Alexander Plushev has a great set of photos he calls "Police Calculator" (Kalkulator GUVD -- the initials for the Chief Directorate of the Interior Ministry, which is the police).
In the top photo, you see the official police figures for a march of "Nashi," the Putin-created nationalist youth movement. The rows look sparse and it has a choreographed feel to it -- but the figure is officially "50,000" for an April 2011 march.
In the bottom photo, you see the people amassed on Andrei Sakharov Avenue in Moscow on December 24, with the official police count of "29,000" -- and it looks like three times as many as in the first picture.
So many believe then that a figure of 50,000 or 100,000 isn't too high an estimate for the Moscow march yesterday.
I remain skeptical about all of these developments, which feel manipulated to me both by the government and the new opposition. In Navalny's firey speech, I have to say I've never seen somebody speak so passionately, loudly, angrily and demagogically about...something so tame -- an election recount. It's odd...
I thought the Bolotnaya demonstration was like 20,000, not 50,000 and I feel like 29,000 might be the right number for this latest march, but others will disagree.
I do wish the Google Earth people would design some sort of ap whereby you could take a mobile picture of a street full of demonstrators, or plug in an aerial photo, and calculate the number of people using Google Earth or Google Street View or something -- and it would become the gold standard. There's just something always so unscientific about this and it's always exploited by governments and opposition both.
Or, I know. How about a FourSquare kind of thing. Everybody gets to the demo, they are geolocated, they "check in," and FourSquare can actually count them. This might be gameable, but something has to be conceived like this. I don't know if 50,000 people checking in on FourSquare at once would make the servers fall over.
Are you La Russophobe?
Posted by: Richard | January 01, 2012 at 03:38 AM
No, not at all.
La Russophobe is a different person who has several blogs, now one called "Dying Russia" and always uses this pseudonym "La Russophobe".
I always write under my own real name on the topic of Russia -- my avatar writing name Prokofy Neva is linked but I write on virtual worlds under that name.
Some of my views coincide with La Russophobe, but not all.
La Russophobe has even ridiculed me at times in some threads.
On the question of the Moscow demonstrations, we agree that they are exaggerated by both official Russian media, now being manipulated to help the demonstrations, and Western media, looking for Arab spring patterns where they don't exist.
The difference is that I think there are more people authentically participating than LR -- but I'll have to write more on this later.
Posted by: Catherine A. Fitzpatrick | January 01, 2012 at 04:43 PM