A mass walk led by writers, camping out at night in the city, cat-and-mouse games with the police: Russia's protest movement is trying out novel tactics to keep up pressure on Vladimir Putin.

Political slogans for the moment have been dropped in favour of tea-drinking and discussions in the open air as the protestors seek to test how far the authorities are prepared to let them use their right to assembly.

Police have twice roughly broken up sit-in protests in the centre of Moscow, an action that would have been unthinkable in the Russian capital before the first mass protests sparked by December's parliamentary elections.

But activists picked up the pieces and moved to a new locale, congregating on park benches even after police detained dozens, took the generator that powered the Wi-Fi network, and reportedly confiscated the donation box.

The general feeling of being fed-up with the current political regime and elections widely believed to be fraudulent is not going away, one of the camp's core organisers Yelena Nadezhkina told AFP on a recent evening.

A regular of environmental protests who lived in a camp opposed to logging in a Moscow region forest, Nadezhkina said the sit-in participants don't follow opposition leaders and come from all over the political spectrum.

"Our goal is to show that society can organise without a dictator," she said. "The authorities have taken over our country and they're not letting people live in peace."

The fluid Internet-based protest is a test for Vladimir Putin, who would be taking a major risk if he underestimates the potential of an increasingly creative opposition over his six year term.

Ten thousand people turned up Sunday after detective novelist and opposition supporter Boris Akunin wrote on his blog that he planned to stroll along Moscow's famous boulevard ring with several other writers to see if he was arrested.

He was not.

Letting the crowd march through Moscow and block traffic while outlawing the harmless sit-in show a chaotic approach and lack of a firm position, said political blogger and editor of Russian Journal magazine Alexander Morozov.

"Latest events show that Putin does not fully understand what is going on, his position has not formed," he said. Meanwhile, the protest movement is becoming more varied and trendy, he added.

"The middle class became creative, and political participation became attractive," he said.

A continued crackdown on the peaceful protest movement will only make it less manageable and put its more radical wing in the forefront, observers said.

"A writer's hunch tells me that many street protests will become unsanctioned, and the authorities will be powerless to do anything," Boris Akunin wrote on his blog Thursday. "There will be nobody to fine and sentence."

Tensions between the authorities and the opposition increased after a mass protest rally on the eve of Putin's inauguration which was violently dispersed by police despite earlier being sanctioned by the city hall.

"A lack of dialogue will only bring radicals to protest," Gennady Gudkov, one of the few vehemently anti-Putin members of parliament, cautioned his colleagues on Tuesday.

"Do we not understand that we are on the threshold of major civil conflicts?" the Just Russia party deputy asked the assembly, still dominated by the United Russia party that supports Putin.

The opposition has said the clashes started because riot police left practically no room for the protestors to pass to the square where the rally was to take place, leading to panic and a push against police ranks.

High-ranking police officers in turn blamed the organisers, and investigators are now questioning detained protest leaders Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov as part of a criminal probe into the clashes.

"Fear can stop the protests for some time, but only for some time, and fear can stop some people and only make others angrier," United Russia member and prominent sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya told the Slon.ru website.

"Dialogue is needed, to talk with the protestors," she said. "It's pointless to say that elections were fair when they were unfair."