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I have a very low opinion of the United Russia party. The United Russia party is the party of corruption, it is the party of crooks and thieves.' I uttered these words in February 2011 live on Finam FM radio, and it instantly became a meme. Afterward, Yevgeny Fyodorov, a United Russia deputy who took offense, challenged me to a debate. This was something unprecedented for a member of Putin's party. I had come to love debates and, naturally, accepted the challenge. The debate was held on the same radio station, and when it ended, the host took a vote: 99 percent of listeners decided I was right. A second United Russia member soon sued me, claiming that my characterization of United Russia had caused him moral harm. The court disagreed, and Vedomosti, at that time still a daring newspaper, ran the headline 'Court Permits Calling United Russia the "Party of Crooks and Thieves."' It was great fun.
In my blog I asked for this phrase to be repeated as frequently as possible, and soon, if you started typing the words 'United Russia' into a search engine, the first suggestion would be 'party of crooks and thieves.' Elections to the State Duma were to be held in December 2011, and I wanted to ensure that the Kremlin's party gained as few votes as possible. The main slogan of our campaign was 'Vote for any party other than the party of crooks and thieves.' I conducted the campaign as usual, making use of the internet and our network of supporters.
As a result, United Russia ended up with a far lower share of the vote than it was expecting, and the Kremlin resorted to monstrous doctoring of the results. The ballot rigging was unprecedented at that time: busing fraudulent voters to multiple ballot stations, ballot stuffing, doctoring results sheets. Although United Russia still obtained a majority in the Duma, its machinations provoked the biggest wave of protests in our recent history.
A rally against ballot rigging had been planned in advance, because no one had any illusions that the elections would be fair. Scheduled for December 5, the day after the vote, it was organized by the Solidarity movement, which had been established by Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Vladimir Bukovsky. Yashin, my friend from the time of Youth Yabloko, invited me to attend, but at first I refused to go. Their position on the election had annoyed me: one section of their movement (Kasparov's) urged a boycott, another section (Nemtsov's) favored spoiling the ballots, and between the two of them they undermined my strategy of 'Vote for any party except United Russia.' Every voter mattered to me. When I saw the election results, however (in Moscow, United Russia obtained 46 percent of the vote, and in some polling stations as little as 20 percent; elsewhere 70 percent), and then videos of the ballot rigging, I could see I needed to attend. I wrote a post on my blog encouraging everyone to come to Chistye Prudy at 7:00 p.m. It was a Monday, and I had no great hopes of a huge turnout.
The Communists were going to hold a rally in Pushkin Square an hour earlier. (I gave them a mention in my post.) It was too late to combine the two protests, but I suggested that anyone who could should go to both. 'A hundred people came to the Communists,' Yashin texted me as I was on the metro on the way to Chistye Prudy. I reflected gloomily that not many more were likely to turn up at our event. Public rallies had not been a popular form of protest in recent years, as I had discovered only too painfully while trying to organize them with Yashin for Yabloko. I could see people were infuriated by the grotesque unfairness of the election, but I had little hope they would take to the streets.
I came out of the metro station and couldn't believe my eyes: there were several thousand people. The whole boulevard was jam-packed. I couldn't remember seeing anything like it.
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