By Agencies

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Protests in Russia are taking place against Vladimir Putin's 12-year rule amid signs of swelling anger over a poll won by his ruling United Russia party with the alleged help of widescale fraud.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Russia on Saturday to demand an end to Vladimir Putin's rule and a rerun of a parliamentary election in the biggest popular protests since those that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Protesters waved banners such as "The rats should go!" and "Swindlers and thieves - give us our elections back!" in cities from the Pacific port of Vladivostok in the far east, Perm in Siberia, Arkhangelsk in the Arctic north, in Kaliningrad and St Petersburg in the west, and Karelia in the northwest.

"Nationwide there have been protests in dozens of towns and cities, all across Russia's nine time zones," Al Jazeera's Neave Barker, reported from Moscow.

"They're calling not for revolution, but for political evolution," he said.
 
'End of aquiescence'
 
More than 20,000 people have already gathered on Bolotnaya Square, on an island across from the Kremlin on Saturday, after receiving permission from the authorities for the event.

Opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov, who took part in the protest, said the Russian public "have run out of patience" with the current government.

"Especially in large cities where people are well-educated, well-informed who understand they are not ready to tolerate such lawlessness when they are ignored and their votes are cynically stolen," Kasyanov, who is also a former Russian prime minister, added.
 
Authorities had detained about 1,600 activists over the past few days who had joined unsanctioned rallies against the December 4 vote.

Police said there were at least 25,000 at the Moscow demonstration, while protest organisers claimed 60-80,000.

The opposition is also organising rallies in at least 14 other major cities in a rare outpouring of mistrust in a system put in place by Putin when he first became president in 2000.

A 30,000-strong demonstration would be the largest to hit the Russian capital in 20 years, in what some see as the first warning bell for the leader and his secretive inner circle of security chiefs.

The authorities' decision to permit Saturday's rallies to go ahead nationwide is a first for the Putin era and suggests the Kremlin would prefer to avoid street battles between protesters and the riot police.

"Faced with this kind of opposition, it was very important for the authorities to show that they were allowing some kind of controlled dissent," Barker reported.

Ivan Safranchuk, a Russian political analyst, said: "People will be allowed to protest, but direct political change won't happen."

For Fred Weir, who has been a Moscow correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor for 25 years, the protests recalled the historic demonstrations of 1991.

"What we're seeing here is a game changer," he said.

While the Putin era is not necessarily over, the former KGB leader will have to adjust to sudden assertiveness and democratic aspirations of the generation who grew up under his rule.

"He'll have to take into account that the public mood is no longer acquiescent," he said.

Allegations

Putin's United Russia has been bruised by allegations of corruption, after opposition parties and international observers said the vote was marred by vote-rigging, including alleged ballot-box stuffing and false voter rolls.

The official results of the elections to Russia's Duma showed that the ruling party United Russia lost 77 of its 315 seats, just retaining a small majority.

Barker said there is a widespread view, fuelled by mobile phone videos and accounts on internet social networking sites, that there was wholesale election fraud, and that Putin's party cheated its way to victory.

Putin accepted the vote's outcome but stayed silent about the protests for three days before accusing US secretary of state Hillary Clinton of inciting the unrest by questioning the polls.

He said Clinton's criticism "had set the tone for some people inside the country and given a signal".

Mark Toner, a spokesperson for the US state department, retorted that "nothing could be further from the truth".

Putin has remained Russia's most popular and powerful politician as both president until 2008 and prime minister today - an image he has cultivated with tough talking against foreign powers and warm words for the Soviet past

"I want new elections, not a revolution," Ernst Kryavitsky, 75, a retired electrician dressed in a long brown coat and hat against the falling snow who was protesting in Vladivostok, even though he did not expect Putin to be ousted.