Protest in Moscow

Moscow. Walking the protest has become too dangerous.

As Russian poet Alina Vitukhnovskaya put it, “the power announced the civil war on its own people.”

The violence and apprehensions, trials, and enormous fines have been continuing for a while now. The brutal violence and the police beating the restrained people seem like a culmination. It has accrued into what we are now observing.

From Russia, it seems to me that the outside world is not really looking. Inside, there is very little information via official channels. The Facebook pages of the remaining organizations that defend human rights are strewn with people’s comments “You were not timely suffocated; no one holds you here, or wait, your time will come.”

People in Siberia that I work with are largely traditionalist and conservative. The attitude towards the protests is very skeptical; the opinion in circulation is that this is Moscow wilding from too much food (“С жиру бесятся”). And that comes from people whose level of living dropped drastically in the recent politico-economic crises. Once a man told me in the village of X that those who come out against Putin should be shot in a ditch.

There is nothing left from the uplifting atmosphere of the extremely cold winter of 2011–2012 when the mass protests and “walkings” (gatherings? гуляния) began taking place. Gone are utopian visions and laughter at the absurd of the police’s existence. Only concrete small demands from the government remain, to which the government answers with the grim reality of brutal police violence.