Moscow Diary: Hitting the brakes

A crackdown on protesting motorists reveals how the car is intimately linked to Russia's economic fortunes, the BBC's James Rodgers reports.

His diary is published fortnightly.

DRIVEN TO PROTEST

A protest by motorists in Vladivostok was broken up by riot police

Never mind the oil price, just look at the traffic jams.

Last year, and the year before, the streets of the Russian capital were choked in the last two weeks of December.

Muscovites scanned the car number plates knowingly, and moaned about the number of people from outside town who had come in to do their New Year shopping.

This year, there is more traffic than usual - but it feels like much less than the last couple of years.

There must be a fascinating academic study to be done on the history of Russia in the last 20 years, and how it has been affected by the oil price.

The Soviet Union might have lasted longer; Boris Yeltsin might have ended his presidency with some of his earlier popularity still intact; the boom of the Putin presidency might not have been quite so spectacular.

The private car stands at the centre of those last two decades of history: from the legendarily long waiting lists of Communist times to the hundreds of thousands of first-time owners who have come after.

As in many other parts of the world, car ownership is a sign of increasing wealth.

Here in Russia, though, it has become something else too.

Russian motorists have been one of the few groups willing to indulge in prohibited public protest here in the last few years. They have complained about corrupt traffic cops, railed against rising petrol prices.

Now they're driving the demonstrations against the Russian government's response to the financial crisis. Car owners in Vladivostok have rallied against a new tax which will increase the duty on imported cars. They're so far east, so far away from Russia's main manufacturers, that - questions of quality aside - it's simply easier for them to get cars from Japan or Korea.

Prime Minister Putin drove a Mercedes in Sochi in February

The motorists aren't natural revolutionaries but, at a time when the Kremlin seems to be nervous about the prospect of wider protests, theirs is an example the authorities don't want others to follow. Unemployment is growing here. That's likely to continue.

People who have lost their jobs may feel they have little to lose by taking to the streets in a way that few have done in recent years.

Riot police - reportedly flown in from other parts of the country - put an end to the demonstration in Vladivostok. The protesters' example did not go unnoticed.

Moskovsky Komsomolets - one of Russia's leading popular newspapers - cheekily pulled out a quote from a recent speech by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He was explaining how he felt it was wrong to buy imported cars while Russia's manufacturers were forced to cut production. Moskovsky Komsomolets duly reported his words, next to a picture of him at the wheel of