‘This Is How You Elect a Fucking President?’

Putin cracks down on Moscow's protesters before the victory tears are dry on his face.

BY JULIA IOFFE 

MOSCOW — When Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov left Pushkin Square Monday night, the crowd -- estimated by the police at 14,000 -- was just starting to disperse. They had stood for two hours in sub-zero temperatures, not 24 hours after Vladimir Putin wept after sweeping to victory in Sunday's presidential race with 63.6 percent of the vote. They had listened to speeches from the whole gamut of the opposition -- the leftists, the nationalists, Alexey Navalny, Mikhail Prokhorov, all had their turn at the microphone. They chanted "Putin is a thief!" and "We are the power!" They weren't as cheerful as they'd been in past protests, but they were peaceful, despite the crowd of Putin supporters that had arrived from central casting.

Gudkov, who represents the Just Russia party and has been a central figure in this winter's opposition protests, made sure to talk to the police officer overseeing the whole operation before he left for his appearance on opposition channel RainTV. Ilya Ponomarev, another Just Russia Duma deputy who has been a key figure in the movement, had announced from the stage that he would meet with anyone who wanted to talk to him at the fountain in the center of the square, a sort-of impromptu town hall. Navalny, the anti-corruption activist who's become the opposition's most natural leader, and leftist activist Sergei Udaltsov had announced that they weren't leaving the square, period -- an unlikely prospect given the temperature. "He told me, fine, let them stay and shout for a few hours," Gudkov said, of the police supervisor.
It didn't quite go down like that. Gudkov and his son Dmitry, also a Duma deputy from the same party, left Pushkin Square with a clear conscience. Ponomarev climbed up on the granite fountain in the center of the square, where Navalny, Udaltsov and a few others joined them. A small crowd of supporters -- almost all male -- stuck around, too. When the police started shouting at them to clear out, Navalny's bodyguard commanded the crowd to form a tightly packed chain around him, and the young men at the bottom of that snow-filled empty fountain joined up. Riot police started to sweep the square and drag people into armored vans: holding pens on wheels. Then the police descended into the fountain, snatching links out of the human chain, one by one, and dragging them to the side of the fountain, and hurling them, like sacks of potatoes, over the red granite border. "Hey! Toss the next one!" one of the cops waiting up there giggled in delight.
They got Udaltsov, Navalny, opposition figure Ilya Yashin, a Western journalist, and Ponomarev, who stood shouting into a loudspeaker: "Police! Stop breaking the law! This is a peaceful meeting!" (They quickly released him.) All in all, they got 250 people, including Alena Popova, a glamorous young media consultant and e-government evangelist who has linked up to Ponomarev and the opposition movement. She wasn't so lucky, though: the police broke her arm.
Hearing about this, the Gudkovs raced back to Pushkin Square from the television studio. By the time they arrived, the riot police and the OMON special police had formed a chain and started to push everyone out of the square. There was plenty of room and not many people, but they managed to get into such a formation -- a reverse cowherd -- that people, many of them journalists with press badges in full view, started falling and getting trampled underfoot.

12NEXT