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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud.

Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Oscar Redmondson, I'm on the podcast this week.

Firstly, more mad than Vlad also says Owen Matthews as he evaluates Russia's ultra-nationalist threat.

Then, Cindy Yu reads her review of The Backstreet's, a new book by Perthart Tarson, before Alicia Healy tells us that the Queen's handbag was her secret weapon. Up first, Owen Matthews.

Russia without Putin was the cry of Muscovites who turned out to protest against Vladimir Putin's

return to the presidency for a third term back in December 2011.

Crowds 100,000 strong chanted their opposition on Moscow's academician Sakhar of Prospect,

as symbolically named a venue as you could wish for, as riot police stood calmly by.

There was anger in the crowd, but there was hope too, not least because the massive protest was officially sanctioned.

One after another, prominent opposition politicians such as Ilya Yashen, Boris Nizov and Alexei Navalny denounced Putin from a stage

provided by the city authorities. Today, the memory of those protests seems to belong to a

different age of Russia. Yashin and Navalnyer are in jail.

Njomtsov was shot dead.

Since the beginning of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, street protests by a single person,

let alone 100,000, have become illegal.

Since 24th of February, some 16,000 people have been arrested for protesting,

including one woman near Red Square who was detained for holding up a piece of paper reading

two words implying nirte vinyer, no war, and another for brandishing a paper that was completely blank.

...