If one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it politicizes every aspect of life, then protest that strove to be apolitical was an appropriate response. If a feature of a totalitarian regime was that it eliminated all space that belonged to people apart from the state, then holding protests in cordoned-off spaces was not such a strange idea: the very ability to negotiate such a space could be a victory. It stands to reason that the crackdown began with the annulment of that negotiation and the physical destruction of the protest space.
