Russia's tech-savvy opposition goes old school MOSCOW - The Internet helped power the massive protests that unsettled the Kremlin this winter, but as the tech-savvy opposition movement struggles to expand beyond Russia's biggest cities, leaders are finding that old-fashioned shoe leather is still the best way to spread their message. The lurching realization came this month in the provincial city of Astrakhan, where an opposition mayoral candidate said an election had been stolen from him and went on a hunger strike. Few in the city realized what was happening until protesters stepped back from their blogs and Twitter accounts and instead resorted to methods from an earlier era, using a labor strike and other disruptive theatrics to win quick concessions and to let others in town know their grievances. Now, back home on the Web, protesters are talking about how to build on-the-ground organizations across their country that cast the Internet in only a supporting role. Finding a way to do it will be critical if they are to broaden their appeal beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, which together hold just 11 percent of Russia's 143 million residents, who are spread over nine time zones. If they succeed, they will have made a major strike against the dominance of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his associates, they say. If the protesters fail, they will continue to have difficulty reaching the four in five people whose main source of news is television, from which the protesters remain largely shut out. Putin, who is about to begin a six-year term as president, may have an opportunity to roll back their momentum. "The tactics are simple," said Ilya Yashin, one of the opposition organizers, who once wrote a step-by-step guide to organizing street protests. When you have no opportunity to go on TV, you go and you shake a million hands. Kind machine of propaganda After the fall of the Soviet Union, an irreverent independent media quickly emerged from the rubble to challenge Russia's powerful elites. But when Putin came to power in 1999, he quickly put the country's major television networks back under Kremlin control. The vast majority of the country gets its news from the three main channels - which this month meant that the residents of Astrakhan saw nothing about the opposition hunger strike until it had already been going for four weeks. And 46 percent of Russians say they don't use the Internet at all, according to a March poll by the independent Levada Center, foreclosing any possibility that they might catch a whiff of the discontent that is so rife on forums there. Moscow protest leaders have been talking about the need for better communication as they search for ways to reach people in the provinces. We just need to organize everything and decrease the confusion and miscoordination by 30 percent. And then we will win," Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger and protest leader, wrote on his blog this week. He called on supporters to build a "kind machine of propaganda," his contrast to what he described as an "evil machine of propaganda" that he says the Kremlin possesses with its control of the main sources of news.