A special Nashi (pro-Kremlin youth movement) activist — or maybe a Young Guard activist — provocateur had been assigned to the picket. He would go up to whoever was holding the sign with the huge sack and mutter, “take this package for Reznik,” kind of like Panikovsky’s “give me a million” (a reference to the classic Soviet novel *The Little Golden Calf*). I snapped at him pretty aggressively (which I later regretted, since it was Lent and one is supposed to keep one’s anger in check), and after that he stopped approaching me. He moved to the other side of the street and waited there with two colleagues. As soon as some LiveJournal girl took over for me, he came up again, and at the same moment two assholes in plain clothes came out of the prosecutor’s office and declared that two people no longer counted as a one-person picket and that they were about to haul everyone in. A couple of minutes later, a police officer from the Tverskoye precinct really did show up. I explained the situation to him, and they decided not to detain the girl. Once again I noticed how badly all these tricks by Nashi/RuMol (Russian Youth Union) people/Young Guard types annoy the police. Cops like to operate in a binary mode: either leave everyone alone or round everybody up without distinction. A situation where one picketer has to be detained and processed, while the other is let go because he’s “one of ours,” does not appeal to them. They don’t need “their own” like that in the slightest. The guy with the sack
His partner