The Civil Archipelago, David Remnick, New Yorker, December 19, 2011
How Far Can the Resistance to Vladimir Putin Go?

It’s easy to mock Russia’s “Democratic” system.  But … y’know… this ad … Vote for Putin’s Party, why don’tcha?… we’ve seen dumber, haven’t we?
We oughta mock Italy’s just as fervently.  Berlusconi and all that… owns 90 percent of Italian media, or something like that.

There are a few take-aways from this New Yorker piece.  One, I already knew this, but some of the key big name figures of the “Civil Archipelago” aren’t entirely sympathetic.  Like, Reformist for the Kleptocracy of the 1990s as opposed to the Putin era.  This is somewhat typical — I always need to note that the presidential candidate for Iran’s “Green Revolution” was a project of the Iranian Revolution.

The more interesting of the movements … “Civil Archipelago” as David Remnick terms it… is kind of aburdly… well, .

The streets—the highways, the boulevards, and the crooked lanes of Moscow—are, in fact, one of the unlikely stages of civil protest in Putin’s Russia. Kutuzovsky Prospect is one of the main avenues on which government officials and the super-rich commute between the center of town and the multimillion-dollar estates of Rublyovka. Out in those monied woods are exquisite restaurants, spas, and showrooms for Bentley, Ferrari, Mercedes, and Maserati. Traffic is horrendous from morning till night. And so officials and the well-connected circumvent the halted condition of mortals by obtaining flashing blue lights for the tops of their cars, a signal that forces everyone to get out of the way, as if for an ambulance. The official blue flashers, called migalki, are often acquired through bribes. And the fantastically reckless driving that goes along with them leads to constant accidents—invariably with much smaller, more vulnerable, civilian automobiles.
Nothing could be more maddening, especially for Russian men, who see their cars as a sign of making it. To be pulled over or to be overtaken is humiliating. Thanks to YouTube and the tactics of flash mobs, a group of furious road warriors started putting blue plastic children’s buckets on their cars—a spontaneous movement that became known as the Society of Blue Buckets. When members discovered that Nikita Mikhailkov, a well-known film director, had a car with a migalka, they lambasted him online.
Ivan Alexeyev, a.k.a. Noize MC, is a hugely famous twenty-six-year-old hip-hop artist in Russia who made much of his reputation rebelling against the entitled class of limo riders. Alexeyev grew up near Smolensk, listening to Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Run-DMC. He went to Moscow for college, to study computer science, and he formed his band there, with classmates.
Last year, while he was on tour in the Russian Far East, he heard about an accident near Gagarin Square, in Moscow: a Mercedes bearing a vice-president of one of the major Russian oil companies, Lukoil, smashed into a Citroën, killing two women, including the sister of one of Alexeyev’s friends. The police blamed the driver of the Citroën, but eyewitnesses said that the executive’s car had been driving in the wrong lane, to avoid traffic.
That night, in Vladivostok, Alexeyev couldn’t sleep, and he wrote a howl of outrage, called “Mercedes S666.” The song, and the “South Park”-style video that went with it, was a big hit on the Internet. “Right away, a lot of political parties tried to use it for their aims,” Alexeyev told me. “It feels like you always have to choose one or the other, and I don’t want to choose.”
Alexeyev has performed songs mocking Russian skinheads and Nashi, the pro-Putin youth group. At a concert in the city of Volgograd, last July, he sang a song about police corruption called “Smoke Bamboo” and made remarks from the stage mocking the Volgograd police for being aggressive. “To be honest, my behavior wasn’t very good, but their reaction was even worse,” Alexeyev told me. He was arrested and jailed for ten days.

Cutting around pieces of symbolism, if tangeantal to the core political problems.

Compare the Cutting and splicing of Media Censorship, and the items that gained the name “Orwellian”, Soviet and Putin-ish:

A week after the incident at the Olympic arena, I paid a call on Putin’s redoubtable spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. Tall and mustachioed, Peskov is a kind of ideal projection of his man; he is wised-up, worldly, professional, and subtly forbidding. When he lies, he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know. The smile is also meant to convey another message to foreign visitors: So, we’re cynical. And you’re not?
When I asked Peskov about the jeering, he unspooled a convoluted hypothesis about how the crowd might have been reacting to the image of Monson being helped to the locker room: “We called him after that, and he said it’s normal that in America when a beaten guy is leaving the hall they often boo.” Peskov, being as skillful and as modern as the regime he serves, then switched from bald-faced nonsense to allowing at least part of the truth. “I also heard some voices, three or four men,” he said. “Someone really shouted out, ‘Putin, go away!’ ”
When I asked why state television altered the sound for replays, he said, “They switched off the noise.”
Yes, but why? I said.
“I don’t know exactly,” Peskov replied. “That was the choice of the editor.” Peskov couldn’t help smiling at this specimen of disingenuousness. And why did Putin cancel an appointment two nights later to attend an anti-drug concert in St. Petersburg? Instead, the Kremlin sent a deputy prime minister, Dmitri Kozak, to represent United Russia, and so it was poor Kozak who endured the catcalls. “Putin wasn’t supposed to go,” Peskov said. “Trust me.”

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