MOSCOW — In the versatile Russian vocabulary of obscenities, there is a single word that means “I am fed up with what they are doing and I can’t take it anymore.” On Wednesday night my partner, Darya, who does not usually speak in obscenities, used it.

We were coordinating our plans for the following day. She said she wanted to go to a protest scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, the date that was set for the sentencing of the anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who was accused of embezzlement. The event was called “A public discussion of the sentence in the Navalny case,” but everyone I know expected it to be a protest against a guilty verdict.

“Are you aware that there is no permit for the protest?” I asked. We have a toddler whom Darya is still breast-feeding, and she generally stays away from gatherings where she is likely to be roughed up or detained by the police.

“I’m going,” she said. And then she used the word that means “I am fed up with what they are doing and I can’t take it anymore.”

Over breakfast Thursday, we did what everyone I know did: We discussed the possible sentence. We already knew the judge had found him guilty, but the sentence had not yet been announced.

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We also knew that he was not guilty. Darya, who is a professional data cruncher, had gone to the trouble of printing out, analyzing and charting all the documents that had been presented in court. She could find no evidence that Navalny was guilty.

She found no evidence that Navalny even had a relationship with the company, KirovLes, from which he was accused of embezzling: He had worked as a consultant to the administration of the Kirov region, and he had suggested that a friend be hired to run the company. The friend, Petr Ofitserov, was now his co-defendant, but if Ofitserov’s relationship to KirovLes was clearly established, his role in the disappearance of 16 million rubles (roughly half a million dollars) was not — and could not be established, for the simple reason that the money had not disappeared. Most of it was accounted for in the very documents the court had reviewed.

There is nothing new about shoddy embezzlement cases against the Kremlin’s political opponents, so the guilty verdict in the Navalny case surprised few people. But would the court sentence him to actual jail time? The prosecutor had asked for six years, and standard practice in high-profile political trials is to hand down a slightly lesser sentence than the prosecution wants. Would the court give him a suspended sentence? That way, without going to jail, Navalny could be disqualified from the Moscow mayoral election in September on the grounds that he had been convicted of a felony. Or would the court find a third way?

By the time we finished breakfast, the sentence had been handed down: five years for Navalny and four for Ofitserov, commencing immediately. Lawyers for the defense said they were planning to appeal. Navalny and Ofitserov were led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Darya cursed again. A stream of obscenities, as well as printable words of rage and despair, filled my social network feeds, my text message inbox and my voicemail. People started heading toward the center of Moscow well ahead of 7 p.m.

It was not yet 6 when we got there and there were already hundreds of people on the sidewalk near the square, outside Parliament, where the protest had been planned and which the police had closed off. In an hour, there were thousands. They all knew they were risking arrest and a heavy fine, yet they kept coming. Soon enough, all passing vehicles except for sightseeing buses were honking in support. Thousands of police and military had arrived, but after detaining several dozen people early in the evening, they stopped, apparently realizing there was no way to detain us all.

At 7:30 news came that the prosecutor’s office asked that Navalny and Ofitserov be released pending their appeal.

The crowd did not disband. We chanted, we clapped, we sang. Some people stood reading books. After 11 the police and Special Forces started breaking up the crowd by force. More than 200 people were detained; after midnight only about a dozen protesters were left in the square.

The following morning Navalny and Ofitserov were released pending their appeal. Had some deal been struck between Navalny and the Kremlin? Had someone in the Kirov court violated orders by going too hard on Navalny? Had the protest succeeded in freeing him?

It was hard to credit the protest. None of the earlier demonstrations, some of which were much larger, yielded immediate results. If they had, it would mean that the Kremlin makes decisions haphazardly and can readily unmake them. This is a scary proposition, but it also appears to be true.

The Russian regime is a blunt force that mows down freedom and those who try to defend it. If it encounters an unexpectedly large obstacle, as it did Thursday evening, it retreats temporarily, only to attempt the exact same maneuver later. Navalny’s and Ofitserov’s sentences remain in force, and the Kremlin will try to jail them again. Unless an even greater number of people decide next time that they are fed up with what the Kremlin is doing and can’t take it anymore.