On Friday afternoon, Denis Terekhov gathered together his employees for an impromptu staff meeting.
They were workaholics in their 20s — ‘office plankton’, as they are sometimes called here — punchy from an apocalypse-themed office party, some headed for winter vacations in Egypt and Turkey. But Terekhov had another order of business. Watch yourself, he told them, if you choose to attend Saturday’s antigovernment protest.
“Any suggestions about how to behave in prison?” someone asked, and everyone laughed. As they headed back to their work stations, the information technology director called out, “Attorneys’ phone numbers will be distributed separately!” Terekhov was not laughing. “Call me if something happens,” he said, and the meeting was over.
A mystery has been unfolding here over the past month, and office plankton are in the middle of it. A critical mass of young Russians decided this month they had the power to alter the course of political events. They organised outside the channels of mainstream politics and took the country’s leadership by surprise, as other crowds have done this year in Israel, India, Spain and the United States.
No one can say how strong this burst of citizen activism would prove to be — whether it can recreate the crowd of 50,000 that gathered in Moscow on December 10, let alone serve as the foundation of a permanent political force. But an impulse was released after December’s parliamentary elections, which were widely discredited as fraudulent. It has rippled out through Russia’s emerging middle class — wired, sophisticated urbanites like Terekhov’s employees — many of whom have decided, quite suddenly, that a political system they have long tolerated is intolerable.
“I did not think for a second that people like me would show up,” said Yuliya Fotchenko, an account director. “There are many of us in this country — really, there are many of us. They feel something is not right. They feel they’ve been cheated. They don’t trust anyone, and they want to leave the country.
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“When those people started to hear the call to come out,” she said, “that is when the fracture occurred.”
A look at the changes in one office over the past month offers a glimpse into how this mood developed into the most serious challenge the Kremlin has faced since Vladimir V Putin won his first term as president more than 10 years ago.
The 80 employees of the company, an internet marketing and communications firm called Social Networks Agency, “use Twitter, Facebook, text-message each other 100 times a day,” like to “hang out in cool places, showing off their Vespas,” and, in many cases, couldn’t care less about who is in the Kremlin, said the information technology director, Dmitri Pitirimov.
On December 5, the police detained a project manager named Mikhail Kazakov, known to his co-workers by his nickname, Panda. Kazakov, is a languid 27-year-old in skinny jeans, so disgusted with the state of Russian politics that he swore off voting eight years ago. He is equally skeptical of “opposition ideas,” and happened to be leaving the Red Espresso Bar with a cup of coffee that night and found himself engulfed in a crowd that had gathered to protest election violations.
Kazakov explained he was a pedestrian, but the police ordered him to set down his coffee on the sidewalk and pushed him onto a bus. He was charged with “actively resisting” the authorities.
“There was some slight feeling of despair, because Misha was arrested for nothing,” said Irina Lukyanovich, a copy editor. “There was a feeling that we were all unprotected.” Terekhov, who used corporate funds to hire a lawyer for Kazakov, sat down the same day to write a newspaper column, identifying himself as a taxpaying businessman who is a natural ally of the system.
“I am an opponent of populist rhetoric, the existing economic course suits me, and I am happy to explain to anyone that for the average entrepreneur, United Russia is better than the Communist Party,” he wrote. “I am also an opponent of revolution: I have an elderly mother and a young daughter. But, please, can you in return show a little respect to me, to my workers, and to common sense?”
Until now, they have occupied a neutral position in Russian politics, this group. Of 80 employees, only one admitted to voting for United Russia, Pitirimov said. And, only one routinely participated in anti-Kremlin demonstrations, hesitating to invite his co-workers since, as he put it, “these events often end with detentions and clubs.”
In December, this changed with amazing speed. The night after Kazakov was detained, Lukyanovich left work and stood on the edge of a crowd that had gathered for the second time to protest violations in the parliamentary campaign. She was just watching, like a swimmer dipping her toe in the water. It was the closest she had been to a protest in her 23 years, she said.
“It is difficult to say what in particular brought me to the idea that it was worth taking part,” she said. “I looked at it and realised it was not as scary as I thought, and probably it was then that I decided I would attend the next rally.”
That opportunity arose four days later, when a crowd of about 50,000 people was organised via a Facebook page. Terekhov expected five or six of his employees to attend, and was shocked to discover the number was far higher, more like 20 or 25. Fotchenko, his account manager, went because “the truth is, it was interesting to see what was happening.”
When she got there, she said, “my consciousness was turned upside down.” Her emotions were so powerful, she said, she was afraid to share them on Twitter lest she come off as “histrionic.” “I am 35, and this has happened to me for the first time,” she said. “I thought, probably not everything has been lost.”
Most of her co-workers are keeping their distance, but they too, seem to be scanning the horizon for political alternatives. Kazakov, whose detention had infuriated his co-workers, remains resolutely skeptical of the whole movement — though, “understanding that this was an event on a national scale,” he got a table at a restaurant close enough to the Bolotnaya Square event so that he could watch the crowd take shape.
A signal change has occurred already: Russia’s opposition movement is the realm of the young. Planning meetings, once held in the musty domain of perestroika-era dissidents, are now convened at Moscow’s most fashionable addresses, like the rehabilitated Red October chocolate factory. In a city obsessed with style, protest has become stylish.
Terekhov has observed this with some anxiety. He has already had a short career in opposition politics, and it left him disillusioned. It frightens him to see his employees surge forward joyfully into a movement that seeks to challenge the Kremlin. They do not understand, he said, “that revolution is not a game.”
“No one understands the seriousness of what has happened,” he said. “Now it is fashionable to go to demonstrations. They are taking a risk without fully understanding the risk which exists.” So, he gathered them together on Friday. He told them not to fight with the riot police, and that if the authorities begin to disperse the rally forcibly, to “run to the nearest courtyard.” On the question of whether they should go, he remained silent.
© 2011 The New York Times News Service