I know I'm out of step with the cool kids on this one, but I don't have a good feeling about tomorrow's demonstration in Moscow.

Here's why.

1. It feels like Minsk almost exactly a year ago. Back then, with the fraudulent Belarusian presidential elections, the alternative candidates called on everyone to go to the square, some 40,000 people showed up and behaved in orderly fashion, but Lukashenka's goons staged provocations and hundreds of people were brutally beaten and arrested, some 40 or more got serious sentences, and today, a year later, several dozen leaders of the opposition and civic movements, notably Andrei Sannikov of charter97.org, are sitting in a cold jail stills. Sannikov and others wer4e sentenced to 2-4 years for supposedly inciting public unrest — although of course it is Lukashenka who has been inciting unrest since 1996.

The day started out lovely and exciting with Andrei and his wife, the journalist Irina Khalip and their young son Danik all going off to the ballot box. I thought there'd be some 15-day jail sentences perhaps; I thought there'd be some office raids, but even I wasn't prepared for seeing Andrei lying, injured, in the snow, after riot troops put a shield on him and jumped up and down.

Belarus has long been a polygon or testing ground for policies in Russia. Dissidents in Russia have always had an almost superstitious view of this, but they're right. The whole concept of the vertikal was tried and tested and perfected by Lukashenka before Putin perfected it. The two countries are in a union of sorts; you feel as if the bad guys have weekend seminars to trade tips just like the democrats. It worked perfectly. The Belarusian KGB (still named that) was able to get many authoritative people at first to believe that it really was the opposition that provoked violence. It took enormous amount of independent youtubing, reporting, lobbying, etc. to try to wrest the narrative back.

Russian organizers like Bocharsky seem perfectly aware of this, but it's one thing to theorize, it's another when there's a steel-toed OMON boot in your face, as the ubiquitous Ray F. writes on A Good Treaty's comments.

2. And speaking of a Good Treaty, that's another red flag for me. These curiously pro-Putin and plus-Kremlin bloggers like A Good Treaty who — out of nowhere, seemingly — began ankle-biting me and harassing me on Twitter and their blogs last year for criticizing Russia even occasionally and not particularly strenuously — are all excited about the demonstrations. That makes me wonder "why". Perhaps they believe in the Surkov agitprop about pluralism and democracy (we're going to reduce down from "managed democracy" to "managed pluralism")? It's awfully creepy reading Surkov blandly talking about dialogue and increased participation in parliament when you know he doesn't mean anything normal by that. What sort of contorted, co-opted thing are we going to be talking about? As the Power Vertical quoted him:

Of course, what he's talking about is controlling the entire framework within which this pluralism is supposed to take place — and he gets to do that, as the Kremlin's siloviki can get the Internet and mobile phones and transportation shut down in a heartbeat if they like.

3. This isn't exactly Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky. There, I've said it. These new democratic leaders don't impress me as much as the old Soviet-era dissidents. Yeah, I get it that I'm old and out of touch. But the morals of SOS were indisputable and impeccable, and Navalny, well… Perhaps it's going too far, as Valeriya Ilyinichna has done, in denouncing Navalny as a "fascist." But it doesn't sit well with me that he has gone to demonstrations with names like "Let's cut off the Caucasus," i.e. end financial subsidies to the North Caucasus or to the Russian March, which seems to be, oh, the thinking-man's nationalists…or something.

I asked a recent Moscow visitor who follows these issues if he had concerns about Navalny, and he didn't, because he said he's an open book, everything he thinks is on his blog. Or in his leaked emails, for that matter. He's a nationalist, but not Putin's style of nationalist and of course not like Zhirinovsky (who has always seemed to be a complete and utter KGB concoction from start to finish, an entire elaborate act put on as a lightning rod to siphon off and make visible certain movements in society.)

So, a nationalist, but not like Putin — well, I don't know if that's an improvement, frankly. Putin's bad enough, but he still has to function within a certain legal framework, if you will, of twisted state-law, but still, a kind of procedure. He has to explain himself on TV, staged though it is.

What do nationalists who have lived largely on the Internet turn out to be like?

To be sure, perhaps the world never got to see what Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky and many lesser known political prisoners might have been like had they had 20 years to function in a social movement in Russia. Sure, the world got to see how Sharansky functioned in various ministerial jobs in Israel. Sakharov was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet for a time before his death. But would they have all remained as liberal and thoughtful, confronted with the complexities of modern life? Perhaps it's easy to idealize them, but the main thing about those men is that they were able to suffer really severely for their beliefs — years of exile, years of imprisonment. They were really grounded in human rights, in the idea of fighting for your own rights, and other people's rights, for "our freedom, and yours." Fighting against corruption of people in high places, sometimes tacitly egged on or paid for by this or that force in society looking to run kompromat on their enemies, well, it's not quite the same thing. In fact, it's quite different than a human rights movement. And I think we'll be seeing more of why that's the case.

I'm not sure Internet people will be willing to do that.

4. Can you trust people on the Internet who pledge to show up? We'll see! Maybe so. 30,000 are planned in the permit, and I wonder what authorities will do if 40,000 or 50,000 show (I doubt it will be more). But more to the point, what if it's only 15,000? That's still a lot, given that a year ago or so, we were talking about the several dozen or a few hundred at the most who would show up for the monthly "31" demonstrations.

More to the point, show up to do…what, exactly? Dude, where's my vote? My vote for what? Just Russia? Or…what? PARNAS, that was never even registered? (And we had to hear A Good Treaty endlessly snark on that question, as if they really had no right to register.)

I'm not so sure Just Russia is a terribly big improvement over Putin, but surprise me.

I can't help thinking of that story found by the Englishman who covered the revolution in 1917. He went to the countryside and asked the peasants what they thought about the "Revolutsiya". It was a strange Latin word. Perevorot ("the turnover") was the usual Russian word. The peasant thought awhile, and then asked about this "Revolutsiya": "Is that when the pig turns from one side over to the other?"

5. OK, so they get 30,000 really active people who all pledge to reform and revivify political life, then what? Well, they they have that Russian boloto, the swamp, the people who are uninvolved and don't want to become involved, or find it easier to say "against all" than to identify what they are for. I see all kinds of people on Facebook and Live Journal trying to instruct each other to be positive and flexible and creative and prepared for the worst and make it different "this time" than it always is. But, well…it's Russia.

Having watched how awful the Occupy Wall Street movement has been, both in its initial cunning manipulation and extremism of the seasoned cadres, then the glomming on of the clueless, then the loons who helped split the camps up into drummers and negotiators, then all the posing and martyrs inciting police brutality, well, I wouldn't wish it on Russia and I certainly don't wish it on my own country. OWS has absolutely nothing about it that I would follow — it is the less than one percent. It is not raising an interesting national conversation, it's inciting class hatred and can't even explain why we have to hate a class that pays 40 percent of the taxes.

The Russian revolt now isn't related to OWS and has different concerns. Perhaps it is more like Tiananmen Square or Tahrir Square in that people want justice, not democracy, order, not freedom. They want fairness, in that they want the vote to be honest. Some of the people are communists who wanted their votes to count for the communists, not for United Russia; some of them are the extreme nationalists of the LDPR that wanted their vote to count for that extremism, not United Russia which is moderate by contrast.  And so on. While there isn't a Muslim Brotherhood or Westernized intelligentsia equivalent as in Egypt, exactly, those same types of divisions exist. What happens when Navalny and Nemtsov and Limonov and Kasparov have to plan something together? Won't it be the usual kasha?

6. The US is too over-eager to see social-media induced change they can believe in. I'm enthusiasic about social media and I think you just go on opposing authoritarians' misuse of it, but I also think there's too much reliance on it and not enough organic face-to-face persuasion of people who don't think as you do — which is what a social movement needs. On the Internet, the arrogant wired youth get away with dismissing people they don't like as trolls, as Tea Party, as out of touch as 1999, as whatever — they mute and ban or delete or ignore. In real life, when you have someone who didn't vote for your party, you can't get away with doing those sorts of things, you have to find out why, you have to really listen to their issues, and you have to persuade them.

I am made uneasy by the whole Hillary Clinton Internet freedom thing and Lavrov's vehement response to it. That is, I'm not upset at Hillary for having the policy, as Evgeny Morozov might be, but I think there were probably ways to pre-anticipate some of the static and backlash and work in the answers for it — in the way the LGBT speech pre-anticipates all the "Western invention stuff" and knocks it out, right within the speech, by pointing to all the African countries that accept gay rights.

In fact, another red flag for me about this whole new Russian social-media revo thing is that Evgeny Morozov is strangely silent. He isn't denouncing Hillary. He's not denoucing Navalny. He's not doing anything. So perhaps these are the droids he was looking for. And I'm very certain that any droids Zhenya is looking for, especially if he is 30 kilometers from the action, are ultimately anything like the sort of truly open and liberal society I'd want to live in. Why isn't there a huge Foreign Policy article denouncing Golos' Ushahidi clone, like Haystack, or denouncing fake Twitter or Live Journal revolutions? Or why isn't there even a tweet saying that it's all ephemeral because the Kremlin will prevail? Answer: because what's coming, is something that Morozov will embrace as authentic — and that's why we have to worry.

The entire McFaul (Malia)-Surkov thing really becomes absurd, doesn't it? When you think that either it is entirely OBE'd by in fact Russians taking their "civsoc 2.0" technology really seriously, going beyond their American patrons, or in fact Surkov is cunningly waiting in the wings just to co-opt the entire thing.

And I do believe that is what we will be seeing — a massive and successful cooptation effort. There may be brutal force used on some, to isolate them and scare those who might become radical — much the way as it was done in Belarus. There will be just letting off steam judiciously, perhaps letting the march proceed and then blaming some extremists for some excesses, but then expecting it all to eventually dissipate as people go back to their (now back online) blogs.

There *might* be a massive show of force with an Internet black-out (in Belarus, the government hijacked all the opposition sites and made them refer to state sites, or shut them off) but the safest thing to do with Internet people is ignore them. A majority of Russian people are not online.

It's been interesting to follow the campaign of Alena Popova — the Silicon Valley girl who held the tech start-up meetings, went with Michael McFaul on a faith trip to Skolkovo with leading US tech people; friend even of the spy Anna Chapman. Yesterday, she was going to the McFaul-Surkov meetings and babbling about technology platforms and connections and empowerment and blah blah. Then she decided to run for election, and had to go out to the hinterlands to talk to people. Then she got in a demonstration and an OMONevts knocked her to the ground and kicked her, and showing her candidate's badge had no effect on him.

In short, the lovely Alena got a taste of what Russia has been like for people in the small opposition or human rights movements or national rights movements for the last 50 years (and of course, the Stalin/Lenin terror before that). And it was interesting to me to see if this would become a new generation of dissidents radicalized by Putin's thuggery. Maybe so.

7. I don't think Vkontakte will hold. I'd love to believe in @durov. I'd love to believe that he will go on defying the povestki  from the prokuratura, and tell his fans that he will not shut down their groups that are critical of United Russia.

But Vkontakte shut down Andrei Sannikov's group of 8,000 supporters within a day of his arrest. It was shameful and disgusting. I wrote to them — others did. They felt no shame. They made no announcement. They didn't explain themselves. Keeping their service and their revenue was more important. That shows me what they are made of, quite frankly.

Maybe for his own Russians, "svoi," Durov might keep the servers from being shut down. How? DDOS attacks seem as common as the cold in Russia. Good luck. And I'm not sure they won't really knuckle him and he will tell himself, better to keep the service open at least for some things, some communications and connections, than risk the whole thing over a few anti-government groups. That's how the line will go.

Again, I'd like to be surprised about this — I don't think I will be.

Here's the thing. A Russia run by people like Alena Popova or even Navalny would be a Russia better than one run by Putin or even Medvedev (Gazprom). But it won't be a Russia that changes its position on Kosovo or Iran one iota. It won't be a Russia that suddenly loses its ambivalence about America and changes its nuclear policies drastically. It won't be a Russia that will wince at the thought of kicking out 10,000 Tajik guest workers or rounding up and disappearing Chechens. The new Internet Russians don't seem to care about these things. Yes, it will be a Russia (a Moscow) where maybe big-wigs can't race by in fancy cars; yes it will be a place where your blog server can't be shut down; yes it will be a place where maybe forests instead of highways run through Khimki. All to the good. But it won't really be about changing the imperial assholery that led to most of Russia's past and present problems — at least, not over night.

Masha Gessen looks at it pragmatically as being the first of an event that eventually, in a few years, who knows how many, maybe 2 or 3 or more, will lead to the demise of Putin. That's a good (and safer) prediction because it does get at the problem of how entrenched Putin is, with not only his own poor people in the sticks, but with Western leaders.

I marvelled how, when Putin first made his announcement, the entire pack of Russianologists and Russian watchers, fell into line — first led by Julia Ioffe, who pointed out sagely that the US would like having Putin because it would be "stability" — and then all kinds of Western government figures and senior analysts fell into line. Sam Charap, call your office. NOBODY credited the Russian people themselves with saying "khvatit!," that's enough. No one will admit that now!

Truly, it was a marvel. It seems to have taken just one sports event where people booed Vova to get the ball rolling. But did it really roll very far?