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JONATHAN RUGMAN, Independent Television News: Tonight's crowds were not huge -- on one side, a few hundred opponents of Vladimir Putin, who accuse him of trying to steal Sunday's parliamentary election, and, on the other, a few hundred Putin supporters, just as adamant that Russia is nowhere near an anti-Putin revolution.
Then riot police moved in, the Kremlin apparently determined to snuff out the merest whiff of dissent. An opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was amongst those detained, in what is not a crisis for Putin's Russia, but a new kind of challenge nonetheless.
This was Mr. Nemtsov last night, chanting, "Russia without Putin," leading a crowd of several thousands in Moscow's biggest anti-Putin protest in years -- 300 were arrested yesterday. And while they claimed Mr. Putin's United Russia party had stolen the vote, European election observers agreed it wasn't fair.
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