NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

This is how parliamentary elections work in Russia
: Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, faces off agai
nst collaborating parties — which would never dare
to criticize him. And the real opposition parties
are banned. But one cannot simply vote against ev
ery party involved. Nor is there any use in boycot
ting, because the election would be considered leg
itimate even if no one but the prime minister and
president showed up.
The only solution, we decided, was irreverent prot
est. And so we came up with a cartoon pig called N
ah-Nah, a name that, in Russian, evokes an unprint
able version of “get lost!” — an expletive for wha
t we’d like to say to those in power. We made post
ers and animated cartoons depicting Nah-Nah at the
polls, destroying the ballot. He would check the
box for every party running and draw an X across t
he ballot. He would do this not in hopes of changi
ng anything, but to illustrate how nauseating thes
e pretend elections are. We posted them online and
called on real voters to follow Nah-Nah’s lead. M
ostly, we wanted to laugh and misbehave a little,
even as United Russia kept its throne.
At the same time, a young activist and very well-k
nown blogger, Aleksei Navalny, offered a different
protest strategy for the elections. He proposed v
oting for any of the collaborating parties in orde
r to avoid casting a vote for United Russia — for
the Communists, for A Just Russia, for Yabloko.
These two protests — Nah-Nah and Navalny — gained
attention, and for the first time in the history o
f the anti-Putin movement, there was a real debate
about methods, a conversation with substance and
without enmity, taking place on the Internet, in c
afes, in Moscow and the suburbs.
Mr. Navalny’s supporters argued that destroying th
e ballot would simply split the anti-Putin vote, g