During a protest in Tomsk on 26 March, the fifth-grader Gleb Tokmakov publicly proposed reforms to Russia’s political system. Image still via YouTube. Some rights reserved.
Russia's anti-corruption demonstrations on 26 March, which took place in over 80 towns across the country, have already been described as a “teenage protest”. This was the polite option, by the way: some referred to it as the “zit revolution”. Russian officialdom is still maintaining its stunned silence, pretending as if nothing happened last Sunday — or at least, nothing more than the Break in Spring festival, an initiative of the Moscow Mayor’s Office. Meanwhile, the most sophisticated of Russia’s state propagandists have already (and happily) taken up this simplistic image of events.
