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The history of protest under Putin is very long. In 2011 protests surged when he rigged the Duma elections and subsequently returned for an illegal third term as president. Dozens got prison sentences after the Bolotnaya Square protest of May 6, 2012...
He countered the protests with repressions that included the jailing of Pussy Riot, and then came up with the brilliant scheme of annexing Crimea in March 2014. This was a unique way to win mass popular support, bolstered by non-stop TV propaganda...
In 2014 protests were virtually non-existent. The few people who held solo pickets in support of Ukraine were jailed or forced out of the country. Putin's dominance seemed complete. Alexei Navalny was placed under house arrest for a lengthy period...
The most popular opposition politician in Russia, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered in February 2015. But Navalny revived larger protests in 2017 as he released videos with millions of views exposing the corruption of Putin's regime, including that of PM Dmitri Medvedev...
And then Navalny announced that he would run for president, but Putin barred him by giving him a criminal conviction on fabricated charges. He didn't jail Navalny, though. Navalny survived assaults with chemicals and held election rallies all over the country despite the ban...
When on December 25, 2017 the electoral commission ruled that Navalny would conclusively not be on the presidential election ballot, he announced an election boycott. Putin "won" the election against an array of fake opposition candidates in March 2018...
And then Navalny's next tactic was to create the campaign for fair elections and support opposition candidates in local elections, which has again proved too much for Putin to tolerate. But Putin was already facing protests around the country on a range of social issues...
Including the hot topic of toxic landfills. Opposition comes from all over the political spectrum, including Communists. There was a big protest in Yekaterinburg over the building of a church in a popular square, which halted its construction. Now forest fires are a big issue...
Apparently the last straw in Moscow was the authorities' refusal to allow Navalny-backed opposition candidates to participate in elections for the Moscow city council on spurious grounds of having allegedly falsified signatures in their support. Now ordinary people...
And celebrities who had refrained from getting involved in politics are very angry and are willing to protest and risk long prison sentences. It's a new era of protest and so far it doesn't look like Putin has another Crimea to pull out of his bag of tricks.
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