Word: kaliningrad
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...right. Demonstrations have cropped up around the country in the past few weeks. They have been smaller than the one in Kaliningrad but still very large by Russian standards. In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, a protest on Feb. 13 attracted about 2,000 people. In late 2008, just as the Russian economy was plunging, there was a protest of a few thousand people in Vladivostok and subsequent rallies that brought out a few hundred people. But the latest rallies are larger, the reasons behind them more diverse and the calls for Putin's resignation more fervent. The Prime Minister...
...popular politician in Russia by far, as well as the most powerful. But even the mainstream opposition sees an opening. Take the Yabloko Party. It had led the pro-Western forces in parliament throughout the 1990s before being voted out in 2007 in an election it says was rigged. Kaliningrad has helped turn its focus to the streets. "The outlying regions are in a better mood for protests," its leader, Sergei Mitrokhin, tells TIME. "Kaliningrad shed light on all the vices of the current regime and its economic policies, and it has led us to activate our regional branches...
...hurdles are many. Putin loyalists control Russia's political institutions as well as the entire bureaucracy. The government controls all the major TV channels. The Kaliningrad protest got virtually no coverage in the mainstream Russian press. Putin has also been able to deflect part of the resentment by dressing down his political party, United Russia, and sending out envoys to show that the Kremlin is paying attention...
Meanwhile, the opposition remains deeply divided. Egos sometimes override pragmatism, and a real alliance appears unthinkable. Since Kaliningrad, opposition leaders have gone back to denouncing one another. "There is a fear of competition between them," says Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a prominent Soviet dissident and a vocal critic of Putin's rule. First arrested by the KGB for her activism in 1969, Novodvorskaya is no stranger to the opposition, but she is wary of the latest flare-up in public resentment. "A street protest is not a grocery store," she says. "You go there to demand your freedom...
...Kaliningrad's transport tax, for instance, has been called off for this year, and Russia can afford it: the state is still reaping massive profits from its sales of oil and gas. The broader economy is also recovering, and even though Putin's initial reaction to the protests showed some signs of dismay, Mitrokhin is far from certain that the government is afraid. "It amazes me," he says. "People are screaming for him to get out, but there is no sense that he is trying to reform or justify himself. He feels his own strength. If needed, he knows...