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A Protest Movement’s Second Wind?

By Masha Gessen

April 9, 2012 8:57 am April 9, 2012 8:57 am

MOSCOW — “Day 24 is over,” Oleg Shein wrote in his blog just after midnight on April 8. “Tomorrow is Day 25. We are not on a suicide mission. Nor are we on a mission to make me the mayor. We are on a mission to secure fair elections that will put an end to the mafia system of government in Astrakhan.”

If the authorities would not listen to legal arguments, to reason, or to crowds gathered in public squares, maybe they would at least pay attention to people willing to die for fair elections.

The politician Oleg Shein and 21 of his supporters are on hunger strike — most of them since March 16. Shein ran for mayor of Astrakhan, a city of just over half a million people in southern Russia, near where the Volga River joins the Caspian Sea. On March 4, Shein lost with under 30 percent of the vote — and, like many independent candidates around the country, he claims the election was stolen.

Shein and his supporters compiled exhaustive documentation of alleged violations — among other things, they claim that at more than half of the city’s 203 precincts there was no vote count at all. They protested to the Central Election Commission and other authorities. And then they went on hunger strike.

It was a radical move but also a rational one. For three months, hundreds of thousands of Russians all over the country, including Astrakhan, had been protesting December’s rigged parliamentary elections. The Kremlin responded by placing Web cameras in all the polling stations for the March presidential vote. Activists protested that the cameras would be easy to fool and circumvent — but in Shein’s case a number of the violations seem actually to have been caught on camera (here is a site, in Russian, where a blogger has posted and analyzed footage from the precincts).

After the protests failed to prevent widespread violations during the presidential and municipal elections March 4, many of the protesters went home, dispirited. The authorities were clearly unwilling to put an end to the rigging, and the public was powerless to make them.

Which is exactly why Shein, who has been active in leftist politics in Russia for more than 20 years (and has served three terms in the national Parliament), arrived at the idea of resorting to a hunger strike. If the authorities would not listen to legal arguments, to reason, or to crowds gathered in public squares, maybe they would at least pay attention to people willing to die for fair elections.

It turns out to have been a bad gamble. Liza Glinka, a physician who runs a homeless charity in Moscow — and is therefore accustomed to seeing people in extreme states — returned from visiting Shein in Astrakhan on April 7 and reported that he and several of the people fasting with him are on the verge of death.

She managed to convince the youngest of Shein’s fellow hunger strikers — a man of about 20 and five women — to quit the fast. Still, 21 men and one woman remained (here is a video, in Russian, where you can see some of the participants and the space where they are holding the strike).

On Monday afternoon, about 200 protesters gathered in front of the Asktrakhan mission in Moscow. A representative promised to come out to speak to them, but at least an hour into the protest no one had materialized.

A day earlier, Shein posted on his blog that he was feeling significantly worse than he had been since the beginning of the hunger strike. “I should check the literature’’ on hunger strikes, he wrote, “to see when I should expect my second wind.”

According to Dr. Glinka, though, expecting to get a second wind after more than three weeks without food may be as futile as waiting for the Russian authorities to notice a small group of desperate people.