Hmm.

Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend.

A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of opportunities to do so (Communists, weary old Gorby) or (b) would never hold honest elections were they to come into power (Zhirinovsky’s ‘Liberal Democrats’). So a Russian Spring this isn’t. Yet.

That said, it takes a lot to mobilise Russia’s urban youngsters to take a public stand against the Establishment, and this time quite a lot of them are doing so.

Note especially the use of social media (ie fast live crowd networking by mobile telephones, as taken to a high art by British rioters and other vanguard forces). The Kremlin has been smart to let this latest large demonstration pass without a vigorous and unpleasant clamp-down – so far.

Perhaps they are just letting things run to take the measure of what they are up against. Including one opposition blogger a using remote-control model helicopter to take pictures of the demonstrations – it survived pistol-fire!

Very cool. And very different