Kasparov? Seriously, could the Russian government be more stupid? He’s a chess champion, he knows how to play games of strategy and he counted on being photographed and videotaped getting arrested and going off to jail healthy. The Russian media is almost entirely state-controlled or effectively so (an enormous percentage of it is owned by oligarchy Putin-loyalists); yes the story there is undoubtedly spun as That Troublemaker Kasparov or perhaps What Happened To Kasparov That He’d Do This but either way they do have to report it. There’s no way they can just be silent about it. With one protest he managed to force the Russian media to talk about the government cracking down on a protest against government crackdowns, force the media to talk about Kasparov being arrested in the street for speaking, personally demonstrated to any on-lookers what he was saying the government was doing and gotten headlines worldwide.

What’s funny to me about this is how some of the Russian media is couching it all in “well, they gave him a permit to protest, he just didn’t get the square he wanted so he took over a different one!” Um, yeah, about that? He applied to hold an Other Russia protest in Pushkin Square. Pushkin Square is, as the linked article notes, the busiest square in Moscow. Everyone would have known about that protest because practically everyone would have seen it. The place where the authorities told him he could have it, Turgenev Square? Well, let’s discuss it this way: if you look at a map of Moscow, the central part of the city is a rough circle about 5 or 6km across. The Kremlin is more or less in the center. The White House - the parliament building - is at 10 if you look at the map as a clock face. Pushkin Square is at 10:30 or 11:00. Turgenevskaya is at 1:00 1:30. It’s not just a different square, it’s roughly 60 degrees around the arc described by the road that encircles downtown.

Oh, and Turgenevskaya is not noted for how busy it is. It’s noted for its metro stop and a statue of a dog.

Interestingly, on the other hand, the dog in question is from a story by Turgenev; the dog is the faithful companion and only friend of a deaf, mute peasant. Eventually the peasant drowns the dog on the orders of a heartless member of the gentry who has been mildly annoyed by its barking. I can’t help but think that whereas in America we quietly acquiesce to orders to hold protests in “Free Speech Zones” miles from the objects of those protests, Kasparov looked at the assigned location for his protest and thought, “No, not this dog, thanks.”