More mad than Vlad: Russia’s ultra-nationalist threat

‘Russia without Putin!’ was the cry of Muscovites who turned out to protest against Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency for a third term in December 2011. Crowds 100,000 strong chanted their opposition on Moscow’s Academician Sakharov Prospect – as symbolically named a venue as you could wish for – as riot police stood calmly by. There was anger in the crowd. But there was hope, too, not least because the massive protest was officially sanctioned. One after another, prominent opposition politicians such as Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny denounced Putin from a stage provided by the city authorities.

Today the memory of those protests seems to belong to a different age of Russia. Yashin and Navalny are in jail. Nemtsov was shot dead. Since the beginning of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, street protests by a single person, let alone 100,000, have become illegal. Since 24 February, some 16,000 people have been arrested for protesting – including one woman near Red Square who was detained for holding up a piece of paper reading ‘Two Words’ (implying Net Voine – No War), and another for brandishing a paper that was completely blank.