ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Mikhail Obozov was in grade school when thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow and helped bring down the Soviet Union. The repressions of the Communist era are like old family stories, droll and sad, told over the kitchen table.
"Of course I don't remember it, but I imagine it like the book by George Orwell, '1984,' " the 21-year-old engineering student said. "The repression of personality. People being brainwashed, turned into state ideologues. Actually, you can draw a lot of parallels between this novel and the situation in Russia right now."
Alarmed at what was happening under the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, Obozov this month launched a student group called Marching Without Putin. One night last week, Obozov and dozens of students and other young activists joined the pensioners who have been swarming Lenin Square here for weeks to protest cutbacks in their social benefits.
Many of the youths said they were angered by bus fare increases, a possible end to military draft deferments and the erosion of democratic freedoms in Russia. Across the snowy square, they bellowed anti-Putin slogans and calls for the government to resign.
"There is no real democracy in Russia, and people who try to resist the power of the authorities are thrown into prison. That's why young people want to have real political rights. People are learning to resist, and that's good," said Alexander Iskrinsev, 20, a law student.
Although turnout was modest, the significance of the St. Petersburg protest and smaller demonstrations in other cities was potentially great. Popular revolutions in nearby Ukraine and Georgia were driven not by traditional political opposition parties, but by large groups of well-organized youths willing to occupy the streets.
The young protesters also did not shy from directing their venom directly at the president. Out of fear, decorum or both, Putin's name usually goes unuttered in public expressions of political opposition in Russia.
"We shouldn't look for scapegoats. The main person who deserves all the blame is Mr. Putin, and every new day of Putin as president pushes citizens farther from a normal life," Maxim Reznik, the 30-year-old head of the pro-democracy Yabloko party in St. Petersburg, said during Tuesday night's protest here.
The handful of student protests do not yet suggest that a youthful opposition is building here comparable to those that toppled Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.
