Why are these thousands needed?

On December 15, the liberal opposition in Moscow celebrated the anniversary of Bolotnaya Square with a “Freedom March” - an epoch-making event whose name has become a household name.

Opposition leaders claim that they gathered five thousand people on Lubyanka Square (it must be said that even for Moscow, even after Bolotnaya, this is an impressive crowd). But the capital's Ministry of Internal Affairs believes that the number of protesters was many times smaller - 700 people. Moreover, more than three hundred of them are journalists and bloggers. That is, it turns out to be only 400 people.

Police helicopter photographs are more credible. But the oppositionists, it seems, were sizing up the crowd the old fashioned way - “by eye”, of course, out of delight, increasing the number of people.

I’ve been wanting to understand this in more detail for a long time. Tell me, what's the difference - 5000 or 700 people?

This is generally not a method for liberals to use the masses. Crowds of people in the information age are archaic. You can’t organize liberal coups like that and you won’t even scare anyone, no matter how much the opposition leaders dream of revolutions a la Midan at-Tahrir.

Liberalism is actually a very aggressive and extremely flexible thing. Trying to fit it into the rusty political structures of the last century - parties, strikes, rallies, kees, marches - is impossible. The ideology of liberalism rests on the individual: like, a person’s rights, freedoms and desires are the highest value. And a faceless crowd that erases individuality is itself contrary to liberal canons.

I’m wondering, are Nemtsov, Navalny and their comrades really so naive that they seriously expected to mobilize the masses? Now they are being disingenuous - they say that five thousand came to us, and they don’t remember that they initially planned to collect tens of times more.

Supporters of the liberal opposition are, first of all, people with a heightened sense of individuality. They are disgusted by crowds, rallies, and crushes, even if they are useful. They will not go to beat the cops and shout something against the bloody propaganda. A maximum of a thousand people will gather in Moscow (this is the ceiling). And these thousand are mostly regulars at all political parties, plus journalists who want to look at the cops’ humiliations of Nemtsov-Nvalny-Sobchak-Yashin.