By Masha Gessen
On January 23rd of this year, Bogantseva joined tens of thousands of other protesters in Moscow in marching for the release of Alexey Navalny. This week, she taught a class on protests and showed her ninth-graders a cartoon called “Instructions for the Ideal Detainee,” which details best practices for protesters dealing with police. On Sunday, January 31st, Bogantseva went to another demonstration, demanding the release of Navalny and other political prisoners. Protesters had planned to gather in front of the secret-police headquarters, in the square where the Dzerzhinsky monument used to stand, but the authorities had sealed off the center of town, closing streets and shutting down Metro stations. Organizers called on people to gather in several different spots instead, for a more dispersed demonstration.
The police came looking for Bogantseva at seven o’clock Sunday morning; she was asleep and didn’t hear the doorbell, but the attendant of her apartment building told her about the visit. They came back while Bogantseva was out protesting, and again after she returned home. This time, they took her to the precinct, where an officer took her mug shots. When the officer was done, Bogantseva handed over her own cell phone and asked her to take the pictures again. The officer was happy to oblige, Bogantseva told me: “She said, ‘That’s funny, no one’s done this before.’ ” While still at the station, Bogantseva posted the pictures—one facing forward and two in profile—to her Facebook page, to alert people that she had been detained. She had just taught the class on getting arrested, so she knew how to behave: she refused to be fingerprinted, demanded copies of all records, and declined to answer any questions, on the ground that she could not be compelled to testify against herself. In all, she spent six hours at the precinct, fielding inquiries such as “Did you take part in overturning vehicles and blocking traffic?” and “Can you name people who took part in overturning vehicles and blocking traffic?” She told me that she did not, in fact, see anyone block traffic or damage any property during the protests, but she said nothing to the police.
The Russian organization OVDInfo, which tracks political arrests and prosecutions, had by Monday afternoon compiled a list of fifty-six hundred and fifty-eight people, in ninety cities, who had been detained during Sunday’s protests, and the list is still growing. This was a new record. The previous record for arrests in a single day had been set a week earlier: thirty-nine hundred and eighty people. In the interim, the police harassed journalists around the country: several dozen were warned to stay away from the protests, and several, including Sergey Smirnov, the editor-in-chief of Mediazona, a leading independent resource, are facing charges. Dozens of people whom police seem to perceive as protest leaders are under house arrest.
Leonid Volkov, who heads Navalny’s political organization, told me over the phone that half of his staff, or about ninety people, including thirty-two out of thirty-eight leaders of regional organizations, are under arrest. (Volkov has been living in Lithuania for a year and a half; he believes he will face criminal charges in Russia were he to return home.) Lyubov Sobol, the head of Navalny Live, Navalny’s media organization, is under house arrest, and several of her staff have been arrested. Around ten out of forty staff members of Navalny’s original investigative organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, are under house arrest or in administrative detention. Some of them were charged with administrative violations connected to the first protest; others are facing criminal charges for allegedly violating pandemic guidelines by attending the protests. Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, was detained in Moscow during the Sunday protest; she was released the next day.
In 2019, Russian authorities launched a wide-ranging investigation of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, freezing its bank accounts and the personal accounts of many of its staff. The case currently has no named suspects, but Volkov believes that it’s meant to target him and the head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov, who has also been staying out of the country. Still, the Anti-Corruption Foundation has continued its work, and this perseverance, Volkov thinks, is what made Russian authorities “decide to move to Plan B, in August, 2020,” by which he means a failed attempt to assassinate Navalny with a chemical weapon. Now the police are trying to shut down Navalny’s organization and the protests that it inspires.
The propaganda machine, meanwhile, has been scrambling to respond to Navalny’s video investigation of Putin’s palace on the Black Sea. In the past week, state television and affiliated social-media channels have claimed that the palace is not all it’s cracked up to be—that it was nothing but a giant construction site, that it was not a private residence but a future “apartment hotel,” and, finally, that it belongs to the Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, who, along with his twin brother, Boris, happens to be a close friend of Putin’s from childhood. In addition, state propagandists continue to accuse Navalny and his people of organizing riots and seducing minors into joining the protests.
For once, the Kremlin’s propaganda onslaught may be no match for the truth coming from the other side. More than a hundred and six million people have watched Navalny’s movie about the palace; according to Volkov, sixty-two per cent of the views have been within Russia. Millions saw Navalny get arrested, on live TV, when he flew home to Moscow after undergoing treatment in Germany following the assassination attempt. Millions watched a speech that Navalny gave in court by video, from jail; in it, he enumerated the legal violations committed in the course of his arrest, and concluded, “You can handcuff me, but this cannot last forever.” More than a million people watched Navalny Live’s witty takedown of the Kremlin’s latest anti-Navalny propaganda, though the narrator, Alexandra Shapalina, has now been detained. And then there are hundreds of smaller-scale contributions, such as one from Anastasia Vasilyeva, the leader of a medical trade union, who played Beethoven for the police who came to arrest her. They also include multiple video reports made from inside prisoner vans, and even Bogantseva’s mug shots. It is as if the Kremlin is co-producing Navalny’s riveting reality show.
Why would the Russian authorities act in ways that seem only to amplify Navalny’s message? Bogantseva suggested that some of the police may be sympathetic to it—in fact, at least one officer told her as much. Another possible explanation is sheer incompetence. Bogantseva said, for example, that the police had used street security cameras and facial-recognition software to identify her as a protest participant, when looking at public posts on her Facebook page would have been an easier and more certain method. On the other hand, if police in Moscow have the technical and human resources to analyze hours of security-camera footage, should they not be able to prevent people from filming in airports, courtrooms, police stations, and prisoner transports? “They don’t want to stop people from filming in prisoner transports,” Volkov said. “They want people to see it on social media. Nothing makes people lose their desire to protest like watching endless reports on how the police fucked people up.”
Navalny and his organization have been stressing a single message over all others: “Do not be afraid!” On January 31st, tens of thousands of people in a hundred and eighty Russian cities—a geographic record—took to the streets. In Vladivostok, where police sealed off the center of the city, protesters danced on the ice of frozen Amur Bay. In Moscow, different large groups marched for hours, weaving through the city in a feat of self-organization and a show of freedom. But the images that went viral were of police brutality: eighteen people stuffed into a small police van in Moscow; tasers used in Moscow and St. Petersburg; detainees in St. Petersburg marched with their hands on the backs of their heads; and detainees forced to lie face down in the snow in Kazan. These images, combined with footage of cities flooded with police vehicles and law-enforcement troops in combat gear, conjure both war movies and recent photographs from Belarus, where thousands of protesters have been beaten and tortured since August.
There are many reasons to be afraid. Nearly lost in the week’s news was a new investigation by Bellingcat, the investigative-journalism organization that worked with Navalny to identify his would-be assassins. It has found three deaths that appear to be linked to the squad that tried to poison Navalny. All three were young men; two were political activists, the other a journalist. Authorities declared the deaths to be the result of natural causes. The men were not as well known as Navalny, and their probable murders were discovered largely through data crunching, not by investigating the deaths themselves—the Putin regime has created a killing machine that leaves recognizable data patterns. The Bellingcat investigation prompted one former government official, Georgy Satarov, to record a short talk stressing that “anyone can be their next victim.” On his Facebook page, he added a statement that said that he is in good health, does not use drugs, and has an excellent sense of balance: “Therefore, I request your active distrust of any news of my sudden death related to any of the aforementioned reasons.” Satarov wasn’t signalling that he thought he would be assassinated, only that there is no reason why he wouldn’t be.
In this world of tasers, special-forces troops, manufactured criminal prosecutions, and teams of assassins, Navalny’s incantation of “Do not be afraid!” does not mean “There is nothing to fear.” A young man in Moscow, asked by a TV Rain journalist why he hadn’t been scared to join the protests, answered, “I was scared. I am still scared. But what’s happening in the country now—it’s bigger than the fear. What else is there to do?” On Tuesday morning, dozens of people who had been detained on Sunday were still being held in overcrowded, unheated police vans outside holding facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. One group recorded a video saying that in the forty hours since they were detained they had not received any food. That day, Navalny appeared in court, where a judge sentenced him to two years and eight months in a prison colony for alleged parole violations. Muscovites again came out to protest, gathering as close to the heavily guarded courthouse as they could. At least three hundred and fifty people were detained.
There has perhaps never been more to fear for Russians who dare to protest than there is now. “Once it became clear that the state is killing its own citizens using chemical weapons and, it very much looks like, does this systematically, all the cards are on the table,” Lev Parkhomenko, a journalist, wrote on Facebook. “There are no more trump cards, no more aces up their sleeve, no queens we haven’t seen. There is nothing that can surprise us—scare us—nothing left about which we could say, ‘No, that’s going too far, that’s not possible,’ ‘They wouldn’t do that,’ ‘That’s unimaginable.’ ” Parkhomenko referred to a common Russian saying—“What’s better, a horrible end or horror without end?”—and argued that the former is always preferable.
Volkov sees the current wave of protests as unprecedented, not because of a record number of arrests or cities participating. “We’ve had pensioners’ protests, hipster protests, laborers’ protests, Internet-dwellers’ protests, but this is none of those,” he said. “This is the people’s protests.” A major factor, he believes, is Russia’s economic predicament: “People’s real income has been falling for eight consecutive years, and you’d be hard put to find a Venezuela with that kind of track record.” There is also the problem of being terrorized—by roving squads of assassins, by police who remove people from their homes, by men in combat gear taking over cities. And there is the insult of being taken for fools by men who cast doubt on Navalny’s report on Putin’s palace. All Russians can do is defy the Kremlin’s expectations and act on their outrage, not their fear.
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