



As it happened, metal barricades and rows of riot police blocked the bridge and one side of the park, pushing marchers into a tight stack on the bridge and funneling them toward the narrow embankment where clashes would later break out. And once the violence did kick off, the police may have been content to let it continue: Ilya Ponomoryev, one of the few Duma deputies to take part in opposition protests, told me that he tried unsuccessfully to talk with any police commanders that day about calming tensions between the two sides. When he found a vice mayor of Moscow off to the side, Ponomoryev said he was shooed off; the official told him, “What you wanted to create, this chaos, you got it.”

But chaos indeed seems the correct word to describe the events of May 6: Neither police officials or opposition leaders seemed fully in control. Moreover, even if the authorities increased tensions—perhaps on purpose—some people from the crowd did indeed attack police. Video taken on May 6 and leaked from law-enforcement sources to the state-run channel NTV depicts several defendants, including Barabanov, grabbing and punching several officers. (NTV is often an untrustworthy outlet of state propaganda, but the footage itself seems legit.) I watched the clips one night with Reiter. “They answered force with force,” she said of the protestors on May 6. “Police started to beat them, they started to answer, it’s that simple.” To deny that fact, she said, is an “affront,” even to those accused. In April, investigators released a page of Zimin’s diary, written on May 2, in which he describes his plans to meet with fellow anarchists a few days later at the May 6 protest for a “decisive moment.” He writes, “Burning fuel flying, smoke, and a blow to the face—this will be the last I remember before falling on the asphalt.” (Zimin's lawyers say this was a piece of creative writing.)

For the government, there's a benefit to associating anti-Putin activism with a rosters of who can easily be portrayed as oddballs—someone who's been declared insane, someone who stutters, someone who braids dreadlocks: just the kind of people you could tar as misfits who fight with cops without justification. (Other defandants, who include college students and office workers, might be harder to smear in this particular way.) But in any event, raising reasonable questions about the actions of at least some of the May 6 accused is not a way of answering questions about what measures investigators used to pursue the charges, or what sentences are justified. Prosecutors have never looked into the many charges of excessive force on the part of the police; Gaskarov, who was beaten in the face by police on May 6 and then arrested in April, was one of those who lodged a complaint that went nowhere. Same goes for 68 year-old pensioner who suffered a concussion after being struck in the head by police batons.

It doesn’t matter. Once the state put forward the narrative of “mass riots,” police were instantly exculpated of any wrongdoing. In other words, only the Kremlin can explain why it is trying to position chaotic street clashes with police one afternoon in May more than a year ago as a premeditated attempt at a coup’detat.

Not long ago, I went to see Viktor, Savelov’s father, at their three-room apartment in the northern outskirts of Moscow. He showed me childhood photos of his son and told me of their trips to the Russian Far East, where they would walk along the river gathering stones. In the corner of Savelov’s bedroom, beyond the Pam Anderson poster and the Warcraft CDs, was a large, empty aquarium. “I gave all the fish away,” his father said. He opened the closet door to show me a messy stack of papers he scooped up from the floor after the police came. “He’ll come home one day and figure it all out,” Viktor said.