Abai and now there

On May 8, in Moscow, on the monument to the monument to the Kazakh poet Abay Kunanbaev, an opposition camp was spontaneously organized by the monument to the monument. Representatives of various views came here, hundreds of people argued every day about politics, gave poetry and lectures, played the guitar, spent the night in sleeping bags ... This new form of self -organization for the country and the resistance campaign went down in history as “Occupyabay”. In the early morning of May 16, Okupayabai was dispersed by the police. The author of The New Times recalls freedom and unity in a single area of ​​the capital, about what these feelings turned out six months later

Occupayabay was a place where one could say and do what I wanted

In May, everyone wrote columns - even those who did not know how to do this, and did not like. For example, I.

This was then time: I wanted to speak out, emphasize, cast in granite, shout, insert my five kopecks clamped in a sweaty fist.

This fist, forgive me for the idiotic pathos, was unclenched at a rally on May 6, when the crowd fought with riot police on an equal footing in Bolotnaya Square and it was clear who was “red” and who was “white”, and where the good is, and where, his mother, evil.

After the fight was over, there was nothing to wave: on May 7, a street protest, a polite front, generously decorated with white ribbons, moved from squares into squares.

The change of places was preceded by “Exile from the“ Jean-Jacques ”: Boskhovsky’s painting-the fragile Lev Semenovich Rubinstein, whom riot police were dragged from unfinished coffee into a crowded carrier. Those who managed to escape, with an inconsistent crowd go along the Nikitsky Boulevard, then to be near the monument to the poet Abay Kunanbaev in pure ponds.

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People who came to clean seven days, I now see in one place - in the Basmanny court. They arrest those who, according to the investigation, took part in the riots in Bolotnaya Square

“In the interval was the night of those that should be called marvelous: at the monument to the heroes of Plevna with laid out plaid, brand new polyurethane rugs, two -liter bottles of water. They drove on bicycles and scooters; they wrote from iPhones on Twitter, this city was ours, and it was, without any doubt, it was excellent.

Why did clean ponds choose? The activist of the RSD Isabelle Magkoeva claims that this thought occurred to her: “There was a concert of veterans, and from the monument to the heroes of the Plevna quickly squeezed out. It seemed to me that on pure ponds, where old people and children walk, no one would touch us. ” The camp on pure ponds lasted a week; I came there for three days in a row and was touched by everything that I saw. I liked the anarchists who followed the kitchen. And these "green", which removed garbage! Nationalists did not like it, but you can tolerate them, we all fight against a common enemy - well, this, this, three times crowned, entered the Kremlin on a white armored horse.

Here, Boris Kupriyanov and Tamara Eidelman, and Ilyash Yashin, stood in the crowd at the Abay monument, and his words was handed over to the chain gathered around the crowd. I'm trying to remember what he was saying, and I can’t. Although some set of postcards in my head remained: Ksenia Sobchak brings pies and fruit drinks to the camp, pensioners take out crumpled ten-rubles from pockets for juice, blogger Timur Khorev clears more in the crowd-he wants to choose a convenient point for his tweettry reports.

My friend and I are sitting on the lawn, playing Dixit. Her son spent the night in the camp for a couple of days, she is happy: a good company, all from school No. 57, quite decent guys. After a couple of days, when the riot police displaced the camp, I wrote in the magazine “Big City” the column “Goodbye, Abay” with the following words: “It was the only place in the city, except, probably, your kitchen, where you could say and do exactly what I wanted.” Hands would tear off for such words.

What have we achieved in these seven days? The correct answer is nothing. Journalist Olesya Gerasimenko-in my opinion, the only one then wrote a very correct thing on the Snob portal: “Sitting in a secluded corner of the Boulevard Ring creates a dangerous illusion of victory. No, you have not achieved from the authorities compliance with the right to freedom of assembly. Check this by looking on May 31 on the Triumphal Square. No, you have not achieved from the authorities to comply with the right to freedom of utterance. Check this by skipping several political slogans. ” Everything is so.

December 2012. The investigation in the “swamp case” has been completed, the court will begin soon. The State Duma adopted several idiotic laws.

I call Isabelle Magkoeva, I want to ask her one question: what have we achieved? “For a while, it seemed to us that there could be a unsmasive protest. Alas, everything collapsed: the camp dispersed the cops, and there were internal contradictions between us. ”

And then Magkoeva recalls with resentment how she, a month after the camp accelerate, was not allowed to perform at the rally on June 12 with the appeal from the Mopy Movement: “Who are you? We have more important people. ”

People who came to clean seven days, I now see in one place - in the Basmanny court. They arrest those who, according to the investigation, took part in the riots in Bolotnaya Square. Some are sitting in the hall-someone with inserted white ribbons, someone-without. Some of them will surely shout to the prosecutor: "Shame!"

Part - already behind bars.

Photo: Kirill Zykov