To me, some of the most inspiring members of this younger generation were young activists affiliated with the organizations Shto Delat? (What’s to Be Done?) and Vpered (Forward). Shto Delat? was something like an activist think tank, and Vpered aligned itself with workers’ causes throughout Russia and, to some extent, led the far left of the Kremlin opposition in the country.
A friend put me in touch with Oleg, who had become something of a celebrity among the student left the year before when he led the sociology students’ protests at Moscow State University, which is essentially Russia’s Harvard. We agreed to meet one afternoon at Patriarch Ponds in the centre of Moscow.
Oleg was about five foot five, with a student’s shaggy blond haircut. His friend and Shto Delat? colleague Oksana joined him. She wore a wide black skirt and a baby-fist-sized crystal around her neck that matched her purple blouse. She had long, straw-like red hair.
They sat on the embankment at Patriarch Ponds sipping red wine from a box. I joined them, and one of the first questions Oksana asked was how to say swan in English. I told her. And then I asked what kind of ducks these were.
“I’ve never in my life seen golden ducks like that,” I said.
“I’ve also never seen them,” Oleg said. “Maybe it is some kind of reaction from the pollution in the water.”
Then they suggested we go have something to eat, and since they were poor leftists, we went to Oksana’s apartment, where they prepared macaroni and cheese by boiling pasta and melting cheese over it. Her bookshelves were packed with philosophy in French and English, as well as a prized collection of Hegel in German.
Oleg clanked the fork against his teeth with every bite of macaroni and cheese. He wedged the utensil into his mouth and then pried it out, making a scissoring sound. He was twenty-two years old.
The Moscow State students revolted, according to Oleg, because “everything is infected by political and nationalist thought.” For example, he explained, the rektor of the most prestigious university in the country would say in front of classes: “As a sociologist, I can tell you it is scientific truth that Jews are greedy.”
When Oleg was seventeen, he had his first formative run-in with the police. He wasn’t doing anything political. He and some friends went to Tver’, about two hours from Moscow. They were standing around, drinking some wine, and one of them happened to have a pocket knife. The cops said, “Give us all your money if you don’t want to have a problem.”
Oksana told me that her next book—she was a philosopher—would concern human relationships with animals. She stretched her black cat in her lap. “Derrida said that a cat needs only one word to accomplish everything. Meow.”
Later, we went to the park in front of the circus at Tsvetnoy Bulvar. Oleg didn’t want to take a cab. Too bourgeois. He preferred the subway, but Oksana didn’t like the subway. “It’s underground,” she said.
“It’s a very proletarian form of transport,” Oleg said. The proletarian argument won out.
When we got there, we stood near the clown statues. We drank beer. The young Moscow leftists slowly began to arrive.
Oksana told us about her friend’s theory that the problem with the LGBT movement is that it’s desexualized. She added that this is a Deleuzian construction. Oksana tried to represent her friend’s views: “He believes that sex is bourgeois and you can only truly critique it when you are outside of the grip of sexuality.”
Mitya, chubby with a shaggy beard, explained to me that he was not enrolled in any university because he was self-educating. He asked if I would join them at the protest for workers at a car factory in a few days, and I said I would.
Visibly shaken, Oleg’s girlfriend arrived. Someone asked her what was wrong and she said she had just come from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.
I told them I’d been travelling all over Russia. I had been to more places in Russia than all of them combined, most of whom had never left the Moscow region.
“Can you tell us something about our country?” Mitya asked, laughing.
I chose the anecdote about arriving on the remote end of the island of Olkhon, around six hours north of Irkutsk. We pulled into a small village on the banks of Baikal, and the first thing we saw was a huge yellow banner with large lettering that said Internet café.
When my arrangement to stay at a friend’s place fell through, Oleg invited me to stay the night. His grandparents, whom he lived with, were out of town at their dacha. It was an old intellectuals’ apartment: the books of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Dreiser, a book of prints by Rubens, a photo of Oleg as a teen looking dangerous and pissed off, paintings on every inch of wallpaper-covered wall surface—still lifes featuring cognac, port wine, a bowl of cherries, flowers.
We drank Chilean red wine and Oleg and his girlfriend smoked. She ate corn directly from the can and chased it with grapefruit juice. She had calmed down as the immediacy of von Trier’s vision wore off.
Oleg loathed the opposition party fronted by chess champion Garry Kasparov. “They are very elitist and aim to take political power. Vpered does not want to capture political power, but Another Russia is involved in the big sphere of politics. They only want to capture power. They don’t want to help students, teachers, workers, people. They are very good guys. They believe their ideas are very good and their ideals are very good, but it’s also Russian politics.” He was suspicious of personal political aims under the cloak of any politician, whether with the Kremlin or the opposition. There was not a single candidate in Russian politics whom Oleg would support.
The next day, Oleg took me to meet Ilya Budraitskis, the spokesman for Vpered, at a Moscow bar for artist types that’s always dense with smoke.
Ilya was wearing a Magic the Gathering hoodie, which, I came to understand, was his de facto uniform. When he wasn’t reading Marxist political tracts, he liked Roberto Bolaño. His musical hero was Johnny Cash. Of Lithuanian descent, he held a degree in history and worked as a history teacher at several Moscow schools, including the prestigious Intellectual School.
Ilya told me about the moment of his radicalization. His parents, staunch democrats, had taken part in the defence of the White House against an attempted Communist coup in 1991. His mother was an editor in a publishing house and his father an engineer in a chemical institute. Two months later, they were both out of work, and their family spent the nineties eating potatoes for dinner every night.
But new and exotic stores began opening in Moscow. Class started to show on the streets and in the schools. “To be cool, you needed colourful Chinese dress with an image of Mickey Mouse on it,” Ilya said. But he had only one tattered Romanian suit that he wore to school every day. Once, on the way home from school, he stopped in a fancy candy shop called Sweet Sweet Way on Tverskaya. He was transfixed by the sweet sweets. But the security guard gruffly kicked him out, swore at him. Told him to fuck off in his Romanian suit. “This was the starting point of my radicalization,” he said. “It had no theoretical base at all, just hatred of the rich.”
A few years later, in 1997 at the age of fifteen, Ilya joined his first political group, the Socialist Resistance.
Ilya’s story in some ways was not all that different from Igor’s. The two were almost exactly the same age. Ilya’s parents were also approached by school officials for bribes. If a student wanted good marks, the teacher required gifts, which sickened his idealistic parents. “To study normally, you or your family needed to participate in this corrupt system,” he said.
Oleg and Ilya had worked together on the campaign against the sociology department faculty at Moscow State University, a campaign that they both agreed had been a failure. They had tried to force the university, in particular a powerful member of the sociology faculty, to renovate the curriculum, which was outdated and rife with right-wing ideology and bigotry. Instead of discussion about sociology as a science, Oleg and his fellow students sat through lectures about how greed was a genetic trait of Jews and the death penalty was righteous and just and should be implemented in Russia.
Their campaign received some media attention, but ultimately the handful of student protesters flunked out or left the university, including Oleg.
“The main weakness,” Oleg said of their efforts, “was the passivity of the majority of the students versus the small minority involved.”
It’s a sound and obvious point: the voice of many is simply louder than the voice of a few. But this was also the main weakness afflicting the larger anti-Kremlin protest movement in Russia.
The Russian protest scene, if you could call it that, was absurdist theatre prior to December 2011. Ilya explained that, long before the start of an action, a typical opposition demonstration in Moscow would be surrounded by steel fencing. A metal detector run by the police would be stationed at the entrance, and the police and special forces officers assigned for security often outnumbered the protesters.
Basically, such actions afforded protesters the opportunity to communicate their messages to themselves, the media, and the police, who were there to ensure they couldn’t communicate their messages to anyone else. Political protests in Russia were, as much as anything, performances for the West—video clips and sound bites to air on the foreign media.
Ilya likened the existence of the Russian opposition then to Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. “Every three months they organize a March of Disagreement,” he said. “Every three months they apply for a permit. Every three months they’re refused. Every three months they come out anyway, just to prove that they still exist. The only point of these actions is to show that the opposition still exists.”
At the end of that first conversation with Ilya in 2009, I asked him where he saw himself in five years. He wasn’t sure about himself personally, but prognosticated about Russia’s future. “What I can tell you for sure is that in five years this society will change. In what way, I’m not sure.” At the time, I took it as the idealism of a young revolutionary. Now, he sounds like a prophet.
We left the artists’ bar, and as we walked past a McDonald’s, Ilya said, “McDonald’s is popular here because of its bathroom. People all over the city go there to pee.”
Oleg took out his lighter. He fumbled with it and it dropped, exploding when it hit the ground. The sound was about what you’d expect from a good firecracker. The three of us stood there in shock, each trying to process what had just happened. I have seen thousands of lighters fall to the ground and never once seen one explode. A freak accident. Oleg seemed reluctant to reach down for it. “Wow,” he said. “I am a real extremist!”