Increasingly, however, Putin's rhetoric seems to point to something a little worse than a case of nerves. On Tuesday, at a meeting of his National People's Front, Putin spoke of the opposition, saying bluntly that they would have to "submit" to the choice of the majority and avoid "imposing" their views on the majority. This kind of zero-sum language would seem to preclude dialogue. Putin followed by bizarrely speculating that his increasingly desperate opposition will end up searching for a "sacrificial offering" from its own ranks. "They'll whack [him] themselves, excuse me, and then blame the government," he said. This kind of talk doesn't leave much room for hope; if anything, Putin seems to be encouraging the radicalization of the still amorphous opposition against him. Already, anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny, who helped launch the protests, has been calling for an "escalation," and some of his activists were arrested on Wednesday for trying to hand out tents: Navalny wants to see a repeat of the great campout in Kiev after Ukraine's rigged 2004 presidential election -- the one that led to the Orange Revolution, as well as to Putin's obsession with "color revolutions" being plotted all around him.
The Putin I've come to know in writing this column for the past year is a leader who, when presented with two options, tends to pick the easier, if often far stupider, of the two, especially in a tense political atmosphere. All spring and summer, the political scene in Moscow stagnated and soured as the city waited for Putin to make up his mind: Would he stay or go? When he finally revealed his decision in September, it was a stunning one, simply because it came out seeming so shortsighted and reckless and blunt.
"It was the most obvious and therefore the least probable move of the ones I could have predicted," Putin's chronicler, the journalist Andrei Kolesnikov told me that day as we both stood slack-jawed in the stands following Putin's announcement. "We all waited for this moment for a long time, and still this is a surprise precisely because it's so obvious." He was in disbelief, despite the obviousness, because he, like many others, had hoped that Putin was capable of a better, wiser decision. When the protests exploded in December, Sasha, half of the duo behind KermlinRussia, a popular Twitter political satire, ruefully pointed out to me that if Putin had let Medvedev stay another term, "none of this would have happened." And I think he's absolutely right.
Would it be foolish to hope that, come March 5, Putin will see his mandate with the nuance the situation requires? To hope Putin has learned that political compromise and political strength can coexist? To hope that, for once, Putin takes the more difficult but ultimately more productive route of reform? Or would it be more prudent to see what's hiding in plain sight? Again. Says Pavlovsky: "I just hope he doesn't send us to war with Tajikistan."
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