After having discussed the Russian development with two Russians, it seems that at least the protests are not very large in the scale of Russia. Moscow has five or six football clubs, and the number of people in one of them causes the same sort of crowd. Also, even the Russian opinion is rather divided on this, some of them don't want any change to Putin and Medvedev, some of them do. The reasons for not wanting the change is the unpredictability - with Putin you at least know what you stand for and what to expect. Some Russians suspect that the United Russia party is still the best choice to vote, rest of them are even worse. Nobody wants Jeltsin or Gorbatsov back. Russian voting percent is usually around 40 - 50 % due to passivity caused by people being unsure or seeing that this wont change anything.
However, the future of Putin is at suspect. Some of the Russians suspect that Putin has to go, but whether this opinion is supported by the majority remains to be seen.
As I said earlier, the only reason Russia and China are interested in showing having human rights is the trade with West. This is done by simply suppressing the other view; if West was really interested in human rights in these countries it would start to enforce this by making trade harder for those who offend the human rights. Unfortunately, the world works the other way around nowadays, it is Russians and Chinese that are pulling the strings and West that has to jump according to their wishes. Remember that it is those countries that are now pushing for their values towards West since we have to trade with them as well. Whether I like this development or not is another thing.
