Putin’s Children

Mikhail Ogorodnikov hadn’t been planning to speak at the rally until someone handed him a megaphone. It was a cold day in March in the Russian city of Vladimir, with dirty snow still stiff on the ground, and many in the crowd in front of Ogorodnikov were roughly his age, 16. As he gathered his thoughts, a strange fact occurred to him: the man they were rallying against, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in power longer than most of them had been alive. “For the past 17 years, this man has been robbing the country I love,” he shouted into the bullhorn. “He doesn’t want this country to thrive. He only wants success for himself and his oligarchs.”

The crowd started cheering, as much for the messenger as for his message. Born in 2000, the year the President first came to power, Ogorodnikov represents a generation that Russians have taken to calling “Putin’s children.” Over the past few years, their political voice has grown louder as the young have grown old enough to vote, run for office and demand a change of leadership.

But few expected that voice to break so suddenly. On March 26, almost exactly a year before Putin is due to stand for another term as President— his fourth—a wave of dissent showed Russia how badly his authority has aged. While Ogorodnikov addressed the crowd in Vladimir, thousands of his peers in more than 80 towns and cities joined a series of anticorruption rallies that swept across Russia’s 11 time zones that day. Putin could ill afford the distraction: he was scheduled to meet with leaders of Iran that week to discuss their alliance in the war in Syria, while in Washington, close aides of President Donald Trump’s were preparing to testify before a Senate hearing on Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. presidential election. So the homegrown revolt caught the Kremlin off guard, and its reaction was a knee-jerk crackdown. Riot police beat up dozens of protesters on March 26; in Moscow alone, more than a thousand of them were detained, including 92 minors.