Process: curtain

Survery of the parties The Russian leadership underestimated the protest potential accumulated after the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Plato Lebedev. In the morning, before the reading of the sentence, only the traffic cops guarded the building of the Meshchansky court, and the bus with riot police and the fire truck stood in the yard. And when the riot police went out to smoke, a man in civilian clothes gallantly asked them to escape from the public: "Gentlemen, go inside."

The next day no one was hiding. On the contrary, the authorities demonstrated its strength: Kalanchevskaya street was blocked by metal fences, the tram was canceled, the trunk of cars were searched, and bags and passports were watched at pedestrians, after which they passed through the scope-metallists. This framework included only those who carry posters such as “Putin, protect us from Khodorkovsky”, and people in T -shirts “Khodorkovsky, Gohome” immediately detained riot police. Colonels commanded the operation. One followed the framework, the other was chasing a newsweeki photojournalist nearly defeated his camera, and the third abducted his editorial certificate.

So the authorities were forced by a small group of people who the day before arranged a small Maidan near the trial. And although Khodorkovsky himself six months ago said in an interview with Newsweek that he did not want to be a hero, he nevertheless turned into a symbol, banner and instrument for combating the regime. The last time this happened with the physicist Andrei Sakharov, uniting the Communists and non -partisans. The oilman Khodorkovsky rallied the fragmented groups of the opposition around him, and the authorities itself handed it to this banner.

The application for a picket in support of Khodorkovsky was submitted by a group of citizens who call themselves a public group “Conscience”. They held pickets since April last year, but at the Khodorkovsky press center they are considered weakmuses. They were allowed to bring 50 people with them, but it came twenty more times.

This is not counting journalists.

“Ivanovich, they promised us a large hall,” the press of a man of an unknown profession, who took the lucky ones to his taste.

“Well, I don’t know what they promised to you there, if only the building is disassembled ...

In the crowd of journalists, the film star Renat Litvinov was visible, who decided to make Khodorkovsky the hero of her film. She had a Nikon camera in her hands, a bottle of kefir Danon and a mobile phone. “And I need to go there,” the star explained offendedly to someone on the phone. There was still an old woman with strips there: “I am also a victim of the regime. They evict me from the apartment. "

From the very first words, Judge Irina Kolesnikova became clear that Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and Kraynov were found guilty. Around the same time, they began to shout on the street: “Freedom!” Khodorkovsky these cries were perfectly audible. “He slowly asked me: when you come out, thank them,” the human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva later recalled.

Although at first they shouted unfriendly. Taymuraz Bestaev was poured for everyone.

“I'm a disabled person of the first group,” he cried out to reporters. “I have been from Tbilisi, I have been living in Moscow since 1971.” I came to support the political prisoner Khodorkovsky. In general, wherever I go there against Putin, I’ll go there.

At two in the afternoon, metal fences were brought in, one of which was dropped on a television porter during unloading. They put up a chain of police officers who shuddered when the picketers burst balloons. “Khodorkovsky’s press center” distributed paraphernalia to the right and left, so even two homeless people from three stations went. The flags of the ATP, “Yabloko”, the anti -Putin defense movement, created by young apple trees based on the Ukrainian “Pores”, and the flags of two Russian “pores” were fluttered. There were even Andreevsky flags with whom wrestlers with a Masonic conspiracy came out. The orange flags of the “our choice” Irina Khakamada caught the eye most of all, and Hakamada herself defiled a picket in an orange scarf. Almost in full force was the “Committee-2008” led by Grossmaster Harry Kasparov, who gave a press conference for three hours, easily moving from English to Russian and back.

The climax came about twenty minutes before the end of the picket, when the participants began to drive away on the trams or on personal cars, sticking out flags or shirts and a loud signal. It was then that all broke through. All together picked up “Down with the regime”, and when a chic “Hammer” broke through the soil slogan, it seemed that for some twenty minutes on a patch of the Meshchansky court, everyone suddenly became a little Ukrainians.

This could not continue for a long time. At two o'clock in the afternoon, the police, until then only spat on the asphalt with sounds “Down with the mode”, were politely offered to disperse through Megaphone. The leader of the “defense” Ilya Yashin climbed onto the shoulders of his comrades: “Now they will disperse us, but we are not diverge anywhere.”

He was taken first, then the deputy chairman of Yabloko, Sergei Mitrokhin. “Take it out of Kasparov,” the colonel completely dispersed.

One riot police grabbed the grandmaster by the neck, and then three Kasparov’s guards picked him up and ran away with him on a gas station in two hundred meters, where Kasparov continued the press conference. Schoolgirl Nastya Karimova from the ATP heartily quoted the 31st article of the Constitution about the right to rallies and pickets. She was scared. A frightened smile also froze on Kasparov's face. “Kasparova to the presidency!” - Disabled Bestaev yelled. Everyone liked this idea. Khodorkovsky was no longer remembered. Everyone had only one desire - to focus with Putin's presidency.

The organizers of the action against Khodorkovsky and those who were against Putin were more cunning - they made a picket until the end of the working week. As a result, the next four days of the surroundings of the Meshchansky court not a revolutionary Kyiv, but a counter -revolutionary Donetsk or even counter -terrorism formidable: checkpoints, army trucks, labidors, gas masks in policemen bags and non -working mobile communications.

Private participants in the picket, all as one refused to introduce themselves and hid their faces from cameras with the slogans “Khodorkovsky - there is no money smells of blood” and “a thief should sit in prison”. When, on the second attempt, I still managed to get to them, at first they said that they learned about the picket in the “arguments and facts” and painted posters themselves.

“Enjoy them for the fence,” the brigadier in red pants commanded in time.

“Glorko, they will tear,” they were puffed out to object to her.

- What to regret, tomorrow will give new ones.

“And you said, drew it yourself,” I turned up. “Why is it not true to say?”

“True, is it not true - what is your business?”

Why was it so to torment everyone? If the verdict reading could still be explained for three hours a day, they read it longer, the weaker the attention to the fate of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, the harsh regime around the trial is incomprehensible. Has the orange threat so scared?

“Now, of course, there is no such threat yet,” says political scientist Alexei Makarkin, “but it touched the future.” If we recall Ukraine, then the Orange Revolution there began with youth shares of protests related to the murder of [journalist George] Gongadze. It is potentially possible with us, so the authorities behave so. ”

Twenty minutes of unanimous buzzing at the Meshchansky Court is one of the first joint enterprises to the opposition. And the allies of the authorities in the fight against an orange threat can become, as Makarkin believes, a parliamentary opposition, so Putin spent more than three hours a conversation in the Kremlin with the leaders of the factions, with which Dmitry Rogozin and Gennady Zyuganov came out inspired.

True, police measures against street opposition can also give the reverse result-records have already appeared in the Internet diarrhea confirming that the young people will not stop pickets from the Meshchansky court.