Tag protest

When no one has your back

Nothing projects self-confidence more convincingly than anonymous Kremlin sources saying “we’re not afraid of the protests.” On this, Mark Galeotti sounds like the voice of common sense: The more the Kremlin projects confidence that it can ride out any protests,…

Navalny’s return III

There’s no shortage of sources to follow the Russian protests. I should probably recommend two Telegram channels in this post, RussiaNexta and SOTA. You don’t have to know Russian – just look though the images and the videos. The story…

No such thing as boundless meekness

Kevin Rothrock tweeted this yesterday: 39 cops have reportedly been injured at rallies across Russia today. Expect that to be the headline news from the state media. Russian libertarians are about to get a taste of the “BLM is all…

Speaking as a free man

Meduza reported from Moscow yesterday: Prosecutors have asked for a four-year prison sentence in the case of 21-year-old Egor Zhukov [or Yegor; the name is a folk version of George], a student at the Higher School of Economics… Zhukov has…

Fear and political participation

Russians are still pretty apolitical animals but they are gradually realizing that their passivity is contributing to the country’s stagnation and general hopelessness. When they quit the “quiet desperation” mode, they look to others who have made it farther into…

Angry but disunited

Environmental protests have been going strong in different parts of Russia in the past year or two but have yet to coalesce into a national movement. It’s local or regional concerns, typically, that drive people outdoors to protest. When an…

Crazy Russians

The fearsome shaman’s march on Moscow has been interrupted – suspended – reversed perhaps – but echoes of his tambourine will be troubling the sleep of Kremlin denizens for some time. Why am I so sure? Because both they and…

The Kremlin vs. the shaman 2

More details on Alexander Gabyshev, the anti-Putin shaman: “Armed security services blocked the highway, quickly encircled our camp and headed straight to the shaman’s tent,” Viktor Yegorov, one of Gabyshev’s supporters, said in a video from the scene. “They drove…

Ethereum, poisoned

Here’s Meduza on the experimental “electronic voting” at the Moscow city election: …[O]fficials have assembled something even more obfuscated than traditional voting… [O]nline observers effectively will have no way of knowing if electronic votes have been counted properly. In essence,…

A mocking shadow

More from last Sunday’s election in Moscow: The candidate Putin reportedly voted for came third out of three in his district. The leader of United Russia’s faction in the city council lost his seat. Protest voters elected a dummy in…

Projection, as usual

Putin in Helsinki, August 22, 2019: Russian opposition members were banned from running for Moscow’s legislature because they had submitted “falsified” signatures, President Vladimir Putin has said, playing down the election protests that rocked the capital this summer… “This was…