Steve Garner is a researcher at the department of Social Science at Cardiff University. The BBC Analysis programme that he appeared in is available here.















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Back in August I talked here about the

pro-democracy protests, anti-Putin protests in Moscow, and I noted that,

compared to the similarly-motivated protests in Hong Kong, there were small.

People might grumble, but there is no arguing that Putin has very widespread

support in Russia, and the protesting was done by a particular well-educated

cohort.















But it’s important to remember that as well as being small, these protests in Moscow are supported by a particular slice of society. There is a group of well-educated Russians, mostly in Moscow and other large cities who yearn for democracy and western-style freedoms. You could call them a young middle class. They travel abroad on holidays, they speak English and other foreign languages, they get their news online from largely independent sources…







That last point is important; television,

regular broadcast television, is hugely popular in Russia; it is hugely

influential, and it is totally under the thumb of the Kremlin. Just last week, Alisa

Yarovskaya, a prominent journalist on a Russian regional TV station in north

west Siberia asked Putin at a press conference why Moscow wasn’t supporting a

project to build a bridge to link two local towns, a project that the regional

governor had proposed.







Pretty innocuous you might think. Not in Russia. By the

next day, she was unemployed, saying that she had quit rather than be fired.

That gives you an idea of the level of dissent tolerated, or rather not

tolerated, in Russian TV news.







But as I said in August, the young, urban,

often well-educated people who are most likely to support democracy often just

bypass Kremlin propaganda and get their news online; often they speak English

or some other foreign language and keep well-in...