On Jan. 23, 2020, a week after the poisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny was arrested on his return to Moscow, Russia saw the widest nationwide protest in its recent history. Defying bitter temperatures and various flavors of “internal troops” (the authorities refused to authorize the protest), some 200,000 people across 125 cities and towns, many with no previous history of protesting, took to the streets to demand Navalny’s release. “Let him out,” demonstrators chanted in my hometown of Krasnodar, the capital of Russia’s largest agrarian region and a conservative stronghold. “One for all, and all for one.”
The scene was striking. It is not that Russia ever lacked protests, of course. In a country with deficient institutions, taking to the streets is one of the few ways to establish dialogue with power. The Soviet Union, for example, was birthed in the revolutionary protests of 1905 and 1917 and collapsed following protests against an anti-democratic coup in 1991. In between, the repressive machine, operated by state security services, couldn’t quash everything. Peasants rebelled against forced requisitions of war communism. Workers protested for better living conditions. Dissidents demonstrated against Soviet expansionism and human rights violations. Those eruptions, all violently suppressed and kept secret, formed a long, unbroken chain. Soviet citizens learned about them through hearsay or “enemy voices,” as Radio Liberty and Voice of America were labeled.
