“It’s not easy to ride a bike in Moscow,” cautioned Alexey Mityaev, the floppy-haired, jeans-wearing twenty-seven-year-old adviser to the head of the Moscow Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development, as we headed out on a test run of the city bike-share program that just launched in the Russian capital. “Sometimes you have to jump!” he called back to me as we left Tverskaya Square. Dodging his first car, he demonstrated, yanking his bike onto the dilapidated sidewalk mid-pedal. “Sometimes you have to ride through pedestrians!”

For the next twenty minutes, Mityaev wove his way through Moscow’s impressively aggressive traffic. He raced lights and shot across lanes when a gap opened between shiny black sedans gunning their motors. ”See?” he said, as two bike riders joined us. “When we’re in a group, we get respect!” An Audi failed (barely) to nick him. Suddenly, Mityaev reappeared right in front of me (I had fallen pretty far behind). “Don’t show fear!” he shouted, over the roar of traffic. “Cars are like dogs! They can smell fear! But if you ride like you aren’t afraid, they respect you!” Then he sped off, heading the wrong way up a one-way street.

Last week, Moscow installed, throughout its center, thirty stations containing a total of two hundred and twenty red city bikes. A Czech company provided the bikes, stations, and support. (“Because they are our brothers,” said Mityaev, with a smile, before adding that the city figured the Czechs had more experience with Eastern European-style vandalism than their Canadian competitors.) Nonetheless, the system resembles the Citi Bike program launched this week in New York. The same basic rules and conditions, as well as general urban-planning principles, are at work, too; Moscow’s D.O.T. worked with its counterparts in New York, London, and Copenhagen as it developed its program. But in the Russian capital, bike sharing may not be as much an immediate step forward for commuting—the program is starting extremely small, both in terms of bikes and miles of bike lanes—as it is a small, concrete triumph for grassroots political activism.

Anton Polsky, a thirty-year-old street artist who goes by the name Make, is one force behind the push to make Moscow more bike-friendly. Three years ago, the longtime cyclist was so dismayed by the situation that he considered moving. The last straw was then-Mayor Yury Luzhkov’s presentation of a conservative, car-oriented fifteen-year urban-planning initiative. “It was so suck!” Polsky said. “I had the feeling nothing is ever going to change in this city.” Before he left, though, he decided to make a map of bicycle routes.

“I made the cycling map when I was depressed at all levels,” he said. “I was depressed with my position as an artist; I was depressed with the former mayor, and the demolition of old buildings; I was depressed on the political level with what was going on with Putin.” Polsky called the map, which included routes he actually used as well as routes he would someday like to use, “USE/LESS.” He made the map, more manifesto than practical tool, “not to create something people can really follow, but to share the idea, ‘It’s your city, you can own it, use it any way you want.’ ”

The map got a huge response. An online Russian paper put up an interactive version. Polsky also started a socially oriented bicycle blog, Chain Reaction, and began to undertake a series of guerrilla actions, like painting his own bike lanes onto streets in the middle of the night. Before long, he had come into contact with a broad community of likeminded activists—urban planners, environmentalists, human-rights workers. “Normally, people here blame the government,” he said. “But I believe these government problems are coming from social problems.” In his view, these include runaway post-Communist consumerism (“USE/LESS” also means “Use less”) and post-Soviet social atomization. “We decided, as long as government can’t change, we should do it ourselves. With bicycles.”

Polsky expanded the USE/LESS map into an alternative master plan for the city. He also started Partizaning.org, a Web site for sharing activist tactics. “After Soviet Union collapsed, people were interested in private things, they were fed up with collectivist ideas,” said Polsky, who is currently in Düsseldorf on an artist’s residency. “Subbotnik, for example, where everyone gets together to clean up public space, it’s actually a nice idea. But of course with its Communist associations, everybody was fed up.” Now, he said, collectivist ideas, a so-called New Collectivism, are making a comeback, particularly with the help of social media. He mentioned the volunteer election observers who used their phones to record fraud at their local polling stations, then posted the footage online, as well as the anti-Putin protests. “I believe change at the city level can grow further.”

Certainly, the bicycle activists have scored some wins. Last year, the city government bowed to pressure and offered one of the activists, Mityaev, his current job in the D.O.T. Mityaev was a PricewaterhouseCoopers project manager who started biking to work after his hour-plus drive became unbearable, and he met Polsky when he started researching what was being done to encourage cycling in the city. Mityaev said it took only six months to get the bike-share program up and running. Now, the city has placed its bike routes according to the USE/LESS map’s crowdsourced suggestions. The first official route is one Polsky drew on his imagined map.

“It feels like all activist ideas are expressing the same things,” Polsky said. “Sometimes they work better than others. Bicycles have been the most successful—united the most people.” Cycle programs are popping up from St. Petersburg to Bishkek. In Moscow, he said, cycling also enjoys the support of “Moscow hipsters,” who might not think much about politics but want to live in a city that’s “nicer, more European.” “We kind of use them,” he said. “Otherwise, it would be hard to get critical mass.”

Among the many benefits of riding a bike in Moscow is that it makes it harder for the police to catch you, added Polsky, who posted a series of official-looking signs around the city just before the presidential elections last year. At Red Square, he put up a picture of a two-seater bike and the message: “Warning: Tandem Ahead.” (“It was about Putin and Medvedev,” he said. “In a playful, funny way, not just ‘Scary Evil Putin,’ or ‘Bloody Regime.’ ”). Another, posted near the Voikovskaya Metro, drew attention to the fact that the station was named for a man responsible for the executions of the Romanovs. “Even if you’re in a group, it’s so much harder to stop you” on a bike, said Polsky. “With a cycle box, you can carry lots of paints and tools through the city. For activist people, it’s much easier.”

Moscow has nothing on New York City, however, the scariest place that Polsky has ever ridden. “In New York, cars really take care with pedestrians. But when you’re on a bike, it feels like no one gives a shit. People walk in the cycling paths, cars are always parking in the bike lanes and unloading things, even police cars stop there.” Signage, too, was a problem: “I got in trouble when I crossed the Manhattan Bridge with the cars. Some big, looking-like-an-F.B.I.-type van started to signal and yell at me, that I can get killed—it was super dangerous to cycle with cars! But I had just followed the signs.” He paused. “I felt like, maybe if I’m ever going to move to New York, there’s something for me to do there.”

Photograph by Mikhail Metzel/AP.