The Economist thinks the mass protests against Putin after the rigged elections signal a serious shift in Russian politics. Joshua Foust isn't jumping to conclusions:
[I]s Russia experiencing an Arab Spring, only in the Russian winter? It is way too early to tell. In Egypt and even Libya, revolutionary movements are being coopted by Islamists, and no one knows yet if those revolutions will wind up being net-gains for their respective countries. Protest movements in Russia are too nascent – are a few thousand Muscovite protesters that big a deal in a city of 10 million? – to draw grand conclusions at the present time.
Mark Adomanis is on a similar page. Jay Ulfelder is more optimistic:
Uprisings occur rarely, even in societies with deeply unpopular governments and weak police forces. With such a low baseline rate of success, we will almost always be right by saying, "It ain’t gonna happen." …
But improbable doesn’t mean impossible. The likelihood of unlikely occurrences can still change over time. What’s more interesting than reflexive skepticism, I think, is to adopt Beissinger’s "evenful" perspective and try to think about how the events of the past few days, and the government’s responses to them, might produce changes in the Russia’s political atmosphere that will become the causes of future actions.
Alexey Sidorenko tracks the spread of the protests around Russia. Seth Mandel worries about the nationalist leanings of putative opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Anna Borshchevskaya thinks through some scary international implications:
While more and more Russians now demand reform, this demand often carries aggressive nationalistic attitudes, hostile to the West, so there would be little incentive for United Russia to take a different path both domestically and internationally. Putin and United Russia will therefore likely continue to distance themselves from the United States and the West, and push the nationalist buttons to gain more public support—a public that has traditionally been all too eager for anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric.
David Kramer wants the US to get on the side of the protestors by coming out strongly in favor of Russian democratic rights.
The Dish 