Horror. There it is, Putin’s nightmare plan: throw me and Volkov in jail so that our campaign offices, activists, volunteers, and the broader public are left alone with terrifying people—political pundits. And their satanic apprentices—columnists.
I read a pile of newspapers and printouts, listened to the commentary on Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station)—and now I’m crying and laughing at the same time, like the girl in the old joke who gets hit on the head by a brick at a construction site.
It’s horrifying that these experts spout such nonsense. It’s horrifying that anyone listens to or reads it.
Once again I’m convinced that I’m right to suggest taking all political pundits to the zoo and putting them in a cage with predators. One important caveat, though: under no circumstances should this be done with political columnists. Their whining, lamenting, and complaining would drive the poor animals insane, and then there’d be no one left to eat the pundits.
Let me explain everything about the October 7 protest and, while I’m at it, lay out some rules for dealing with political pundits and political commentary. They’ll be useful to you.
There are almost no political scientists in Russia—that is, people who actually treat it as a science. People capable of reading, writing, and publishing in English—not in newspapers, but in academic journals. Want to read people like that? Exactly, that’s useful. Golosov, Gelman, Shulman. If you really think about it, you could maybe add two or three more names, at most.
I’d like to write, “there are also practitioners who really understand regional politics,” but alas, there’s only one of them—Kynev.
Political commentary from any Russian scholar with genuine recognition in the international academic community will almost always be interesting and useful. Examples: economics professors in the U.S. and Spain, Sonin and Mironov. And in general, commentary from any physicist would be a million times more useful than that of the “political experts” in Russian newspapers. Recognition abroad works here as a simple indicator: you may not know how to judge physicists, biologists, or philosophers, but if a foreign university invited someone and pays them, that means they’re a real scholar.
The people whose names you see in newspaper articles don’t understand things any better at all—they just always answer the phone. The journalist is too lazy to do real work and is on deadline. And there’s this idiotic rule: you need one comment “for” and one “against.” So the journalist keeps the phone numbers of two useless louts who are always ready to comment on absolutely anything.
And that’s how the most pointless guys become the most “famous political experts.”
A comment from an active politician is always more important than a comment from an expert. Even the cowardly, propaganda-style statement by the leader of Yabloko (a Russian liberal party) is a hundred times more useful than a million columns. There, at least, it’s clear what it’s for and why. The position is clear. It will have consequences of some kind, which means it’s useful to know.
Any columnist, political pundit, or expert spinning elaborate conspiracy theories is always an idiot. Sometimes also a crook, but always an idiot.
Columnists, political pundits, and experts who cite inside information and “sources close to...” are always lying.
You’re no worse a political analyst than the newspaper kind yourself. You just don’t have the nerve to write columns based on whatever showed up in your Twitter feed and then call yourself a “commentator.” They do.
I hope these simple rules will be useful.
Now let me explain the October 7 protest and how to assess it. It’s all very simple.
They don’t want our regional meetings and they’re afraid of them. They make for bad optics.
They free people from learned helplessness.
So they decided to ban the meetings.
They decided to crush attempts at unsanctioned meetings by detaining me, campaign office leaders, and regional coordinators.
And any unsanctioned protests that do go ahead are to be handled in the media with the line: “Well, look, fewer people showed up, the protest has died down.” There’s nothing new here—it’s a complete copy of the 2011–2012 strategy. Especially since
a defining trait of a sizable part of the liberal public—and this is true everywhere, not just here—is political masochism and endless brooding about inevitable defeat, a failed protest, and so on. The Kremlin doesn’t even have to try—we’ll bury ourselves in columns about how there were 428 people at yesterday’s rally and now there are 315, which means we’ve lost and the Kremlin has won. Three months ago there was a spark in people’s eyes, and now it’s gone. So why go anywhere or do anything now? Clearly our slogans are wrong. With a pang in our chests, we wait for a rally to draw fewer people than the day before so we can immediately start flogging ourselves with a seven-tailed whip.
We understand this simple and obvious strategy.
We stand our ground because we rely on moral rightness and dignity, not on some clever political technology.
We focus on making sure the specific rallies that triggered the conflict go ahead as effectively as possible anyway. That’s exactly why we dug in so hard in Nizhny Novgorod—and why I got 20 days in jail over it.
That’s exactly why we announced that the main rally on the 7th would be in St. Petersburg. We planned and prepared it despite the illegal refusal and the pressure.
And it went excellently. Many thanks to our campaign team and to all the participants, who proved themselves to be real fighters and people of principle.
Once it became clear that there would be no permits at all anymore, and that Volkov and I would be isolated, we activated our entire network to organize actions across the country in support of St. Petersburg, so that the slogans in favor of political competition would ring out more clearly.
It was important to understand how the network would function under that kind of stress:
announcing the protest for Saturday late on Monday evening
- detention of campaign office leaders
- detention of a dozen regional coordinators
After all, there was a widespread view that any regional political network in Russia is always dead on arrival. Just look at the local branches of our political parties.
In the end, protests took place in more than 80 cities. And when exactly did we get used to the idea that protests in Russia could happen in several cities at once? I’ll tell you: since March 26. Before that, it hadn’t happened for what felt like a hundred years.
We saw the main thing: the political structure we are building together—with shared effort, shared money, and paid for with arrests, hours spent on pickets, and going door to door—is alive, real, and fulfilling its main purpose: uniting decent, brave, principled people across the country. It carries a political message; it performs organizational functions even when it has formally been decapitated.
When I see photos of a wonderful, inspiring march in Moscow, a picket in Novosibirsk, an action in Yekaterinburg that even the city’s mayor attended—this is the question I want answered: did they manage to break what we had been building over these past few months? Did Putin succeed in pushing the regions back into political apathy and hopelessness?
So far, my answer is no, they did not. And on the 7th, we confirmed it.
We understand that they will keep trying, and we understand our weak points and vulnerabilities. But we also understand our enormous strength and potential. We will keep working as long as we have the strength, and we look to the future with optimism.
Those are all the conclusions. I’m sure you understand all this perfectly well yourself, without political pundits and columnists.