(Vice News) Sunday was a tough day for underground anti-Kremlin opposition leader Alexei Navalny — and not just because he was thrown to the ground by a half-dozen Russian cops on Moscow’s main boulevard, then shoved into a waiting paddy wagon feet-first.
Navalny had a bigger problem: Despite weeks of hype, the nationwide protests he launched to support a boycott of Russia’s March presidential election drew just a fraction of the massive crowds that turned out for anti-corruption protests in the first half of 2017.
If Sunday’s protests were a test of Navalny’s ability to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin, he didn’t exactly shake the Kremlin walls, analysts said. […]
“If I were Putin, I would not be worried so much about these protests,” said David Szakonyi, a political science professor at George Washington University who focuses on Russia. “The network isn’t as strong as we might have believed before Sunday, based on rally attendance.” {…]
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