Nick Ottens

An article about the protests in Russia published at Foreign Policy today tells you all, I think, you need to know about the organization and cohesiveness of this “movement.”

Anarchists clustered by the gay activists, themselves within spitting distance from the radical young communists. Their elderly counterparts, with fur hats and voluminous, unkempt eyebrows (“You tell America,” one of them, an 83-year-old World War II veteran, said, looking at my press badge, “that Russia will never be its colony!”) were also nearby, flanked by the wry and rowdy hipsters from Leprozorium (“Leper Colony”), a closed and harshly meritocratic web forum famous for cultivating some of the Russian internet’s stickiest memes.

So we have die hard communists joining forces with bored hipsters trying to oust Vladimir Putin and his cabal of oligarchs while tens of millions of Russians sit at home watching wondering whether these people don’t have anything more important to do.

All around these islands was a sea of grandmothers, of the middle-aged, of the well-heeled, the more modestly compensated, and, of course, the office plankton.

Winds of change? I think not.