In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What he meant by that was it is possible to fail in many ways, but there is only one way to succeed. The interesting thing about Russia’s ongoing failure, in contrast to its most famous writer’s wisdom, is that it is unrelenting in its uniformity. Nothing happening in Russia today is a surprise. It looks exactly like Russia's entire painstaking history played out year after year, decade after decade. Russian history, which is full of unique and different historical events, always seems to arrive back at the same place. 

It has been a long time since Russia has seen such protests. However, it is not only about the numbers, since over the past three years several thousand (or even several dozen thousand) have come out to demonstrate in Moscow and St Petersburg, including in the anti-war marches in the spring and autumn of 2014 as well as in the memory of Boris Nemtsov after his assassination. This time, the fact that these protests were a coordinated action, which reached the whole country from Vladivostok to Smolensk and from Karelia to the Caucasus, is what is important. What is more, they were watched live on the internet. This is a huge success of the organisers – Alexei Navalny, Leonid Volkov and the rest of the anti-corruption foundation team and the members of Navalny’s campaign committees, which have been created over the past months ahead of next year’s presidential election. They also have created a growing challenge for the Kremlin.