The coordinated rally on August 10 on Sakharov Avenue in Moscow confirms the growth of the protest in all respects – numbers, topics, geography – even when potential political leaders of the protest are isolated. The fact that the country's leadership has not shown any kind of reaction to the developments may indicate both the lack of a strategy for response on the part of the authorities and an inadequate perception of what is happening as a whole – or rather both at once.

Having approved two rallies – on July 20 and August 10 – the authorities were given the opportunity to assess the evolution of the protest in Moscow. What began as local discontent with the refusal to admit opposition candidates to the elections to the city legislative assembly, three weeks later, following the brutal dispersal of uncoordinated protests that took place in the interim and the absurd criminal case of “mass riots”, has visibly grown into a much more universal discontent – in general, against state violence and for human dignity in its various manifestations. The departure of the topic of the refusal to admit the opposition and the elections to the Moscow City Duma from the foreground was evident in the speeches of many speakers at Sakharov, and the same conclusion can be made by studying the posters from the rally and its resolution. The street is still demanding the registration of independent candidates, but now also the cessation of criminal and administrative cases, the release of all those arrested in the case of “mass riots”, and an investigation into the violation of the law during the dispersal of demonstrations.

The blurring of the protest theme did not fragment the protest, but expanded its potential audience: people demonstrated their readiness to take to the streets not only for the candidate for deputy, but also for his beaten voter, not only against the restriction of electoral rights, but also for the right to peaceful assembly and other civil rights. According to the "White Counter", 22,400 people came out to the strictly "electoral" rally on July 20, and more than 50,000 came out to the "universal" rally on August 10, i.e. at least twice as many. In addition to Moscow, solidarity protests took place in 40 more cities in Russia, in St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Bryansk, Syktyvkar they were accompanied by detentions (in total, 352 people were detained across the country, 256 of them in Moscow, OVD-Info reported).

The next agreed rally has been announced by Moscow communists, but its agenda is unlikely to remain within the original: the moral claim underlying the conflict between citizens and the authorities – “stop lying!” – is potentially broader than the ideological one.

The rally on August 10 took place with an almost completely updated list of speakers. In part, this was a forced replacement: most of the politicians involved in one way or another in the Moscow City Duma election campaign are currently serving administrative arrests, but even those who remained free (like Lyubov Sobol - she, as the mother of a small child, cannot be arrested) were unable to speak (Sobol herself was detained before the rally began). Both on the podium and among the rally participants, there were many who came to the protest action for the first time, although the backbone was made up of those who already had protest experience, according to the results of a survey conducted outside the rally. Writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya and journalist Leonid Parfenov, the faces of the Bolotnaya protests seven years ago, spoke on the same stage as Face, IC3PEAK and Krovostok, while Yuri Dud and Oxxxymiron called on people to come to Sakharov. The new faces of the protest were those whose audience is young people aged 20-35. Unlike the protests of 2011-2012, the new protest celebrities do not claim the status of protest delegates. They only express the opinion of their generation, they are from it, but not above it, sharing with their peers the demand for honesty and respect.

The rally on Sakharov, like the uncoordinated actions before it, did not provoke any reaction from the country's leadership: the president seems to be demonstratively ignoring the Moscow events, spending time either in a bathyscaphe chamber or behind the wheel of a bike. Federal TV channels habitually present the Moscow protests as a clown show of marginalized people, reporting that they involve "gypsies, homosexuals, supporters of the empire and communists" - for some reason surrounded by hundreds of riot police. The State Duma and the Federation Council, also habitually, talk about "foreign interference", pro-government commentators recall the wild 90s and the Maidans - these old songs sound not only absurd, but also infinitely old-fashioned for those for whom the summer of 2019 was the first summer of protest.

New faces and old explanations for protest