Because the 31st article of the Russian constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly, the Russian opposition has taken to gathering by the statue of the revolutionary poet Mayakovsky on Triumphalnaya Ploshchad in the center of Moscow every time a month has a 31st day. A routine has developed: Every 31st, the Moscow city government withholds permission for the assembly, claiming they've already scheduled something for that time. (On Jan. 31, it was "Winter Delights.") Every time, the opposition -- about a hundred aged liberals still clinging to the hopes of the early Yeltsin era -- gather anyway. And every time, the police and, occasionally, the special forces show up and arrest people, some of whom happen to be famous opposition figures who know how to get in touch with the press and make the mayorality look rather foolish. (On Dec. 31, for instance, the police made a splash of international proportions by arresting 82 year-old human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeeva. In January, they ran the second she screamed. "I guess there was an order not to let the old lady die, lest there be an international scandal," she said.)
Apart from provoking the cops into arresting old ladies, however, the protesters don't have much to show for their 31st-article gatherings, which are replicated in a few other places across the country. Partly, this is the opposition's fault. To say that they don't have a coherent or realistic platform or a leader would severely understate the matter. They have been so marginalized by the state that, in the best traditions of Russian political opposition, they have taken to utopian squabbling -- the Communists with the nationalists, the liberals with the Kremlin drop-outs -- while United Russia keeps consolidating power through hard-headed yet sophisticated pragmatism.
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But it's also due to the fact that, marginalized and tiny as the protests are, most Russians don't even know they exist.
Take this weekend. On Saturday, the day before January's 31st-article protests, more than 10,000 people gathered for a demonstration in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a little island of Russia wedged on the Baltic Sea coast between Poland and Lithuania. In a country where 50 to 100 people count as a major opposition protest, this is not only huge, it's unprecedented. By contrast, the biggest protest in contiguous Russia in recent memory, those in Vladivostok at the height of the financial crisis in December 2008, drew only 1,000 people. The event organizers claim up to 12,000 protesters, but even with 10,000 people and cars spread across a parking lot spanning three hectares, the protests were unusual.
This was true not just because of the scale but because of the content. Originally, the smattering of opposition groups gathered to protest a hike in the transportation tax and import duties on cars. Cars and pensions remain perhaps the only reason Russians will take to the streets -- when the Kaliningrad government raised transport taxes last year, thousands protested -- so it was a surprise to many when the target became the government itself. People showed up with banners demanding the return of the direct election of governors, something the Kremlin shelved in 2004, ostensibly to fight terrorism. Some banners expressed the wish to see United Russia either tossed in the garbage or flushed down the toilet. Another banner read, "You've gotten fat, stolen a lot, now how about doing some time?" According to the organizers, over 5,000 people signed a petition demanding not only the cancellation of the transport tax, but the abdication of the local governor, his entire government, and even Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
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