On Jan. 23, Russia saw the largest and most widely distributed protests to take place in the country in the course of almost a decade. The Russians who came out to picket President Vladimir Putin’s regime were responding to calls to demonstrate issued by Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who had triumphantly returned to Russia in order to lead the protests after his earlier poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent.
When the day arrived, the protests that Navalny and his team had called for broke out at in at least 120 cities and towns all through the length and breadth of the Russian Federation. Navalny has demonstrated to the authorities, the Russian population, and the world that he has Russian citizens who are ready to march and protest for him and to be detained by riot police if need be. This was a victory for the opposition, if not a decisive one, not least because it showed the messiness and chaos of the regime’s response.
