When there is a protest or rally, there is frequently a side debate afterward about just how many people attended. Organizers frequently have a number, police another and news media another and the numbers frequently don’t match. Obviously, the inflating or depressing the number of people who attend a rally is a political exercise and people-counting at the rally against falsifications in the Dec. 4 Duma elections today at Prospekt Sakharova in Moscow is no different. The Interior Ministry pegged the number of attendees at 29 thousand, organizers at 120 thousand, state-owned news outlet RIA Novosti at 56 thousand and independent  online TV station ‘Dozhd’ cited70,110 (which seems oddly specific, but no matter).

Quick, how many people are in this crowd? There'll be a quarter in it for the person with the fastest correct answer (photo from ITAR-TASS)

Ennumerating crowd sizes is a notoriously inexact science and open to such a wide degree of interpretation that it’s difficult to reach a meaningful number. There will inevitably be people on all sides scoffing at the numbers that don’t support the narrative they are backing. So, I would argue that any debate over the numbers will not be overly informative except in one important sense. Even the MVD’s almost certainly low-balled number suggests that there has not been any momentum lost in the campaign to overturn the election results and the relatively more objective media figures suggest that the movement might have even gathered steam despite a 2 week hiatus. For a comparison, between 35,000 and 50,000 people are generally thought to have attended the Dec. 10 rally at Bolotnaya Square.

This momentum will need to be carried through the holiday season starting in January and to the next rally, planned in February. That rally will be even more important than the previous two as it will demonstrate whether the current opposition has staying power and could represent a sharp challenge to the planned re-election of Putin at the beginning of March.