Over 50,000 people took to the cold and snowy streets of several Russian cities to demand a rerun of an election they deemed stolen by the ruling regime. The Russian Prime Minister blamed the protests on Hillary Clinton, but in reality they seem to be organised online ("Let our freedom not only be on Facebook" read one handcrafted sign).

YouTube-ing the fraud

Early exit polls predicted Putin's United Russia party would lose its majority, but instead it managed to scrape 50.07% of the vote.

Russians took to YouTube to show how that was accomplished: voting booths with pens that write in invisible ink, ballot boxes shipped pre-stuffed with votes, election officials sitting at a desk filling out dozens of ballots, and buses that took the same voters to multiple polling places. "We can't even call them elections," one opposition leader declared.

A Facebook protest

The latest protest had over 30,000 people RSVPing on Facebook. But many more than that turned out with the FT calling it the largest protest since Boris Yeltsin took on the Supreme Soviet in 1993. As one twenty-something said:

When you find out that people you work with are going to be here and people you went to school with and all of these people have no connection to politics, well, it's impossible to stay home.

They have families, they have money – things to lose. But they all came here.

The news anchor on state-owned NTV threatened to resign if he couldn't cover the protests. So the station reported on demands for the election commissioner to resign, though carefully avoiding any protesters demanding Putin quit.

President Medvedev ordered an investigation into the "irregularities", announcing the move on his Facebook page.