A picture from Moscow

Yesterday’s protests in Moscow – against the city government’s attempts to disqualify opposition candidates from running for the Moscow City Duma in September – seem to be getting less coverage than they deserve in the media outside Russia. Of the reporting I’ve seen, this piece in the Washington Post stands out for its opening photograph.

It show Ilya Yashin, an opposition activist and head of the municipal council in one of Moscow’s urban districts, addressing the crowd from a niche in the Moscow city hall building – next to a bas-relief of Lenin that has remained on the wall since Soviet days. A curious proximity, inviting obvious parallels – all of them superficial – but the image by itself is, as they say, powerful.