Winter is Coming Read Online Free PDF

that it would have been unacceptably ill-mannered for Medvedev to earn a higher percentage than Putin—or for him to be taller than Putin.) Medvedev immediately named Putin his prime minister and the two men switched offices in a graceful pas de deux on the grave of Russian democracy. Four years later, Medvedev duly handed the presidency back to his master, having changed the constitution so Putin could now sit for two six-year terms. In the 2012 election even less effort was made to hide the fact that Russia had truly become a dictatorship once again.
    There were a few bumps in the road, however. Just three months before the presidential election on March 4, the largest political protests of the post-Soviet era had erupted spontaneously after the parliamentary elections were so blatantly rigged that it was too much for many to stomach. Over the next months, hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets, many chanting “Putin Must Go!” and “Russia Without Putin!”
    I frequently participated along with other opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov, but it was the surprising appearance of tens of thousands of typically apolitical and apathetic Muscovites in Bolotnaya Square on December 10 that gave us hope that something might be changing. Since 2005, I had been at the front of many marches where we had been outnumbered by the riot police by at least ten to one. On December 24, in Sakharov Prospekt, the odds were reversed at last. Standing before a sea of opposition flags uniting against corruption and Putin, who could not dream of a new future?
    But the momentum could not be maintained. Draconian new laws against the freedom of assembly were quickly passed, allowing for huge fines and criminalizing nonviolent protest. Many opposition leaders and members were harassed, arrested, and interrogated over their roles in organizing the protests. The Kremlin committed massive resources against the protests; the last mass demonstration on May 6, 2013, was brutally dispersed and led to the so-called Bolotnaya Square case that records show has involved more than thirteen thousand witness interviews and that led to dozens of protesters being sentenced to years in prison.
    At the same time, the Kremlin-controlled media began to intensify its portrayal of the protesters and opposition leaders as dangerous extremists and quite possibly traitors to the motherland. Not only would the revolution not be televised, the would-be revolutionaries had no access to television. There were still a few significant protests after Putin’s so-called election was announced, but it became clear to me in 2012 that democracy was truly dead in Russia. I could no longer envision a peaceful transition away from Putin. If he fell it would be messy and likely violent. After I was called several times to come in for one of the prosecutor’s special interviews—you go in as a witness and come out as a suspect, if you come out at all—I decided not to return to Russia in 2013.
    Here I would like to rewind and look again from outside of Russia. Oil price boom, propaganda, repression, and a compliant population notwithstanding, Putin could not have achieved what he did without considerable outside help. After all, it is not so easy to create a dictatorship in this day and age. Among other factors, global communication makes it difficult to prevent a country’s people from envying the rights and riches of their neighbors. This is one reason Putin has always done everything possible to support authoritarian regimes in Russia’s neighbors.
    The global trend toward democracy in the second half of the twenty-first century is one of the greatest achievements of humankind. Before World War II, a vast majority of the world’s democratic governments were found in Europe and the Americas. Samuel Huntington documented this “third wave” of democratization in his 1991 book of the same name, while Francis Fukuyama’s was memorably titled The