Someone brought me a disc with the film *The Term*, and I finally watched it too.
Before that, I had read a lot of reviews, and they were wildly different—it was striking just *how* different. It seems to me that many people took this film too seriously. Or rather, not even too seriously, but started looking in it for revelations, answers, a chronology of an attempted revolution, or a chronology of the failure of an attempted revolution.
*The Term* is, after all, a project about observation. And the film turned out to be about observing people placed in different contexts.
I know that some of the people in it are irritated and offended, but it seems to me that self-irony is everything here. Anyone, if you film them long enough in everyday life, ends up looking like an oddball on screen.
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The filmmakers treated me quite fairly: all I do is adjust my hair in a very funny way (I’d never noticed that about myself) and snap at journalists. If they had wanted to portray me in a bad light, they had a million opportunities.
By the way, I can confirm that we had an agreement: not to show anything that had been explicitly forbidden. *The Term* honored that agreement, at least in the parts involving me.
But I want to talk about something else. I sat down to watch this film thinking, “I wonder if I’ll learn anything new?” I did, in fact. And I want to share it.
There is footage in it from the events in Astrakhan in April 2012. I went there to support Oleg Shein, who was on a hunger strike against election fraud. That trip had major significance for everything I did afterward: it was after that, apparently with the Kremlin upset that a 5,000-person unauthorized march could take place in a sleepy southern city, that orders were given to keep me constantly under travel restrictions. After Astrakhan, I was no longer allowed to leave Moscow.
(A lyrical digression. As I watched, I remembered Astrakhan, and one thought kept coming back: we were right in every single word we said. In 2012, Nashi activists (pro-Kremlin youth movement) and cops were chasing us around the city, locals were shrieking, "Muscovites have come here and are trashing our dear Khazaria," while the federal TV channels were smearing Shein and praising the city’s mayor, Stolyarov, and former mayor Bozhenov, who had become governor of Volgograd Region. A year and a half passed: Stolyarov turned out to be a United Russia thief and was arrested for corruption, and Bozhenov too was caught stealing, though he was allowed to flee. So the chants of "Crooks and thieves Stolyarov and Bozhenov stole the mayor’s chair from Shein" turned out to be true in the most literal sense.)
So anyway, an episode important to me happened in Astrakhan. We had just arrived and had no idea what to do. The city—apart from a small group of activists—was asleep. It was hot. We were sitting on a curb in the local square while the local cops looked at us curiously.
Then some big guy walks up: "Alexei, I’m Maxim Vitorgan. You wrote on LiveJournal that people should come, so I came. What do we do?" (At that point I had only seen Vitorgan on TV, in films, and once at a rally—from about 100 meters away.)
What was there to do? We didn’t know ourselves. Sit down on the curb with us and wait.
A lot of people like that came later, but Max was one of the very first, and he made the biggest impression on me. Imagine that—he dropped whatever filming he was doing. Came all the way out. Wanted to do something. Now *that’s* civic-minded. We had to come up with some kind of strategy so as not to fall flat on our faces in front of people like him.
We pulled ourselves together quickly and, together with Shein, went out to campaign among local work collectives and trade unions.
We went ourselves to the universities, and in the evenings we would simply approach people on the Volga embankment and start talking politics. Ksyusha Sobchak, when she arrived, was a huge help—crowds of people would just trail after her.
You know the rest: a large unauthorized march, police confused in places. The entire *A Just Russia* faction flew in on a special plane; back then they still weren’t fighting the “fifth column,” and they themselves were all wearing white ribbons. The deputies said no more rallies were needed, so we dispersed, but as I wrote above, our trip had major political consequences.
And now I’m watching The Term and I see that it wasn’t like that at all. Vitorgan didn’t come because of my LiveJournal post at all—he came for Sobchak! And there I was, getting all emotional about it.
There you have them—the driving forces of the protest!