In Russia, Echoes of Revolution. (Another 1990 revolution in the making?)

[pampango]

At a protest in St. Petersburg last month against electoral fraud, an effigy of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

I was a reporter in the crowd on a crisp October afternoon in 1990 at the dedication of the gray granite boulder, brought from the birthplace of the Soviet prison camp system on the White Sea. A 90-year-old survivor of the gulag prison system spoke, and hundreds of people filed by, solemnly placing roses or carnations. There was a feeling of victory. How long could the secret police continue to operate inside the Lubyanka, as the feared headquarters is known, when so stark a reminder of its crimes sat in this little park of spruces across the square?

Well, as it turns out, at least 21 years. A Russian friend, Andrei Mironov, a human rights advocate and one of the last political prisoners of the Soviet era, recently stood in the grimy slush in front of the memorial and said that he had hoped that by now, the Lubyanka would long since have been turned into a museum devoted to the crimes of the secret police. So much in Moscow has changed, transforming it into a bustling, elegant city of cozy cafes and edgy galleries. But the subterranean power structure has remained largely intact.

Now, to the astonishment of many Russians, political change is in the air again. ... For anyone who covered the slow-motion collapse of Communism here, this moment feels familiar. Then, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s experiment in modernizing the Soviet system began to run out of control, security officials were deeply uncertain about how to respond to the proliferating street demonstrations.

Now it appears that Mr. Putin has overplayed his hand, by arrogantly assuming that he could help himself to another presidential term or two. This obliviousness by a leader has its precedent, too, from two decades ago. Mikhail Gorbachev believed that a free press could be added to the existing Soviet system, the way one might add a new wing to an old house. But the revelations that poured out in the late 1980s — when Moscow’s evening newspaper featured daily profiles of people murdered by Stalin and pioneering television shows toured Western supermarkets — proved fatal to the Soviet Union.

As someone on the outside I don't get the sense that Russia is near another revolution. There are just more demonstrations than there have been in the past. I expect Putin to win the election, but I guess it's always easiest to expect that what has happened before will continue to happen. It didn't work out that way in 1990, so we shall see.