I am not going to comment much on the May 5 protests in Russia because I have already done so many times before and there is nothing new or interesting about this one.

There were a few thousand people in Moscow. To repeat the obvious for the nth time, this is:

Not any more than during any other protest in 2017.

An order of magnitude lower than in 2011-12.

Basically an irrelevancy in a city of 15 million.

The only thing I personally found interesting and telling is the slogans of the opposition: “Not Our Tsar“.

Not “down with the dictator,” or even “no to fascism” or something similarly liberal.txt, but precisely the anti-monarchic overtones.

This rhetorical background was set up by Navalny himself, who billed the event as a protest “against monarchy”. This approach seems to have been long in the works – for instance, in a TV interview back in 2017, he described Putin as a “reactionary” with an obvious sense of distaste in his tone.

I don’t know why Navalny picked this approach. Most likely he really does feel that way. And/or he might want also want to extend his appeal to sovoks and Stalinists by adopting the Soviet discourse about the evils of Tsarism.

Incidentally, do you know who predicted this?

That’s right, The Unz Review’s most commonly translated foreign author, Egor Kholmogorov:

And yet the Red people are still stuck in their polemics about Gaidar and Chubais. For instance, take the issue of creeping separatism in Tatarstan. It is impossible to solve it from a neo-Soviet position, because it was Lenin who created the Tatar ASSR and accomodated the Sultan-Galievs. The Ukraine, which demolished all its Lenin monuments, was his beloved child. In reality, regardless of which question we consider, appeals to the Soviet experience are block brakes on our future progress. It is either a false alternative to the liberal solution, or it is the liberal solution. Therefore, it is of no surprise that we are hearing increasingly Bolshevik overtones in the rhetoric of our liberal cliques, for example, in the matter of anti-clericalism. The Zyuganov era of traditionalist-friendly Communism is coming to its inevitable end, and is becoming displaced by a new era of Communist liberalism, which is hostile to the Russian traditional values that are held in equal contempt by both liberals and conventional Communists.

It might be a good thing, though. By tying virulently Russophobic neoliberal globalism to virulently Russophobic sovok – two sides of the same coin – Navalny might succeed in flushing all that scum down with him. In that case, we wish him the best of luck.