The Pied Piper Of Protest
In today’s Moscow Times Yulia Latynina takes issue with Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov’s incendiary stance on how the Russian ‘evolution’ should be managed, (revolution would be a better option, he suggests). ‘Pied Pipers took the citizens away,‘ Limonov wrote of the other opposition leaders on Saturday. ‘We missed a historic opportunity.’ Laynina expounds quite clearly her take on how the protest movement, in its expanded middle class incarnation, could change Russian society. She also identifies exactly who she is backing:
I attended the rally as an ordinary participant, and I saw what type of crowd it was. With the exception of a few flag-waving groups of professional revolutionaries, 80 percent of those present were young, educated white-collar managers. In other words, it was Russia’s “Third Estate” — a bourgeois crowd.