ELLEN BARRY Three weeks ago,when this city was bracing for the first in a series of large anti-government protests,some commentators dipped into the well of Russian history,when czars and crowds collided in a blur of sabres,poleaxes,cavalry charges and masses of commoners holding icons over their heads. In the old stories,crowds are a brutal,elemental force,and it is no wonder that Russian rulers sought to suppress them. They are part of the Kremlins collective memory,and they hang over the protests today. Peter the Great,at 10,newly declared the czar,cowered with his mother while rioting guardsmen impaled his relatives on spears. Czar Alexis came out to address petitioners and found himself engulfed,seized by the buttons of his caftan. Czar Nicholas II saw his troops fire on 8,000 workers who came to the Winter Palace in 1905 to ask for better working conditions. The attack so scandalised the circles around Nicholas that he adopted the reforms the protesters had demanded,like the creation of a parliament. When new protests welled up 12 years later,he decided to take a different tack,allowing women and children to rally peacefully over a shortage of black bread. But those protests spread like brushfire,to strikers and to troops who refused to fire on them. A week after the first sanctioned rally,Nicholas was forced to abdicate the throne. The Soviet premiers and general secretaries have taken his experience to heart: the best way to deal with mass demonstrations,they concluded,was to prevent them from happening. Vladimir V Putin adopted a similar nip-it-in-the-bud approach,though for the most part he avoided using violence. Richard E Pipes,a longtime scholar of Russian history at Harvard,said Putin had learned his history well. If I were in charge I would first of all reform the government, Pipes said. If I did not want to do that,I would forbid the demonstrations and I would arrest anyone who did not comply. Echoes of this theory could be heard after the December 4 parliamentary elections,when it became clear that young Russians were ready to protest in greater numbers than any time since Putins rise to power in 2000. The Kremlin-friendly novelist Sergei Minaev warned protesters that if they died there,even their close friends would forget the cause for which they had laid down their lives. To anyone who has spent time in Putins Russia,the sight that unfolded on Bolotnaya Square on December 10 came as an almost physical shock. It has been so long since Russians went out in the streets in large numbers demanding political change that the crowdan estimated 50,000 people,calmly watched over by the policeresembled a natural wonder. People in the crowd were peering around at each other. They were neither wild-eyed nor downtrodden. They did not smell of fear or aggression. The critical mass of middle-class professionals that has existed on the Internet for years was suddenly a physical fact,close enough to feel the body heat. It seemed like the birth of a new organism. Nothing scary happened that day,or at a repeat demonstration on December 24,when the crowd was significantly larger. Yevgeny S Gontmakher,an economist who has advised the government on social unrest,said that Russian leaders had no formula for dealing with protesters whose demands cannot be addressed with money. That it has appeared now is a sign that Russia is becoming a Western country,in its own way. Its public politics, Gontmakher said. I think this is happening for the first time in Russia. It suggests that Russia has to choose a European path. It may be that these latest protests have marked a change in the relationship between the Kremlin and crowds. After an initial burst of acid hostility,Putin and his officials began to speak of the protesters. Last week,Vladislav Y Surkovthe Kremlin official who for 10 years made it his business to stifle any street politics that might grow into a threat to Putin said the protesters at Bolotnaya represented the best part of our society,or,more accurately,the most productive part. Still,the tug of history is strong in the Kremlin. Some contend that the basic structure of Russian society has changed little. But this much is clear: Russians are hurtling toward somethingsomething as old as confrontation,or something as new as dialogue.
