Today is going to be a hard day. Everyone I know is going to be voting and watching the exit polls and sweating the dips and wobbles of the numbers and staying up late and arguing with the television and maybe lashing out at those dear to them because they are all nerves after taking part in (yet another) election of a lifetime and worrying that it didn’t go their way and that life for the next four years may become just that much more unbearable politically and, scanning one’s cocktail-party knowledge of Roman history, may begin worrying that this day likely heralds the end of the great American experiment. And, for the first time in my life, I won’t be doing all those things. Instead, I will spend the day explaining to my colleagues and friends why I didn’t vote, as I did to my outraged and disappointed parents last night. So instead of voting and instead of hitting the “play” button on my forehead every time I deflatedly tell someone I didn’t vote, I decided to write up my explanation and make my new employers publish it.

Dear friends and family, please do not be ashamed of me and please try to understand. I am not voting today not because I am a bad citizen and not because I am the old editor of the Washington Post, but because I just spent three years living in Russia and covering its politics, and it’s given me a strange and probably cloyingly naïve perspective on life back home. I’ve written about how it shaped my experience of hurricane Sandy, and now I’ll tell you about why it’s convinced me not to vote.

On December 4, 2011, I reported about how Russians went to the polls to vote in a new parliament. Given the pains that the Kremlin goes through to engineer the outcome, this is usually a boring and useless day, but two months prior, Vladimir Putin had shocked the world by announcing that he would be coming back for a third presidential term. The relative thaw of the four years of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency were now obviously a cruel joke. People—especially the educated, the affluent, and the urban—were angry, but when they saw the absurd levels of electoral fraud that went into electing a loyalist parliament that December day, they took to the streets for the first time in decades.

These people had lived through the age of Putin in what is called “internal emigration.” Seeing the corruption and lawlessness around them, they took solace in their rapidly improving lifestyles. They bought cars and swarmed the warm spots of the world; they became Apple groupies. They stopped participating in politics and became consumers par excellence. They did not vote, they did not protest. The only thing they expected of their government was to leave them alone. Their silence, bought with petrodollars, was a crucial half of the Russian social contract. It allowed Putin to rule how he wanted, but to do so without resistance. But Putin’s announcement after Medvedev’s talk of modernization suddenly changed things: they had been taken for fools, and they were pissed. Tens and tens of thousands of these middle class Russians, minted in Putin’s first decade in power, came out in peaceful protest against him in December.

It’s hard to explain the euphoria of those December days. The Western press scrambled to put a label on it—Russia’s Tahrir Square, the Russian Spring, a Snow Revolution—but all it was was a class of hyper-educated people finally waking up and demanding respect. They did it with wit and sentimentality, they used the big, weighty words—freedom, democracy—that the neocons have ruined for us, and they meant it. It was exhilarating; it was deeply, and profoundly moving.