‘There is no alternative’
Tony Wood writes about Russia on the eve of the presidential election
In the closing weeks of 2011, the wave of protest that had spread to dozens of cities since the start of the year – from Tunis to Cairo, Madrid to Athens, New York to Oakland – reached some unlikely places. On 10 December, as many as sixty thousand people turned out in Moscow to demonstrate against the falsification of parliamentary election results the previous week; five thousand took to the streets in St Petersburg, while at least three thousand braved temperatures of -20°C in Novosibirsk. Elsewhere in Russia, the crowds were smaller, ranging from hundreds to a few thousand, but the geographical spread was striking: from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the far east, via Chelyabinsk and Ekaterinburg in the Urals, Volgograd and Voronezh in the south, the Siberian cities of Tomsk and Irkutsk, even Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Arctic.
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[1] Dvizhenie po spirali: politicheskaia sistema Rossii v riadu drugikh politicheskikh sistem (Ves Mir, 2010).
[2] I.B. Tauris, 338 pp., £20, March, 978 1 78076 016 2.
[3] Aleksei Navalnyi: Groza zhulikov i vorov, edited by Konstantin Voronkov (Eksmo, 224 pp., 246 roubles, February, 978 5 699 53227 8).
[4] Masha Gessen’s The Man without a Face, to be published on 1 March, may produce further revelations.
Vol. 34 No. 4 · 23 February 2012 » Tony Wood » ‘There is no alternative’
pages 11-14 | 5612 words