Thread by @samagreene

I'd like to tell you a story.

In September 2011, when I was living in Moscow, I went to meet a friend and colleague -- a Russian academic at a major Moscow university -- just to catch up, and to talk about some research we might do together.

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When I walked into her office, the look on her face was one of despair. Quiet, composed and dignified -- but emotionally and morally eviscerated.

I did not have to ask her why.

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The day before we met, something had happened in Moscow that everyone knew was going to happen. In an event choreographed and telegraphed and utterly predictable, Vladimir Putin had announced that -- after four years as prime minister -- he was coming back to the presidency.

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There was nothing surprising about this. It was the only logical outcome.

And yet some people in Russia -- people like my friend -- had allowed themselves to imagine something else.

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People like my friend -- and I recognize that my friend was in a minority -- had allowed themselves to begin to believe that a different Russia was possible. One in which presidents followed both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. In which elections mattered.

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Putin's announcement shattered that imagination.

It was the worst mistake he ever made.

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Three months later, in parliamentary elections, people like my friend came out to vote against Putin's ruling party. They knew they would lose, of course. But they wanted to vent.

That's when Putin made his second mistake: he decided not to count their votes.

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First Putin took away my friend's ability -- her right -- to imagine a better future.

Then he took away her voice.

The result was the largest ever challenge to Putin's rule and the rise of an opposition movement that continues to give the Kremlin fits.

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The look on her face that September morning -- that gutted desperation, where I had been accustomed to exuberance -- is one I will never forget. All the more so because I saw it again and again that day and the next.

And because I see it now, when I look in the mirror.

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What happened today in the Senate was utterly predictable. No other outcome was logically possible.

Yet some might have imagined something else. A sudden surge of conscience and civic duty. An imperceptible thawing of hardened hearts. The restoration of our Constitution.

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Taking away people's ability to imagine a better future is a dangerous thing. It fundamentally alters the way they think about risk and action. It becomes harder and harder to justify idleness and complacency. Determination grows.

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My friend in Russia faced -- and continues to face -- longer odds than any American is likely to. Hers was a battle against a regime that controlled the entirety of the electoral system, the police and the judiciary, and even much of the private sector.

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In America, we have an infrastructure of resistance and democratic action of which my Russian friends can only dream. But they do dream of it, and so they act. They organize. They march. They go to jail. They nurse broken bones. Some of the die. But they persist.

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Putin has been forced by this movement -- this movement born when he deprived people of their imagined future -- into fundamentally altering the nature of Russian politics. Pushed into ideology and violence that keep him in power but make his rule more brittle.

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People who know they deserve better can take on the mightiest of autocracies for decades. Without the resources we take for granted, they can and do win victories on the streets, in the courts, and eventually in elections.

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Just imagine: If they can fight to gain a democracy they don't yet have, can't we fight to preserve a democracy we haven't yet lost?

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So if your face looks like mine does right now, like my friend's did back then, hang on to that -- and hang on to this story. Search for that look in the eyes of those around you. Know that it means determination and solidarity. Know that it means power.

/END