“MOSCOW Does Not Believe in Tears.” The title of a popular Soviet-era melodrama became the slogan of last night's protest rally, held near the Pushkin monument in the heart of the Russian capital. A day earlier Vladimir Putin had shed a tear when he addressed a 100,000-strong crowd of grim-looking supporters, many of whom had been coerced or paid to join the throng. Muscovites, most of whom voted against Mr Putin in Sunday's presidential election, were repelled by this staged crowd scene and the heavy military presence that accompanied it in their city.



Yesterday evening some 15,000 of them gathered on Pushkin Square, in bitterly cold conditions, to protest against an election they considered to be dishonest. The atmosphere was tense. On the way to the demonstration I counted 20 lorries filled with soldiers. Many more were parked behind the square. The riot police that surrounded the square seemed all the more intimidating next to the mostly open and friendly faces of the protesters. Unlike the ready-made banners at Sunday's pro-Putin rally, most of the ones at the Pushkin square were handwritten. One young woman held aloft a sign urging: “Putin, don't cry”.



Yet yesterday's rally felt very different from the protests that have taken place in Moscow since December's rigged parliamentary election. Some of those had pulled in as many as 70,000 middle-class Muscovites, but it wasn't just the numbers that were down last night. So was the mood of the protesters. “I did not really feel like coming here tonight, but I came because I felt I had to,” one woman said. Mr Putin's victory on Sunday, with an official tally of 64% of the vote, made many protesters depressed. Although this result was also rigged, it is likely that the majority of the country voted for him. Previous protests had been not just upbeat, but almost euphoric. The atmosphere last night, by contrast, was one of hopelessness and frustration.



The protest movement seemed to have divided into those who did not feel comfortable with its growing radicalisation, and those for whom it was not radical enough. Some of the more successful middle-class Muscovites who had attended earlier protests out of a sense of indignation did not turn up.

Many of them had backed Mikhail Prokhorov, a liberal business tycoon who took 20% of the vote in Moscow on Sunday. Mr Prokhorov made a brief appearance at the rally. "I greet you, the free citizens of Russia," he said. "I thank those who gave me their votes, despite the fact that the election was dishonest. I am in your debt." His speech was well received.



Yet the biggest cheers went to Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and politician who tried to mobilise his supporters with fiery rhetoric. “We are the real masters here!" he said. "We will occupy the streets and squares and we will not leave."

But a day earlier Mr Navalny had told me that Mr Putin's victory did not leave people feeling the same sense of indignation as the December elections had done, and that sustaining the intensity of the protest would not be easy. It required an escalation—but a measured one so that the sort of violence that would demoralise the movement could be avoided. This, in fact, is what Mr Navalny achieved yesterday.



When the sanctioned part of the protest was over, he and some other opposition politicians, including Sergei Udaltsov, a young radical communist, stayed put, taking a defensive position inside a snow-covered fountain. Their supporters stood around, watching hundreds of helmeted policemen prepare to move in.

A few minutes later the square turned into a whirl of bodies: the policemen tried to squeeze protesters out and to isolate those inside the fountain. The press, standing on a makeshift stage, watched the arrest of Mr Navalny and a few others. Then the police kicked them out too.



Unable to return to the square, hundreds of protesters walked out on to the busy Tverskaya Street and marched away from the Kremlin, shouting “Russia without Putin”. Sirens blasted and police vans broke up the crowd. Some 250 people were taken into custody.

Mr Putin did not opt to follow the example of neighbouring Belarus, where after a presidential election in December 2010 the security services first provoked violence and then beat everyone up. But nor was he content to allow protesters to move freely around the city. (While the attention of the police was firmly focused on peaceful protesters, a small group of ultra-nationalists were allowed to walk almost unhindered, attacking journalists and passers-by.)



Yet neither the anger at the heavy-handed police actions nor the excitement of Mr Navalny's arrest (he and most others were released a few hours after being picked up) could disguise the falling intensity of the urban protest movement.

This does not mean that the changes in Russia that were set in motion in December will stop. But the course they follow will be longer, and less linear. The ideologists of the protest movement believe it needs not just a change of format, but a change of focus. The next few months may see a shift of protests to a more local level, zooming in on Moscow as a city rather than a federal capital.

“We must start the movement for bringing back the city in which we live,” a new manifesto said. Such an approach could mobilise the large number of Muscovites who are unhappy with the running of their city and want the freedom to choose their own mayor, something they currently lack. Ultimately, this could lead to far more tangible and consequential results than any of the previous protests.