Remembe, remembe, the fifth of December. A lot of people write about the sense of inspiration that swept over them on December 5. For some, that inspiration began even on the fourth. Personally, I felt no inspiration at all. When Yashin called the day before and said, "come to the rally on December 5," I answered in the sense that I had no intention of protesting alongside your half-dead PARNAS/Solidarnost people, who had been getting in my way the whole time with their idiotic "vote for no one" campaign. Here, jumping ahead a bit, Yashin dug up our text messages. Just so it's clear what expectations there were for the rally:
Then came the 4th, the day of the State Duma elections. Right away, what poured in were not just "reports of election violations," but actual videos filmed at polling stations showing blatant fraud. The next day Churov would deliver his famous line about them: "videos showing signs of editing, posted on the American server YouTube." Even so, when the first exit-poll results started coming in from the eastern part of the country, things looked pretty good: the Party of Crooks and Thieves was getting hammered in every major city. Vladivostok, Bratsk, Irkutsk, Novosib. It was obvious that much of the Volga region would be hell, but there are no elections there anyway. Same in the Caucasus. They just write whatever numbers the bosses tell them to put in the protocol. But Moscow was still ahead. We were all rubbing our hands with glee: now the Crooks and Thieves would finally get smacked, and they wouldn't see 50% in the Duma no matter how much they rigged things across the rest of the country. And then—whoops: this whole ridiculous, clumsy, thieving Sobyanin gang, right before everyone's eyes and without much difficulty, humiliated the biggest city in the country. Live on YouTube, we watched as in "democratic" Moscow, starting at 8:00 p.m., observers were thrown out of polling stations, and United Russia started posting record results. Rage and hatred. That was all I felt. My city is not Chechnya or Mordovia, where some swindlers appointed by who-knows-whom can get away with this. And I still feel nothing else when I see, for example, that idiot "deputy" "Zheleznyak," the author of the internet censorship law, who became a deputy precisely thanks to votes stolen from me. And the final straw for me was our friends from Yekaterinburg, Volkov and Krasheninnikov, who had successfully pushed the campaign "Vote for any party except United Russia" in their city. First they were celebrating the fact that United Russia got only 25% in Yekaterinburg, and then they started cursing Moscow and Muscovites because we had 46%, and all their success was wasted and produced no result. In Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, citizens managed to defend their votes. In Moscow, they did not. So I decided: to hell with PARNAS and Solidarnost. It doesn't matter whose rally it is. I won't respect myself if I don't go out into the street and say what I think about this. I'll go on principle. I wrote a post about it, and then I went. I came out of the metro and couldn't understand where I'd landed. There was a sea of people, all young. It was very different from the rallies I'd seen before. They all looked angry and bewildered too. Clearly 85% of them had never been to a protest in their lives. This time they had come on principle too—it was obvious right away. I didn't know anyone at all or recognize anyone by sight, which is very uncharacteristic of the traditional "opposition rally," where all the participants already feel like family to me. It was impossible to get to the stage. Everything was blocked off by the police. I had to climb over a fence, and in the process gift Putin a quote (not pretty, I admit). Sergei Vlasov from RosUznik also remembers that moment. I spoke. And by the way, absolutely NO ONE from the parties that had taken part in the elections came to the rally. The votes stolen from them didn't concern them. So that, naturally, was not exactly inspiring either.
http://youtu.be/c701YjMkPGc (the musical version seems more meaningful) After the rally, people headed toward the Central Election Commission. It wasn't really a march as such—more a fairly chaotic movement through side streets. Most of the crowd was cut off right away. We were going who-knows-where and for who-knows-what reason. It was raining. It was obvious they'd disperse us and crack us over the head with batons too. Simply on principle.
(source) That was actually the first time I understood who all those people around me were and where they had come from. Observers. December 5 was a rally and march of angry election observers. They formed the core of the crowd. Later, even among those who ended up in the detention center with me, about 70% were observers. They came to the rally because they had been thrown out of polling stations, and then in the morning they saw on the Central Election Commission website that their precinct had supposedly given United Russia 60–70%.
(source) You know the rest. Many were detained, many were arrested. No inspiration. At first there was no information at all in the detention center, then they started bringing people in by the batch. Then rumors began to spread that on the 6th people had gone out into the streets again, many had been beaten, and again there were loads of arrests. The action on the 6th was completely unauthorized; people knew they were going to get hauled in, but they went again on principle. The rumors were confirmed by the fact that they started packing the cells tighter and bringing in extra beds. Then the lawyers came and told us it was true. On the 6th everyone had been beaten and detained, but on the 10th people were going to come out into the streets again. The idea was: sure, everyone would obviously be dispersed and beaten again, but people were demonstratively joining a Facebook group on principle. And supposedly that Facebook group already had many thousands of people in it. Which, of course, was hard to believe. That phrase, "on principle," is the most important thing. We don't go to rallies, become observers, send 300 rubles somewhere, or put up leaflets for some big shot, for the person on stage, or for some vague "opposition." We do it for ourselves. So that we can say to ourselves: I am not afraid, and on principle I will act as I think is right. I don't give a damn what they say on the zombie box (state TV propaganda) or how many degrees below freezing it is outside or how many police there are. A year ago, people willing, in a completely uninspiring atmosphere, to do the right thing on principle started a major movement that sooner or later will bring us victory. For now, we are still far from it: we did not achieve new elections, the State Duma is occupied by the Party of Crooks and Thieves on stolen mandates, the thief Putin sits in the Kremlin, Gunvor trades our oil, and participants in peaceful protests sit in prison. But could anyone have imagined 365 days ago that rallies with fewer than 50,000 people would soon be considered failures? That civic and political groups numbering in the hundreds would spring up spontaneously like mushrooms? That millions of rubles would be raised for the defense of political prisoners? That in Moscow round-the-clock protests would go on for days, with bigger crowds at night than there used to be during the day? That elections to the Coordinating Council would be held, with tens of thousands taking part, and for the first time representatives of the "opposition" would be elected directly by people rather than through rigged congresses? That a year later the internet would be filled with what were practically memoirs by people recalling the inspiration of the events of December 5–24? We lost the word "inspiration," in the context of politics, somewhere around 1991. Of course we will achieve our goal. "On principle" is always stronger than "for money" or "by order." When? Ask yourselves that. No kindly uncle is coming; it all depends on how much effort each of us is prepared to put in here and now. As I wrap up this heart-rending post and look back, I want once again to thank everyone who supported the campaign "Vote for any party against the Party of Crooks and Thieves". Everyone who worked. Who took part in all our silly contests for leaflets or songs, and then distributed those leaflets and songs. Who did it despite the hopelessness of autumn 2011 and without paying attention to the constant whining that always followed us, along the lines of "oh, here they go again with their Party of Crooks and Thieves barrel-organ. That's boring now and has been out of fashion for two weeks already. Let's all post a picture of a funny goat guitarist instead. That's the trend now and gets likes." And of course those who became observers and then found themselves at Chistye Prudy on the 5th. Who were at Manezhnaya Square on the 6th and were beaten, but were not afraid. Who came out into the street on the 10th on principle and gave themselves a little inspiration. We will all see each other on December 15 at the March of Freedom. Who the hell knows whether there will be any inspiration there, but we have to go on principle.