IN RUDYARD KIPLING'S "The Jungle Book" Mowgli is led astray by the Bandar-log, a tribe of monkeys who, explains Mowgli's chum Baloo, ignore all the rules and “throw nuts and filth on our heads.” Only Kaa the Rock Snake, an old and fickle hunter, is able to entrance these undisciplined apes and make them do his bidding.Such was the unfortunate image that Vladimir Putin chose to conjure earlier this month when he spoke of his attitude to tens of thousands of Russians who had come out to issue a protest against December 4th's rigged parliamentary election . The demonstrators, claimed the prime minister, were paid by foreign powers: “What can one say, in this case? One can say, in the end, ‘Come to me, banderlogi.'”

Yet if Mr Putin ever had Kaa-like powers of hypnosis, they are failing fast. His suggestion that the protesters were nothing but simian wreckers surely drove only more Russians to join a new rally on Moscow's Sakharov Avenue on December 24th, as did his assertion that their white ribbons looked like contraceptives.



Up to 80,000 citizens showed up for Saturday's demonstration, about double the turnout for the previous protest, on December 10th. That in turn was the biggest the city had seen for 20 years.



The crowds streamed into the broad avenue in the north of the city, named after the Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov, to face a stage emblazoned with the words, “Russia will be free!”



Among them was Sergei Shashko, 53, a farmer from Kaluga region, in western Russia. “This is a bourgeois revolution against a feudal state,” he said. “Today people have a little more money and they want something different. They're no longer happy to go to a bureaucrat for help and be kicked or ignored instead.”



On the stage, the diverse leaders of Russia's political opposition gave fiery speeches. Alexei Navalny, the blogger-lawyer and heart-throb of the protest movement, fresh from serving a 15-day prison sentence following a previous demonstration, cried: “I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and the White House [Russian government] right now. But we are a peaceful force. We won't do that—yet.”



There was a clear consensus in the crowd. Protestors spoke of endemic corruption and predictable politics. Some expressed their wishes to emigrate. Many demostrators held witty signs or inflated condoms, referring to Mr Putin's barbs. A giant python on a placard squeezed the life out of Russia. There was a group of banderlogi: young men in chimpanzee masks.



Roman Dobrokhotov, a 28-year-old anti-Kremlin activist, released a huge portrait of Mr Putin on a steel frame, attached to helium balloons. “Crawl away, worm!” read the slogan on one. To cheers, the portrait was sucked into the sky, disappearing from view.



The tipping point for many Russians, said Mr Dobrokhotov, was Mr Putin's announcement in September that he would return to the presidency next March, replacing his one-term stooge, Dmitry Medvedev.



“The protesters are no longer just classical democrats, the intelligentsia, and pensioners,” he said. “Now they are also students, and people in their thirties and forties with good cars and nice clothes. They feel a lack of freedom. They know they can choose a new phone, choose the food they want. But they can't choose their political leaders.”