It’s not us who made things such that people have to protest.
Try a thought experiment: “I’m very constructive, and I want to change Russia for the better.”
Most likely, the first thing you’ll do is try to run in an election and discover that they won’t let you onto the ballot. So much for “I want fair elections”! They won’t let you in at all—not even into rigged ones anymore, now that we’ve started getting decent percentages even there.
Then you’ll want to draft a useful anti-corruption bill, but the Kremlin crowd will lie straight to your face without blinking: “we’ve already passed that”.
Fine, corruption is political, so you decide to introduce an entirely uncontroversial anti-plagiarism bill concerning the academic community. But the answer you get is: all our bosses’ dissertations are plagiarized, so now is not the time.
What an outrage, you’ll think, and decide to turn to the media—only to discover fairly quickly that censorship, though illegal under the law, exists so openly that even Vladimir Pozner, a host on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel), talks about it.
After seeing the remarkable rallies in France, you’ll want to join the global campaign in defense of free speech—after all, even our foreign minister was marching through the streets of Paris that day, supposedly standing up for European values. For a one-person picket with “Je suis Charlie,” you’ll get 38 days in jail and a criminal case opened against you.
Then perhaps, despite a certain distaste for this artificial body with vague powers, you’ll decide to join the Civic Chamber and try to influence the authorities constructively from there with useful advice. Your attempt will fail, because the elections to the Chamber will be falsified so brazenly that no one will even bother to be outraged—they’ll just wave it off.
At this point you’ll slam your fist on the table and shout: “Fine, then I’ll go to court!” Though more likely, given your previous adventures, they’ll drag you into court yourself for being a little too civically active. In the first case, you’ll simply become one more witness to the fact that in a Russian court it is impossible to beat the authorities; in the second, you’ll learn why Russia’s acquittal rate is 0.4% (lower than under Stalin), and discover that court verdicts are plagiarized from the indictment.
So it won’t really be you deciding to help organize a huge rally against everything that is going on. It is the authorities themselves—Putin, Medvedev, the lawmakers who vanished to the Arctic instead of doing their jobs, and Shuvalov, from his palace while advising the rest of us to use less electricity—who are telling you:
— My friend, we will hear nothing and we will want to hear nothing until you and people like you come out into the streets of Russia’s cities. If you don’t come out, then you’re willing to put up with it. If you don’t come out, then for us, you simply do not exist.
I have already written that, unfortunately, there are no formats left for interaction between the authorities and society except mass demonstrations.
In fact, the Kremlin riffraff themselves are promoting this idea better than any opposition movement could. Now that they are facing political and economic difficulties, they too have rushed to organize rallies in support of their new strategy: turning the entire country into one huge fundamentalist village-like Achkhoy-Martan (a conservative town in Chechnya), where enlightenment is rejected and officials spout nonsense straight out of the 16th century.
Tolstoy and Pushkin would never have approved of this crap. Neither should we.
Let us return to the streets peacefully and calmly, to enter into the only dialogue possible with these Rublyovka-Achkhoy-Martan types (a jab at Russia’s wealthy elite and social conservatism)—the one they themselves are offering—and discuss Russia’s path forward.
I call on all Muscovites—and guests of the capital—to come out into the streets on March 1, 2015, and take part in the peaceful mass demonstration, the anti-crisis march “Spring.”
The idea of the march is simple: those sitting in the Kremlin have failed and will continue to fail. They had 15 years and $3 trillion from the sale of our natural resources.
The time has been wasted, the money has been squandered. Yesterday’s downgrade of Russia’s credit rating to “junk” status has thrown the country back to 2005. The fall in oil prices instantly crushed the ruble and wiped out people’s incomes. Once again it has become clear that we built a state resting entirely on the price of the black liquid flowing out of the ground in Western Siberia. A state like that cannot be strong.
I believe that we should come to the anti-crisis march with clear and simple demands—demands shared not just by opposition groups, but by the majority of citizens. This is precisely the foundation for a positive agenda around which we can all unite. It is what Russia cannot emerge from the crisis without.
Here are the march’s demands, prepared by the organizers:
When we prepared the text of these demands, we based it on a special large-scale sociological study by ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation; I’ll write more about it later), in which we identified the very issues that citizens are prepared to take to the streets over.
Take note of this curious point: the set of demands turned out to be one that absolutely every reasonable person supports, and even many thoroughly “systemic politicians” do as well. It is striking, for example, how closely it matches Yevgeny Primakov’s recent keynote speech—and he is certainly no radical.
At present, the march is being organized by the Progress Party, RPR-PARNAS, the December 5 Party, and Solidarity, but we call on everyone who shares these demands to come out. There are no leading and supporting roles here; any organization or party is welcome and will have an equal place.
We have more than a month ahead of us to prepare, and my view of how this should be organized is that the march should be prepared not by an organizing committee of 10 people, but by an organizing committee of 5,000—the core of the most engaged and active people, who will work to bring others to the march. I’ll write more about that as well.
A separate disclaimer for the little pests in the prosecutor’s office and Roskomnadzor (Russia’s media and communications regulator) who will rush to block this post the moment it is published: the anti-crisis march “Spring” will be fully legal. An application for a procession of 100,000 people along one of the central streets will be submitted in the proper form and at the proper time.
We will decide the issue of organizing similar marches in other cities in the near future.
Please mark March 1 in your calendars and schedules, and do not plan anything else. We will be saving Russia from the crisis.
We will march under Russia’s national flag.