd-friendly Cyrillic—svoboda and solidarnost’. The gesture got him nowhere. Almost from the start, the Russian dominated the fight. Yemelianenko, with a deft and powerful kick, snapped a bone in Monson’s leg, causing the American to limp pitifully. But, even as Yemelianenko took command, steadily reducing Monson to a swollen, bloody pulp—a source of pleasure to the crowd—it was hard to tell if Putin was enjoying himself. The camera flashed to him now and then. He barely betrayed a smile. His face, now smoothed with Botox and filler (it is said), is more enigmatic than ever. What was more, he had larger concerns. He knew that, no matter how hard his operatives tried to get out the vote in the provinces and massage the results, the Kremlin party, United Russia, was going to lose ground.

At the end of the bout—a unanimous decision for Yemelianenko—the Prime Minister climbed through the ropes to pay tribute to the loser and to congratulate his countryman. By this time, the American handlers were tenderly helping their warrior to the dressing room. Monson could no longer walk. His lips were as fat as bicycle tires.

Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once in two four-year terms as President, not in three-plus years as Prime Minister. And yet now, having announced his intention to reassume the Presidency in March, possibly for another twelve years, he was experiencing an unmistakable tide of derision.

When I first watched the YouTube video of the event—a video that went viral across Russia—I thought immediately of the May Day parade twenty-one years ago, when I stood in Red Square and watched as thousands of people suddenly stopped marching across the cobblestones, looked up at Mikhail Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet leadership perched atop Lenin’s tomb, and shouted their rage. “Resign!” some cried. “Shame on you!” They unfurled banners reading “Down with the Empire and Red Fascism!” and “Communists: Have No Illusions. You Are Bankrupt.” They waved the flags of the runaway Baltic republics. They waved the red flags of the Soviet Union with the hammer and sickle cut out. A Russian Orthodox priest hoisted a sign reading, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, Christ Has Risen!” With the help of a pair of binoculars, I had an excellent view of Gorbachev’s expression, and those of the other leaders, as they shuffled around in shock. There was no Botox yet in Moscow, and these men were visibly alarmed. After more than twenty minutes, when the rambunctious parade showed no signs of moving on, Gorbachev signalled to the leadership, and they slunk off the tomb and through a door back into the Kremlin.

During the late eighties and the nineties, state television was electric with argument, truth-telling, irony, hysteria, and scandal. Under Putin, TV news is exquisitely monitored and unwatchably bland. You can often say what you want in print, on the radio, and on the Web, but state television is, in the eyes of the Kremlin, what counts. The night of the bout, the bureaucrats who run Rossiya-2 knew their job; when they showed taped highlights later on, they washed out the sound of the jeering. One of the leaders of a Kremlin-organized pro-Putin youth group called Nashi declared that the ruckus at the arena was nothing other than the impatience of fans eager to get to the rest rooms. But on the viral video the dissatisfaction was clear. The leading opposition blogger and activist, Alexei Navalny, even headlined his fevered post “The End of an Epoch.”

It is not the end of an epoch. It would be hasty, in fact, to declare the event the beginning of the end. Any comparison to the May Day events of 1990, much less to Tahrir Square, last winter—an event discussed constantly in political circles in Moscow—discounts the fact that millions of Russians remain apolitical and atomized, and have learned to live with a system that provides few legal guarantees but does offer some economic advancement. Yet even before the Duma elections something was clear. Despite Putin’s high approval ratings—–sixty-something per cent, down from the mid-eighties, in 2007—the Russian people can no longer be portrayed as uniformly bovine and apathetic, anesthetized by stability. United Russia is deeply resented for its sense of cynical entitlement and its colossally corrupt relations with the oil, gas, and timber industries. Viktor Shenderovich, who, before being blackballed under Putin, was a subversive political comedian on television, wrote on the Web site Daily Journal that the Prime Minister, who prides himself on his populism, had encountered at the Olympic arena not the disgruntled liberal intelligentsia but the narod, the people. “After these significant boos and the cry of ‘Get lost,’ the end for Putinism could be very near or very far,” he wrote. “It makes no sense to guess the timing. But it’s a fact that a point of no return has been passed.”

Predictions really are a mug’s game. The jeering at the Olympic arena was presaged by many other events, especially after Putin announced, in September, that it had been decided “years ago” that he would run for President next March, implying further that Dmitri Medvedev, the President since 2008, would plunge deeper into Putin’s pocket, and become Prime Minister. It seemed that many people could not bear the presumption, the brazen predestination. In the Siberian mining city of Kemerovo, fans at a concert by the band Time Machine booed the m.c. when he announced that United Russia was behind the event; in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, hockey fans shouted down a team captain who was made to read a statement in support of United Russia. Russian-language news sites and blogs are filled with such reports, and they are increasing.

A week after the incident at the Olympic arena, I paid a call on Putin’s redoubtable spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. Tall and mustachioed, Peskov is a kind of ideal projection of his man; he is wised-up, worldly, professional, and subtly forbidding. When he lies, he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know. The smile is also meant to convey another message to foreign visitors: So, we’re cynical. And you’re not?

When I asked Peskov about the jeering, he unspooled a convoluted hypothesis about how the crowd might have been reacting to the image of Monson being helped to the locker room: “We called him after that, and he said it’s normal that in America when a beaten guy is leaving the hall they often boo.” Peskov, being as skillful and as modern as the regime he serves, then switched from bald-faced nonsense to allowing at least part of the truth. “I also heard some voices, three or four men,” he said. “Someone really shouted out, ‘Putin, go away!’ ”

When I asked why state television altered the sound for replays, he said, “They switched off the noise.”

Yes, but why? I said.

“I don’t know exactly,” Peskov replied. “That was the choice of the editor.” Peskov couldn’t help smiling at this specimen of disingenuousness. And why did Putin cancel an appointment two nights later to attend an anti-drug concert in St. Petersburg? Instead, the Kremlin sent a deputy prime minister, Dmitri Kozak, to represent United Russia, and so it was poor Kozak who endured the catcalls. “Putin wasn’t supposed to go,” Peskov said. “Trust me.”

Recently, I walked past 38 Petrovka—the headquarters of the Interior police—and crossed the street to the new headquarters of Memorial, a civil-rights group that began in 1987. Those were the early days of glasnost, when all kinds of neformaly, informal civic political groups, with names like Moscow Tribune and the Club of Social Initiatives, were suddenly allowed to bloom. The organizers of Memorial, some of them former dissidents and political prisoners, began with the idea that progress was impossible without proper commemoration of the horrors of the Soviet past. Activists for Memorial collected tens of thousands of signatures on petitions urging the Communist Party to build a monument to the “victims of illegal repressions” under Stalin. After a series of marches, conventions, and encounters with the Kremlin leadership, Memorial spread to dozens of provincial cities and towns.

Gorbachev was convinced that, in order to reform the country, he had to win over the intellectual class, and in 1988 he endorsed the idea of a monument at a Communist Party conference. But he was ambivalent about Memorial itself, rightly seeing it as the seed of a broader political opposition that would end up questioning the legitimacy of the system itself. “We have to somehow de-energize Memorial, really give it a local character,” he declared to the politburo. “What this is about is not Memorial. It’s a cover for something else.” Gorbachev did not crack down on Memorial, but the group wasn’t allowed to register, a bureaucratic maneuver that hampered its ability to collect funds and operate smoothly. At Andrei Sakharov’s funeral, in 1989, Gorbachev asked Sakharov’s widow, Elena Bonner, if there was anything he could do for her. She said, “Register Memorial.”

Memorial survived. The Soviet Union did not. At Memorial’s new headquarters, underwritten in part by the Ford Foundation and U.S.A.I.D., I was shown around the library and the archives, where, in the past two decades, scholars have done research for hundreds of new publications on the Soviet past. An archivist opened drawers filled with handkerchiefs, drawings, and other modest artifacts made, surreptitiously, by prisoners in the Gulag. The archivist pulled, at random, the file of one Vladimir Levitsky, who was imprisoned in 1932 for the crime of collecting stamps. Stamp collectors were suspected of trafficking in secret signs and codes. In 1937, Levitsky was shot at a labor camp called Olkhovka, near Krasnoyarsk.

Memorial has expanded in intent and practice over the years, becoming not only a research center, with libraries and archives around the country and a virtual library on the Gulag system, but also an important locus for human-rights work. It sponsors essay and outreach programs for schools. Sometimes, Memorial feels the pressure of officialdom. In 2008, police broke into its St. Petersburg offices and confiscated twelve hard drives that included an archive on Stalin, representing decades of work. The director there, Irina Flige, said it was an act of intimidation. Six months later, the courts told the police to return the hard drives.

One of Memorial’s founders is a historian named Arseny Roginsky, whose father died in Stalin’s prisons. Roginsky attracted the notice of the K.G.B. in Leningrad when, in the seventies, he started collecting a kind of proto-archive of documents about Soviet repression; in the early eighties, he was sent to a prison camp for four years.

I had coffee with Roginsky, whom I’ve known for years, at Memorial’s old headquarters, a less antiseptic set of offices, where the entry hall is plastered with photographs of heroic figures of the dissident era, and where Roginsky is allowed to smoke. Sitting in, and sometimes pacing, his minuscule office, Roginsky told me that the past few years have seen a proliferation of independent human-rights groups, media outlets, think tanks, academic departments, election watchdogs, and N.G.O.s not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but all over the country. Because their efficacy is so limited, so circumscribed by the Kremlin, they do not constitute a true civil society; rather, they are an archipelago of islands in a vast sea, barely connected to each other and ignored, at best, by the political élite.

“To speak in a grandiloquent way about it, this whole process is about shaping civil society,” Roginsky said. “This is more important even than whatever we accomplish in human-rights cases or in the study of history. In this country, we have a lot of state and very little society. Our task is to make it so that there is more society and less state.”

Since the mid-nineties, Russia has been fighting a war against insurgents in Chechnya and throughout the North Caucasus. Memorial has been in the lead among the organizations collecting information on human-rights violations committed by Chechen insurgents, Russian military authorities, and the pro-Moscow government. Memorial was a crucial source of information for the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who published horrifying reports in the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. For her countless articles on torture, illegal detentions, and the reign of terror under Chechnya’s ruthless and flagrantly corrupt President, Ramzan Kadyrov, Politkovskaya endured harassment, mock execution, and poisoning. “You’re an enemy, to be shot,” Kadyrov told her, in 2004. Two years later, she was gunned down in Moscow.

I met Politkovskaya several times, usually when she was winning awards in the West for her bravery. When, shortly after her death, one of her best sources and a close friend, Memorial’s Natalya Estemirova, came to New York to speak at an event commemorating Politkovskaya, I interviewed her onstage. Estemirova spoke movingly of their hair-raising trips around Chechnya. For months afterward, I worried about her; she was determined to go home to Grozny, the Chechen capital, and continue her work for Memorial, investigating kidnappings and extrajudicial executions by the Russian military and by Kadyrov’s soldiers. In July, 2009, Estemirova was kidnapped in Grozny. Her body was found in the neighboring region of Ingushetia; she had been shot in the head and chest. Neither murder has been solved.

Along with Tanya Lokshina, an indefatigable visitor to the region for Human Rights Watch, I went to Memorial’s newer office to speak with the head of its human-rights efforts, Oleg Orlov, who had been sued by Kadyrov for defamation after Orlov publicly blamed him for Estemirova’s murder. Orlov described how the authorities made it nearly impossible for lawyers and human-rights workers in the region to do their jobs.

On the eve of a protest in Ingushetia, in 2007, Orlov went to the city of Nazran, fully aware that the next day the authorities would crush the protest. “The city was flooded with Army and police,” he recalled. “I met the family of a leading member of the opposition, and probably I was spotted there. People were watched very closely. I stayed in the most obvious place, the Hotel Assa. It has armed guards twenty-four seven. Two deputy ministers from the Interior Ministry, Russian, were there with their own guard. In other places in Ingushetia, insurgents murdered Russians. At around eleven, I was in my hotel room typing on my computer. There was a knock on the door. There were voices. I opened the door and there were three gun barrels pointed at me, by huge guys with black masks. They knocked me down. I thought they were carrying out a sweep operation, hunting down insurgents who were at the hotel. I said, ‘Guys, you are mistaken, I have a Memorial I.D.’ They simply destroyed the door of the closet. The senior guy said, ‘Put all his things into a bag.’ I was lying on the floor and still able to see all my stuff thrown into a plastic bag. They tied it up. I tried to protest, telling them my rights. They were hitting me.

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“Then I realized it was no mistake. They picked me off the floor and I realized it was an abduction. Many times in my life, I had covered such things, so I knew the algorithm. It went exactly by the scheme I remembered from our human-rights reports in the field. There was a hood over my head. No shoes. They drag you to some kind of vehicle. Then they tell you, ‘Everything will be all right. You will be questioned and then you will be released.’ That’s what they always say: ‘Don’t make a fuss.’ Three TV journalists were also abducted, and forced into the same car. Someone said, ‘The mopping up of the hotel is completed.’ And the car moved on.

“The decent road ended, and now we were bouncing up and down. I realized no one is going to question us. I thought, They’ll bring us to some sort of cell. They said very little but spoke in Russian without an accent. The car stopped. They opened the doors. They threw us out, and there was an order: ‘Liquidate them with silencers.’ That was an unpleasant, if brief, moment. Then there was an immediate sensation of relief, because they started punching us. If they were going to liquidate us, they wouldn’t have beaten us. The hood fell off, and I saw the others were beaten up much worse. Two of them were severely beaten, with concussions, and one had to be hospitalized. Then they stopped. They said, ‘We don’t want to see you again in Ingushetia. If you come back, blame yourself for what happens.’ The car drove off. We got to our feet.”

As Orlov finished telling the story, explaining how he made it back to Nazran, I was struck by how utterly cool he was. In this respect, he was just like Politkovskaya, like Estemirova, like Lokshina. I feared for him, even if he didn’t fear for himself. Last year, Kadyrov went on Chechen TV to denounce Orlov and Memorial. “They are not opponents,” Kadyrov said. “They are traitors. They betrayed the idea of the motherland and the nation.” Orlov was reading to me off his computer. “They get huge salaries from the West,” Kadyrov went on. “They publish ugly things on the Internet about [Chechnya] to get their money. They are not my opponents. They are enemies of the people, enemies of the law and the state.” Enemies of the people. This was Stalinist language, and yet Orlov was ironic, unfazed.

A couple of years ago, at another benefit dinner in New York, I met an honoree from the North Caucasus named Nadira Isayeva. As she received her award and spoke modestly about her dangerous work as a journalist in Dagestan, just east of Chechnya, for the newspaper Chernovik (“rough draft”), I couldn’t have been alone in wondering about her longevity. We met in Moscow a couple of weeks ago. Isayeva is in her early thirties and was wearing the hijab. She is married to a Salafi Muslim who had called her from prison on a smuggled phone to express his admiration for her work. In 2008, she and three colleagues were indicted for “inciting hostility” and for defaming Russia’s Federal Security Service and local law enforcement.