The World

This morning’s Moscow News urged anybody attending the anti-Putin protest to eat lots of food before venturing out into the -20 temperatures. So I started my day at the Starlight diner, loading up on bacon and pancakes, in the company of Arkady Ostrovsky – a friend and fellow journalist.

The march set off from October Square – just underneath the last surviving statue of Lenin in Moscow. The demonstrators are usually referred to as the “Moscow middle-class” – and there were certainly some chic fur-coats and fancy phones on display. But ideologically, they were a very diverse grip. There was a large group of communists, carrying red flags with the hammer-and-sickle. There were nationalists, waving white and blue flags. There were gays carrying the rainbow banner. There was a group carrying black flags. I asked who they were and was told – “Fascists, move away.” Then there was another, smaller group, carrying black flags with Arabic writing on them – they were Russian Muslims. There were even some people waving the Facebook flag.

The liberals, who were probably the most visible presence, tended to carry orange flags and home-made posters with their own slogans on them. (They are individualists, after all). One showed a picture of an Alsatian dog, with the words – “We are barking now, but we can bite.” Another sported a large picture of Putin, under the words – “Number one, crook and thief.” Many wore the white ribbons that have become the symbol of a demand for clean elections – and which Putin notoriously compared to condoms.

After a long freezing walk, the march ended at a square just around the corner from the Kremlin. There was a stage, from which a couple of opposition politicians such as Boris Nemtsov made brief speeches. There were also various bands, entertaining the crowd.

In search of warmth, I went into the tent behind the stage. Pointed out to me, among the crowd, was Kseniya Sobchak, a glamorous television hostess and socialite, who is also the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the late mayor of St. Petersburg, who helped guide the early political career of Vladimir Putin. There was also a small group of Russian paratroopers in blue berets, who have composed an anti-Putin song that has become an unofficial anthem of the movement and a hit on YouTube.

We went back out into the cold to watch them perform on stage – singing, strumming guitars and waving their regimental flag. I am not a Russian-speaker, but it was a catchy number. Its lines – rapidly translated for me – included: “Putin, you are not a Tsar/ And we are not idiots.”

The song also refers to the troops service fighting in Dagestan and elsewhere. Putin must have hated that. His people like to lampoon the Moscow demonstrators as self-indulgent office-workers and socialites – and to claim that Putin represents the real patriotic Russia. But to have a group of battle-hardened soldiers singing out against you ….That sounds like bad news to me.

Vladimir Putin’s public appearances are always interestingly theatrical. His performance yesterday at the Russia Forum, here in Moscow, was characteristically peculiar. At times, Putin was all swagger. At other times, he seemed rather uncertain. At one agonising point, he lost his place in his notes. I was told later that this only lasted for ten seconds. It felt like ten minutes.

What was most interesting, however, was his interaction with the foreign visitors, who had the dubious privilege of sharing the stage with him. (I was in the audience.) Putin was clearly keen to show off his intellect. He argued at length that the world’s economic problems were a crisis of over-production. This sounded to me like re-heated Leninism. Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor, sharing the stage with him, fairly politely refuted the “over-production” argument – which I’m not sure you are meant to do, when the Tsar is outlining how the world works.