Moscow, December 2011: people take to the streets in response to parliamentary election falsifications. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 misha maslennikov. Some rights reserved.With all the attention the media showered on the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, it’s easy to forget that two years earlier mass protests were rocking Moscow, not Kyiv. Naturally, you could argue that we remember Euromaidan not only because it was successful, but because it was closely followed by the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. If we ignore the 2011-2012 “White revolution” in Russia, it is only because it failed. Fair enough, but why did it fail?
The simple answer is that Vladimir Putin and his cronies suppressed the opposition and intimidated it into submission. While there is a lot of truth behind this argument, it only scratches the surface. How did the Kremlin manage to so effectively hobble its opponents? Who were its opponents exactly, and what flaws or weakness did they have which worked in the authorities’ favour?
The new edition of Marc Bennetts’ I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition goes a long way towards answering these questions. The years 2011-2013 were interesting times indeed, and I was fortunate to witness them. In spite of this, I feel lucky that I’ve never had to explain those days to outsiders. Where does one even begin?
