On December 24, 2011, Mikhail Prokhorov—banking and mining billionaire, N.B.A. team owner, international playboy, and Russia’s third-richest man—set out to be among the people. A crowd of about eighty thousand had come out to Moscow’s Sakharov Avenue to demand free elections and to lambaste Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It was a bitterly cold, gray day, but Prokhorov wore just a pair of light-washed jeans, a brown leather jacket, and leather gloves the size of skillets. Moving slowly among the protesters, Prokhorov chatted with friends and staffers, and pointed to the building where, in 1989, he began his finance career as a lowly data clerk at the Soviet International Bank for Economic Cooperation.
Prokhorov is running for President in an election that takes place on March 4th. Putin will surely win, and Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist, will likely come in second. The urban professionals who made up the core of the Moscow protests have come to despise Putin, and they generally dislike Communists. But they also don’t have much love for Prokhorov. To most of them, he is a Kremlin stooge, taking orders from Putin, his ostensible opponent. According to this theory, which Prokhorov denies, his campaign is roughly equivalent to what would happen if Barack Obama persuaded T. Boone Pickens to run as an independent, in order to siphon votes from the actual Republican nominee.
As Prokhorov moved down Sakharov Avenue, rubberneckers and picture-takers eagerly elbowed their friends and pointed in disbelief at the oligarch. Prokhorov is six feet eight, and is not hard to locate in a crowd. Nearby, radical young Communists heckled, “One billionaire—a million hungry!”
“Come closer!” Prokhorov shouted back at them. “I can’t hear you!”
Soon, he was so mobbed by the well-wishers, the critical, and the curious that he could no longer move. (“I can’t believe he’s not wearing a hat!” one woman, a retired librarian, said. “He’s going to get sick!”) He listened to people’s grievances and nodded, accepted flyers and business cards, and gave snappy replies to questions; he even managed a couple of media interviews via cell phones passed to him across the cluster of heads buzzing around his torso.
“Can you please tell me, is it possible to earn a billion honestly?” an elderly man asked, echoing the sentiment, common in Russia, that the oligarchs earned their fortunes through deceit and government connections.
“I think you can,” Prokhorov replied, his face radiating self-regard. “At the very least, I haven’t broken any laws.”
Someone else asked if he was a Putin patsy.
“I am not a Putin supporter,” Prokhorov said. “I have my own views.”
What was his election platform?
“Maximum freedom.”
This is Prokhorov’s second foray into politics, and he has admitted that he consulted with the Kremlin before embarking on the first. Did he get Kremlin approval to run this time, too?
“I think that, for any person, it’s very important to be able to come to agreements,” he said, adding that not all Kremlin employees are evil.
What of the fraudulent December 4th parliamentary vote in which Putin’s United Russia Party narrowly held on to power, setting off a wave of protests?
“If I become President, I will dissolve this Duma”—the Russian parliament—“and have new elections.”
What about the story, reported in the Russian press, that Putin called him and asked him to run as a decoy?
“I like these tall tales.”
Will he ultimately give his support to Putin?
“I’m not going to give anything to anyone.”
Nearby, a group of young protesters—members of a Web forum called the Leprosarium—jumped up and down, shouting, “Fuck, you’re tall! Fuck, you’re tall!” Prokhorov ignored them, and went off to attend a ceremony that officially opened his campaign office. The protest organizers had not invited him to speak.
The last time a Russian oligarch entered politics, he did not fare well. About a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia at the time, started working to get his allies into the Duma, angering Putin. In October, 2003, masked commandos stormed his private jet and arrested him. His assets were parcelled out to Putin’s friends, and he was sentenced to nine years in jail. In December, 2010, he was given another, fourteen-year sentence. The harshness of the punishment sent a clear message to Russia’s magnates: stay out of politics.
During Putin’s rule, his éminence grise, Vladislav Surkov, built a system of what he has called “managed” democracy. Elections were rigged, and it seemed that Surkov allowed parties to exist only if they served a specific purpose or demographic. The statist, conservative United Russia supported Putin. The three opposition parties—the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and the left-leaning Just Russia Party—have opaque funding and generally toe the Kremlin line. (They are justly called “the loyal opposition.”)
In early 2011, Surkov began working to create a new party for Russia’s urban middle class, which had become increasingly hostile to the government’s corruption and ineptitude. Rather than permit them to organize organically, however, Surkov resuscitated a moribund liberal party called Right Cause.
The project’s curators approached at least three members of the Kremlin élite, with no success. Then, on May 16th, Prokhorov announced that he would lead the Party. He insists that the Kremlin didn’t ask him to do so: he heard about Right Cause’s search in the papers, and some friends suggested that he get involved. After contacting the Party, Prokhorov says that he then approached the Kremlin and was given approval. He told me directly that he sought the counsel of the President, Dmitry Medvedev, and the Prime Minister before making his announcement. Why, I asked, did he need to talk this over with them? “If you are the head of a big company, you cannot be involved in politics,” he explained. But, unlike Khodorkovsky, he added, he had relinquished control of his business before taking up politics.
Whether the Kremlin had requested, or merely blessed, Prokhorov’s campaign was an important distinction. If Prokhorov was to lead a party for the urban middle class, he had to be independent. But, from the beginning, few people believed that he was. He had funded various Kremlin initiatives, like a summer training camp for several of Surkov’s pro-Kremlin youth groups. As a publicity stunt, he once spent a night in a tent at the camp. Worse, he completely avoided criticizing Putin after taking over the Party. And so the urban élite dismissed Right Cause as a “Kremlin project.”
Surkov seemed to do everything in his power to help Right Cause succeed, thereby sending another signal about its lack of independence. In early summer, Prokhorov appeared on all the federal television channels, which blacklist genuine opponents. During one appearance, he demonstrated his basketball skills by sinking a three-point shot. Moscow was blanketed with tangerine-colored posters featuring Prokhorov’s face, staring heavy-lidded at the city.
In August, Surkov began phoning Prokhorov to suggest people who would and wouldn’t work for Right Cause. Prokhorov told me that he promised he would take the Kremlin’s ideas into account, but he clearly chafed at the interference. Prokhorov had recently tapped Evgeny Roizman, a controversial anti-drug activist from Yekaterinburg, to join the Party. In early September, Surkov pressured Prokhorov to remove Roizman from the Party roster. When Prokhorov refused, Surkov organized a coup within Right Cause and had him voted out of power.
On September 15th, Prokhorov gathered a swarm of puzzled journalists and supporters at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the place where he had planned to hold a Party congress. When he rose to speak, everyone was sure that the public tension with Surkov in recent days was part of an elaborately staged show of independence. But Prokhorov delivered an uncharacteristically emotional speech about Surkov. “There is a puppeteer in this country who privatized the political system, who has misinformed the Russian leadership about what is going on in the political system, who pressures the media, plants candidates, and manipulates citizens’ opinions,” he said. “This puppeteer is named Vladislav Surkov.” He then called for Surkov’s dismissal. This was real. The project had clearly jumped the rails.
When I first met with Prokhorov, five days after the implosion of Right Cause, he was not his usual swaggering self. He looked pale, and he drooped over a white leather armchair in the rotunda of his Moscow office. A glass skylight flooded the room with the late-September sun. His desk was immaculate: a few stacks of paper and a tray of dried fruit. There was no computer in sight. Bookshelves were littered with mementos, statuettes, and a smattering of books. Tucked behind them was an old picture of him with Putin, who comes up to Prokhorov’s chest.
“No, no, I’m not wilting,” Prokhorov said, when I remarked on his posture. “I’m just catching up on sleep. I’m sleeping seven hours a night now! Before, it was four or five.”
There were less than three months until the parliamentary elections, and liberals were intrigued by his unexpected show of independence. But Prokhorov had exited Right Cause at the very moment that he had become appealing. He seemed to relish the irony of his situation, as well as the skepticism he had encountered. “If one of my friends or colleagues did this, I would think exactly the same thing,” he told me. “I’d have no illusions.”
His independent stance also carried a potentially steep cost. When Prokhorov assailed Surkov at the Party convention, everyone in the auditorium was stunned. Such a confrontation was unprecedented, and it was not expected to go unpunished. This may be why Prokhorov was at pains to downplay the incident. “I don’t really like to discuss what happened between two people,” he demurred, before conceding that the clash had made public a growing rift between the modernizing and the conservative forces in the Russian élite. “He’s inhibiting development,” Prokhorov finally blurted out. “That’s the essence of the conflict.”
Five days after we talked, Prokhorov was unexpectedly excluded from a Presidential commission on technological modernization. A month later, Putin’s office postponed the London I.P.O. of his gold-mining company, Polyus Gold. “It’s just an administrative delay,” Christophe Charlier, the deputy C.E.O. of Onexim, Prokhorov’s holding company, said. He added quietly, “In Russia, because of lack of transparency, people don’t believe in coincidences.”
Prokhorov’s parents, Dmitry and Tamara, were members of the Soviet upper middle class. Tamara was a materials engineer at the Institute for Chemical Machine-Building; Dmitry was trained as a lawyer. When Prokhorov was born, in May, 1965, Dmitry was handling international relations for the Soviet Committee of Physical Culture and Sport. As Prokhorov now puts it, his father “spoke for the red Soviet machine that beat everyone in sports.” Athletes often visited their small Moscow apartment. “There were sports in my life from childhood,” Prokhorov says. Like many Russian men of his generation, he spent most of his time outside “in the yard,” where he learned the ways of the patsan, or guy code. (This is the code that Prokhorov upheld in sticking by Roizman—loyalty—and the code he broke in going against Surkov.)
Prokhorov was, until the eighth grade, a middling student. “Boys in the Soviet Union got to work on their brains later; it’s a common story,” Prokhorov explains. Reading also came to him in adolescence, though he says it is something he quickly outgrew. “I just don’t like literature, because all of the experiences in it are redundant to me,” he says, adding that he has read mostly “specialized literature,” like books on chess tactics. “I have it all in my real life,” he goes on. “Literature I just don’t get at all. I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone has real-life experience, then he can’t, by definition, like literature.”
Eventually, Prokhorov’s parents stopped chasing him out of the kitchen when friends gathered in the evening and discussed politics. Prokhorov remembers a wide range of topics, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Western culture and the ineffectiveness of a planned economy. “We weren’t discussing any plot against the state,” Prokhorov says. “We discussed mundane things.”
His need to clarify that his family wasn’t plotting against Brezhnev points to a key tenet of the Prokhorovs. Dmitry may have been discussing Solzhenitsyn in the kitchen, but during the day he worked in a highly sensitive branch of the Soviet apparatus: athletics were an important propaganda tool at home and abroad. He was allowed to travel, a rarity in those days. “He knew the Western world very well, and he would tell me about it, except very carefully, so that I didn’t give voice to these thoughts in school,” Prokhorov says, outlining a common Soviet public-private split. “At work, everyone was a strict Communist, but in the kitchen everyone was a dissident.”
“Our parents were thoroughly Soviet people,” says Prokhorov’s bookish older sister, Irina. She runs his philanthropic organizations, an erudite literary magazine, and a publishing house, and lives in a wing of his mansion west of Moscow. “They never fought against the Soviet state.” Dmitry and Tamara came of age during Stalin’s rule and knew better.
Prokhorov credits his mother with providing him with his cool temperament. “I’m a boa constrictor,” he says. “Calm, good mood. That’s like my mom. She could listen to people for a long time, and I can also listen.”
Prokhorov first made money as an undergraduate at the Moscow Finance Institute, which was a five-minute walk from home. He has developed a lofty mythology to explain his choice of profession. “Since childhood, money had a way of finding me,” he says. “I always found something in the sandbox. We’d be at the beach, and I’d find money. Money just found me on its own. I didn’t do anything for it.” This power is gone now, says Prokhorov, who is the thirty-second-richest person in the world. “I guess I don’t really need it.”
In 1983, after his first year at the institute, he did a two-year stint in the Army. “You had to fight at the very beginning, because that was part of the survival,” Prokhorov recalls. “People were always wanting to test you: are you real or not real? After a couple months, they understood that I was real, and no one bothered me anymore.”
Afterward, he returned to school and got to work. He organized his Army buddies into brigades that unloaded freight cars—potatoes, frozen beef, cement—and they earned in a day what a professor might make in a month. He handed over most of his money to his family.
In 1988, just before Prokhorov’s last year of college, Russians were allowed to own businesses for the first time in sixty years. He and another classmate rented a section of a laundromat near the institute and set up an operation for stonewashing jeans. The business was extremely successful, and soon all his friends—and their friends—were working for him. “I remember the last time I really got any pleasure out of money was when I bought a car, and I understood that I could take a girl to a café,” Prokhorov recalls.
At about this time, both of his parents died of heart disease. Prokhorov remained in their flat, which he shared with his niece and Irina, who had divorced her husband several years earlier. He became the breadwinner of the family. According to Olga Romanova, an opposition activist who was friendly with Prokhorov in college, this explains why he has never married. “This is his family; he doesn’t need another one,” Romanova says of Irina and her daughter.
In college, Prokhorov met Alexander Khloponin, who became his best friend. “Khloponin was the ringleader,” Romanova says. “Misha was the pensive serpent sitting next to the leader.” Khloponin introduced Prokhorov to Vladimir Potanin, who became Prokhorov’s business partner.
When he met Potanin, Prokhorov was working at the ailing International Bank for Economic Cooperation, where he had been assigned after college and where he’d quickly earned a series of promotions. In 1992, as Russia went through its first painful year as a fledgling market economy, Prokhorov and Potanin started their own bank, which they called MFK. That year, the management of the International Bank—whose fold Prokhorov had just left—sent a letter to its clients, encouraging them to transfer their holdings to MFK. Within six months, Potanin and Prokhorov had three hundred million dollars in assets. All the old debt was left at the International Bank.
The following year, Potanin and Prokhorov formed the United Export-Import Bank, or Uneximbank, for short. They divided their labor according to their talents. “He didn’t like to dig through the technical stuff, and I loved it,” Prokhorov says. “And he loved buttonholing people, being involved in politics, lobbying.” (Potanin declined to discuss Prokhorov for this article. Khloponin, who went into business with the two, is now the Kremlin-appointed chief of the restive North Caucasus region.)
Uneximbank soon became the authorized bank for a number of state organizations, including the Finance Ministry, the federal tax service, the state arms-export agency, and the city of Moscow. At the end of 1994, the second year of the bank’s existence, it had 2.1 billion dollars in assets, nearly seven times more than it did at the beginning of the year.
The partners’ next coup came in 1995. A resurgent Communist Party threatened to take down an enfeebled Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 Presidential election. Potanin masterminded a plan wherein he and the other oligarchs offered loans to the government, which couldn’t pay wages and pensions, and they asked for shares in state enterprises as collateral. After selecting the companies they wanted, Potanin, Prokhorov, and their compatriots bid on how much money they would lend the government for those shares. Should the government default on its loans, which was all but assured, Uneximbank and the others could sell the shares. When the government failed to repay the loans, the bankers kept the shares. Potanin and Prokhorov walked away with Norilsk Nickel, which was Russia’s largest platinum and nickel producer. At the time, Norilsk had revenues of three and a half billion dollars. Potanin and Prokhorov had given the government a loan of a hundred and seventy million dollars.
The loans-for-shares transactions, which made billionaires of Potanin and Prokhorov, remain highly controversial, and helped draw a connection in the Russian imagination between the crook, the businessman, and the Kremlin official. When asked recently on national television whether he had ever participated in corrupt dealings, Prokhorov shrugged and replied, “Yes, of course I participated in them. What, don’t I live in this country?”
In 2001, Prokhorov took over the management of Norilsk. He improved productivity, diversified the company, and, in the six years that he was in charge, Norilsk’s value increased elevenfold, owing in large part to a global commodities boom. He set up the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, run by Irina, which brought arts and culture to the icebound miners. He also took control of one of Norilsk’s less valuable but, to Prokhorov, more interesting projects: Moscow’s CSKA basketball team. Prokhorov gave the team a healthy budget, which allowed it to recruit top talent. The team won the European championships twice in three seasons.
In January, 2007, Prokhorov and twenty-five others—some of them young Russian women—were arrested at Courchevel, a French ski resort where Prokhorov has “a small house” and spends the Orthodox Christmas holiday. Prokhorov was detained for three days—which he spent shadowboxing and stretching in his cell—on suspicion of making prostitutes available to his guests. When I asked him about it, Prokhorov laughed off the incident and said that everything written about it was “absolute rubbish.” One of the people he uses to book hotels and cars for his guests happened to have gone through customs with a binder containing pictures of twenty girls. “Girls travel with me, and he had pictures of them in his bag—you know, to meet them at the airport,” Prokhorov explains. The French police got a different impression: that this man was a pimp. In general, Prokhorov is unapologetic about his predilections. (“How will I become president without a first lady?” he recently wrote on his Facebook page. “Let me tell you a secret: I had my first lady when I was seventeen.”) He can often be spotted at Moscow’s poshest clubs, surrounded by herds of young women from the city’s modelling agencies. Because neither he nor his friends are married, he says that, in Courchevel, “we didn’t even violate anyone’s moral code.”
Nevertheless, the arrests became an international incident. Potanin was scandalized, and Prokhorov was soon pushed out of Norilsk. In the spring of 2008, Prokhorov swapped his stake for a fourteen-per-cent share in Rusal, the world’s largest producer of aluminum, and more than seven billion dollars. Five months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, sinking world markets and commodity prices. Prokhorov, whose assets were now mostly in cash, was affected far less than any of his peers. The French, in the meantime, apologized and awarded Prokhorov a Légion d’Honneur.
For a while, he was the richest man in Russia. He signed on to reënergize and fund the Russian Biathlon Union. He bought the New Jersey Nets and made plans to move the team to Brooklyn. (His wedding present to the Nets forward Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian was a pair of his-and-hers Russian fur hats.) He created a glossy media empire. He began investing in high-tech and nanotechnology projects, which were being pushed by the Kremlin in its drive to diversify the Russian economy. One of these ventures is a Russian-made hybrid vehicle whose name, to the Russian ear, sounds like “Fuck-Mobile.” Putin gave it a spin last spring and praised it as “a totally new product” with an “attention-grabbing” name.
When I met with Prokhorov last October, he had just got back from windsurfing at his private resort in Turkey, and celebrating the season-closing bacchanal at Ibiza. He had doubled his daily exercise regimen, from two hours to four. “Basically, everything’s great,” he said, beaming. He gulped down a large teacup of an orange vitamin broth. The rumor around Moscow was that he and Surkov had made up and the two of them had drunk on it. Prokhorov denied this, but in November Surkov told a Moscow newspaper that he had no issues with Prokhorov.
On December 4th, Russia held its parliamentary elections, and Putin’s increasingly unpopular United Russia edged back into power. To many, this seemed a less than credible result, and video evidence of egregious voting violations circulated on the Web. People took to the streets, and the police cracked down, arresting a thousand protesters in two days. On December 8th, Prokhorov published a blog post in which he declared, “Like it or not, Putin is for now the only politician who can somehow manage to control the machine of state.”
On December 10th, an estimated fifty thousand people gathered in Moscow’s Bolotnaya, or Swampy, Square. Thousands of others protested in more than eighty cities across the country. Crowds of expats gathered at Russian embassies around the world. Russia hadn’t seen anything like this since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite official warnings of violence, the protest had the feel of a block party. Muscovites, who can seem like the rudest people on the planet, smiled and struck up conversations with strangers. The President, however, was silent, and so was Putin.
Two days later, Prokhorov held a surprise press conference in the center of Moscow. “Honestly, I’m not sure what you’re expecting of me, but I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he said, smiling. “This is probably the most serious decision of my life. I’m going to participate in the Presidential elections.” This time, he said that he would do it as an independent. The people in the room gasped, and the old question arose immediately: was this another Kremlin project? That night, the main national channel broadcast a long, glowing report of his candidacy. Shots of the press conference were interspersed with footage of grinning protesters at Bolotnaya.
Whatever credibility Prokhorov had built up by turning on Surkov in the fall quickly dissipated, in part because of the fawning coverage on state television. To make matters worse, an article in the magazine New Times declared that, on the evening before the protest in Bolotnaya Square, Prokhorov had taken a call from Putin and then told the friends he was with that the President had asked him to run. The story was based on anonymous sources, and Prokhorov immediately denied it. He says that Putin and Medvedev found out about his intentions from the press conference. His spokeswoman adds that the New Times account was “total fiction.” Nevertheless, given Prokhorov’s past, and the nature of Russian politics, the damage was done.
When I met Prokhorov two weeks after he had announced his candidacy, he had just spent two hours in the cold at the protest on Sakharov Avenue, and another two organizing the drive to gain the two million signatures necessary to register for the Presidential election. He had clearly enjoyed himself.
He had an elaborate, and decidedly wobbly, story about his decision to run. For two months, he said, he had been building a national support network. Two days before the big protests, Prokhorov says he “quietly submitted” his application to the Central Election Commission. “I won’t hide the fact that I have a friend, and I asked him not to leak anything,” Prokhorov told me, declining to name this apparently influential person. His blog post, in which he appeared to endorse Putin, was, he said, a red herring.
A few weeks later, his election prospects, though not his credibility, were given an assist when the Central Election Commission disqualified Grigory Yavlinsky, the traditional liberal candidate: nearly a quarter of his petition signatures were deemed fakes. Prokhorov, who had gathered two and a half million signatures in a mere two weeks—one of which was a national holiday—remained on the ballot.
Regardless of its origins, Prokhorov’s second political intervention seemed more promising than his first. In his parliamentary campaign, he had avoided even the slightest criticism of Putin. This time, he has attacked the Prime Minister, however mildly. “I have my own economic views,” he said, on NTV, shortly after his announcement. Putin’s economic program, he said, is “leading to economic catastrophe.”
Perhaps most promising for Prokhorov, Surkov was promoted out of his position three days after the protest on Sakharov Avenue. Instead of curating internal politics, he will now oversee the state’s modernization push. In a farewell interview, he scoffed, “I am too odious for this brave new world.”
Running for President is not a bad deal for Prokhorov, whose name is still associated with Courchevel. (A popular joke has him choosing his first lady, his second lady, his third lady, “and some whores.”) Sated and successful in business, he gets to try something new. “The fact that I’m useful to the government is obvious,” he said in a television appearance. “But why don’t we use the government, too?” Meanwhile, he seems to have grown even smoother as a candidate. He jokes with the press; he laughs. He has even got better at answering the same question—is he a “Kremlin project”?—over and over. “There’s nothing I can tell you that will convince you,” he’s said. “The only way is to keep working, calmly, and prove it with action.”
Prokhorov seems to relish the role of being the one man who’s allowed to speak truth to power. His platform, which he published in January, is full of commonsense proposals, like shortening the Presidential term of office from six years to four, and limiting the number of terms a President can serve. He proposes to force the government to sell its controlling stakes in media organizations. He wants to eliminate the Draconian registration procedures that Surkov invented to keep opposition parties out of the Duma. He has detailed economic proposals designed to boost competition and remove the state’s influence from the economy. Prokhorov’s first campaign promise was to free Khodorkovsky. He has also become bolder. When asked in a recent television interview about that infamous online comment that only Putin could run the current Russian state, he stuck by it. “But I don’t want to live in a country like that,” he added.
“I’m playing a long-term game,” he said on the evening of December 24th, after the protest. It was already dark, and a butler brought in tea and a tray of sweets. Prokhorov seemed energized by what he had seen that afternoon, and spoke of building a political party after the election. “The only thing is if people don’t support me at all,” he said of the coming election. “In that case, you can’t fool yourself. You have to tell yourself, ‘Apparently you have no political talent and you should do something else.’ I’ve only done things at which I’m at least somewhat better than others. The Presidential elections are a great test.”
On February 4th, with a month left before the election, some hundred thousand Muscovites came out for the largest protest to date, a march down Yakimanka Street to Bolotnaya Square. The temperature was ten degrees below zero. Prokhorov had been gaining in the polls, with twenty per cent of the protesters supporting him. But his national share of the vote was still only about five per cent.
This time, Prokhorov was seasonably dressed, in ski pants and heavy-duty boots. A blue down jacket filled out his svelte frame, and a white fleece hat with a red zigzag on the forehead made him easy to spot in the crowd. Roizman, on whose behalf Prokhorov had abandoned Right Cause, was there with a delegation from the Ural Mountains. (He is now an adviser to Prokhorov’s campaign.) So was Prokhorov’s sister, Irina. She wore a leopard-print fur hat and clung to his arm in the crush of supporters wearing white scarves that said “Prokhorov.” They were a diverse but largely middle-class crowd, and they didn’t care whether Prokhorov had negotiated his run with Putin. “I agree with his platform, that’s it,” a middle-aged small-business owner from the Ivanovo region told me as we walked. Others said that it would be a good thing if Prokhorov were indeed a “Kremlin project”: at least he’d be able to get things done.
The tightly packed cluster around Prokhorov moved aimlessly through the larger crowd until Prokhorov took control.
“Right!” he called out over everyone’s heads. “We’re moving to the right!”
“Right!”
“Right!”
“Right!” his supporters echoed.
“Curb!” he called, stepping up over a pile of dirty snow.
“Curb!”
“Curb!”
Soon, the pack started chanting behind him: “Prokhorov for President! Prokhorov for President!”
“What are they saying?” he asked Irina.
He craned his head to catch what she whispered in his ear. Then he looked up and smiled.
The Master and Mikhail [TNY]