The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

by Masha Gessen

Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible—and most eccentric—pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons, or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or heard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva—which happens to be incompatible with playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.