This winter, a burgeoning protest movement laid its cornerstone in a former swamp and up grew hope. Our correspondent talks to protesters, editors, commentators, and Kremlin-watchers in anticipation of this weekend’s election and what comes next.

The Morning News || March 2, 2012

The white-shirted cops are shouting at us to get off the street as they corral us onto the sidewalk. One African American man gets on the curb but refuses to be pushed up against the wall of the building; they throw him into the street, and five cops tackle him. As he’s being cuffed, a white kid with a video camera asks him “What’s your name?! What’s your name?!” One of the blue-shirted cops thinks he’s too close and gives him a little shove. A white-shirt sees this, grabs the kid and without hesitation billy-clubs him in the stomach.

Boston Review || September 26, 2011

On Thursday evening, sixteen days after thousands of Egyptians converged on Cairo’s central square to bring an end to a thirty-year-old dictatorship, it seemed that the moment we had been waiting for had finally come.

New York Review of Books Blog || February 11, 2011