The police crackdown that ended Monday's post-election rally in Moscow with the arrest of charismatic blogger Alexey Navalny and other opposition leaders is only likely to fuel their discontent. "Russia without Putin!" they chanted. "We are the power here!" But some of those who gathered in Pushkin Square also seemed to be in shock at the scale of Putin's crushing victory. "This isn't fair! They have cheated Russia!" said Alina Koseva, a young graduate who had travelled 1,500 kilometres (932 miles) from Orenburg in Russia's south to join the demonstration. "I want a revolution," said her friend, engineer Aleksey Garo. Putin, who the opposition calls the leader of Russia's "swindlers and thieves", was the focus of the crowd's fury. "Thieves must be in jail!" some of them chanted -- a deliberate echo of Putin's well-known phrase about imprisoned anti-Kremlin oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But others preferred to mock the strongman leader for the tears he shed at his victory rally, several of them holding homemade placards reading "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" -- a reference to the title of an Oscar-winning Soviet-era film. "When Putin was announced as the future president, he cried. But with this placard I am holding, I wanted to say that we don't believe in his tears or his victory," said student Polina Petrunya. She said she hoped that the opposition rallies would eventually force Putin to step down. "I don't think he will serve his six-year term. People won't stand for it; they will change things," she said. Unlike the meticulously choreographed Putin rally on Sunday, where organisers handed out banners with pre-printed slogans, most of the opposition placards were hand-crafted and their satirical messages improvised. Competing flags also testified to a lack of a common political vision apart from anti-Putin sentiment in the fledgling and sometimes anarchic opposition movement, which arose in reaction to alleged fraud during December's parliamentary polls. The hammers and sickles of Communists mingled with banners and posters supporting tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, the liberal Yabloko party or the Left Front. There were even several youths waving flags for the pro-filesharing Pirate Party. Many of the protesters, wearing the white ribbons which have become the symbol of the movement, came from the young, educated middle class which has grown up during the Putin years. But there were older people too, like pensioner Zoya Shakalova, who said that she had witnessed violations at a polling station the previous day "unlike anything I have seen in my life". She said that she believed the younger generation had lost its fear of Putin, once seen as all-powerful and politically unassailable. "The young people are starting to sort things out. They have the Internet and they are getting themselves organised," she said. "They are not afraid of going out on the streets to stand up for the truth." Dozens of protesters were also willing to stand up to the police, holding out in Pushkin Square after most of the crowd went home, until they were dragged away to the waiting police vans. But even those who left calmly ended the rally with a cry of defiance. As they dispersed into the freezing night, groups of policemen at the nearest metro station watched with disbelief on their faces as the platform echoed to the previously unthinkable sound of hundreds of passengers chanting: "Putin -- thief! Putin -- thief!"