Testing Putin

Twenty years after the Soviet collapse,Moscow and other Russian cities,from St Petersburg to Vladivostok,are witnessing the biggest protests since 1991,with unofficial claims of a 50,000-strong crowd in Moscow. The surge in public anger after videos and images of alleged voting fraud during the December 4 parliamentary polls went up on the Internet spilled out of Facebook,vKontakte and Twitter onto the streets and took the muted opposition parties by surprise. The protesters claim Prime Minister Vladimir Putins United Russia did much worse than the drop in votes from 64 to 49 per cent.

Putin,self-declared candidate for an apparently guaranteed presidency once again in 2012,is now surprised at the anger of the very urban middle class he helped create. This isnt the noughties. The 2008 global financial crisis made Russia increasingly bitter,stagnating the once galloping growth in income and pushing inflation. Moreover,younger Russians born around or after the Soviet extinction want more than controlled democracy,and they are using,after the Arab Spring,the expedient of social networking to circumvent old-style controlling instincts.

Russians have never known democracy except for the chaotic Boris Yeltsin interregnum of 1991-1999. So they couldnt savour the freedom behind the instability of those years. The Putin presidency (2000-2008) curbed the liberties of the first post-Soviet decade and stifled political opposition. Russians didnt mind,happy to stabilise their lives and prosper,while Putin jailed oligarchs synonymous with Yelstin-era corruption. That may be changing now,with Premier Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev first-timers to a new test. The educated,professional class that benefited from the economic boom now appears to demand political space.