The picture shows a little boy sitting on a bicycle in front of a wall of Russian police.
The New Yorker and Foreign Policy magazine correspondent Julia Ioffe snapped the photo with her iPhone during violent protests by anti-Putin demonstrators on the day before Putin's inauguration, ABC News reports. She tweeted the photo to her more-than-6,000 followers with a reference to Tiananmen Square.
Ioffe was referencing the huge pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989, iconized by a photograph of one man standing still in front of a row of tanks.
At least 20,000 people rallied Sunday at Moscow's Bolotnaya Square in protest of Putin’s election.
Violence erupted as the protesters marched toward the Kremlin and police fought back with clubs, injuring several people and leading to more than 400 arrests, reports the Associated Press.
Anti-Putin protests began when the sidelined leader, who was serving as Russia's prime minister at the time, announced he intended to return to the presidency, an office he held from 2000 - 08.
Putin’s easy victory in March despite accusations of ballot box stuffing and government corruption sparked more protests, showing the public’s changing sentiment toward the long-time leader. Demonstrations became violent as Putin’s inauguration approached.
Ioffe was at the scene when she glimpsed the powerful image of the young boy lingering on his bicycle in front of a daunting line of Russian police wearing helmets holding weapons.
"In the era of Twitter and Facebook, [images] become instantly iconic," Ioffe wrote Monday in a Foreign Policy magazine article on the Moscow protests.
Demonstrations continued Monday during Putin’s inauguration and more than a hundred more people were arrested.
In central Moscow hundreds of young people are still camped out to protest the goverment.
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