By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
MOSCOW — Free after a 15-day prison term, the opposition blogger Aleksei Navalny moved quickly on Wednesday to use his growing celebrity to promote a huge antigovernment protest, exhorting “people across the country” to turn out on Saturday and register their anger against United Russia, the party of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
Greeted by a throng of supporters and camera crews outside the detention center on the outskirts of Moscow where he was released in the middle of the night in a snowstorm, Mr. Navalny held an instant news conference on the street, pointedly attacking Mr. Putin, who is seeking to return to the presidency in elections to be held in March.
“He won’t be a legitimate president,” Mr. Navalny said, wearing a blue Abercrombie and Fitch jacket but standing hatless in the cold. “What will happen on the fourth of March, if it will happen, will be an illegal succession to the throne.” Supporters gave him a bouquet of white roses and some chanted his name stressing each syllable, “Na-val-ny! Na-val-ny!”
Mr. Navalny, who has roused many people in the opposition movement by branding United Russia as “the party of swindlers and thieves,” was jailed after helping to lead the first public protest against parliamentary elections this month. Foreign and domestic monitors said the voting was marred by fraud, including ballot-box stuffing.
He was convicted of disobeying a police order, and was in prison as street protests continued, including a rally on Bolotnaya Square, not far from the Kremlin, that drew upward of 50,000 people.
Mr. Navalny deftly sidestepped questions about his own political intentions, and his influence — including his ability to spur protesters to take to the streets — is difficult to measure. But it is clearly growing. The number of people following his Twitter posts has jumped to more than 159,000 — an increase of more than 1,000 each day he was in jail.
In his first blog post after being released, he declared Russia to be a changed country — “We got into jail for 15 days in one country and got out of it in another one” — and he predicted that the tide of history had turned against Mr. Putin and the Kremlin.
“The ‘seizure of the Bastille’ scenario will turn,” he said.
In his blog post, Mr. Navalny said that he listened over radio to the events transpiring in Moscow and around the country and watched as prison officials began assembling additional bunks, apparently in anticipation of mass arrests. But the demonstration on Dec. 11 was peaceful, and while there was a huge police presence, no detentions were reported.
“You cannot imagine how cool it was to listen to the radio broadcast from Bolotnaya,” Mr. Navalny wrote on his blog.
But even as he declared that “a great responsibility lies on us” and that “we all have to come to the rallies on the 24th of December and to all subsequent events,” it is unclear that opposition leaders have the momentum, or the coherence, to keep the protests going.
Many of the people joining the protests are middle-class professionals who say they have not been politically active until now. But the protest leadership is composed of officials from an array of different groups, including Communists, nationalists, social Democrats, Western-minded liberals, religious groups and some fringe advocacy groups.
Although these groups have found common cause in protesting the elections and demanding government reforms, their leaders are often mired in infighting. They found themselves at odds this week after the publication of telephone recordings in which Boris Y. Nemtsov, a veteran leader of the Solidarity movement, could be heard calling his counterparts “scum” and “half-wit.” He also derided middle-class protesters, many of whom were joining opposition demonstrations for the first time this month, as “hamsters and “scared penguins.” The prosecutorial Investigative Committee announced on Wednesday that it would open an investigation into whether the recordings or their publication violated Russian law.
Mr. Navalny made reference to these fissures in his blog post, and sought to minimize them. “The talks about the disagreements and conflicts are much exaggerated,” he said. “There are petty misunderstandings. People are people and this is inevitable.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Navalny or anyone else will be able to unite these forces. And while a permit has been granted allowing a demonstration of up to 50,000 people in Moscow on Saturday, the cold, snowy weather and looming holiday season could dampen participation.
Emerging from the detention center shortly before 3 a.m., Mr. Navalny sought to keep the focus on a single target: Mr. Putin.
“In the parliamentary elections, the strategy was very simple: vote for any party except for the party of swindlers and thieves,” he said. “Now the party of swindlers and thieves has nominated the chief swindler and thief for president.”
He added, “People all across the country have to turn into an exemplary propaganda machine and explain to all the population that this man is a swindler and thief and he cannot be the president of our big and beautiful country.”
After a few more questions, Mr. Navalny’s wife, who had come to pick him up, drove him away, in a silver Mitsubishi sport utility vehicle.
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