Facebook proved it Saturday by blocking an announcement inviting Muscovites to attend a January rally in support of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who is about to be sentenced to a long prison term on trumped-up charges.

Ever since Navalny emerged as the most credible leader of Moscow’s failed “Snow Revolution” of 2011 and 2012, he has been hounded by Russia’s law enforcement agencies.

Last year, when he was sentenced on trmped on charges in a lumber case, between 5,000 and 10,000 Muscovites assembled opposite Red Square to demand his release. This time, Navalny’s supporters are taking no chances and trying to organize a rally for Jan. 15, when the sentence is due to be announced.  About 12,500 people indicated they would attend before Facebook blocked the announcement for Russia-based accounts and, as users later reported, even for some people based overseas if they listed a Russian city as their birthplace.

The move was a godsend to Volkov and other Navalny sympathizers. The rally became a kind of international cause celebre after Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, tweeted about the blockage:

Twitter refused to block tweets announcing the Jan. 15 rally. It merely forwarded the authorities’ complaints to the posters. It would not do for Facebook to appear more pliable than its competitor. Second, both Twitter and Facebook have audiences of a little more than 10 million in Russia, a tiny share of their worldwide user base, and their revenues from the Russian market hardly even register on the corporate ledgers.

None of these three considerations would even have come up if Facebook hadn’t blocked the original event announcement. What if Facebook is doing significant business in a country, its authorities have not fallen foul of Washington, and Twitter is, for reasons of its own, complying with requests for the removal of certain content? Then will it be possible to organize a protest using the platform?

Opposition activists everywhere must now assume that they need more reliable ways to organize online.

As for the U.S.-based Internet companies, after Edward Snowden’s reports of their cooperation with U.S. intelligence, they are already widely mistrusted.

Russia’s immediate first task is to stabilize the value of its currency, ease pressures on its international reserves and restore normal functioning of its banking system. The Russian government, together with its central bank, has made progress on this score by substantially raising interest rates, injecting liquid assets into its banking system and working to persuade Russian exporters to surrender more of their dollar proceeds.

Yet measures are only temporary stabilizers, not long-term solutions. They need to be quickly supplemented by cuts in the government budget and the adoption of pro-growth measures that alleviate the dangers of what is already an ugly outlook.

The second issue relates to Russian’s operating environment. Oil prices will not rebound quickly from their stunning decline. Russia will suffer a meaningful fall in foreign earnings and also see less direct outside investment to support its energy sector. Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin is giving the West no reason to lift sanctions that have gradually and effectively put pressure on the Russian economy.

The third task relates to Russia’s access to an “external balance sheet” that is, a large source of outside funding.

Most emerging economies in crisis — be they in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe or Latin America — have required either the reality or the perception of sizable external financing to support adjustments in domestic policies. This has normally come in large part from an International Monetary Fund program that, in addition to providing direct financial support, brings in other official funding and private capital.

Russia is unlikely to secure help from the IMF or other credible outside sources. Instead, it has no choice but to rely on its own $400 billion buffer in international reserves to meet multiple objectives: stabilizing the currency, securing payments on its foreign debts, restoring liquidity to its banking system, alleviating the effects of a huge contraction in imports, slowing capital flight, and securing refinancings and new loans.

The experience of prior emerging-market crises suggests that to restore durable economic and financial calm, Russia needs to do a lot more.  It would need to change course on Ukraine, open the way for constructive re-engagement with the West, and secure external funding.

We can expect alternating periods of financial dislocation and temporary calm. They will be accompanied by credit-rating downgrades, a worsening economy, higher inflation, controls on imports and capital flows, and shortages. In other words, Russia faces an especially dark winter.  (But never underestimate Putin, who will make every effort not to go down in history as a loser.)

The word “cycle” conjures up images of waves and seasons, but the business cycle isn’t a regular cycle.

There’s an obvious upward trend to this line. But take a look at the recessions (the gray areas on the graph). Do you see temporary bumps, followed by the return to a trend? Or shifts in the trend itself? Or both? As hard as it is to make that call using the naked eye, it’s equally hard to do using mathematical tools.

One traditional method, pioneered by the Nobel-winning macroeconomist Ed Prescott, is called the Hodrick-Prescott Filter, or H-P Filter. Basically, an economist just picks a time horizon — say, three months, or five years, or 20 years — that he thinks represents the business cycle, and the H-P Filter will separate the squiggly line into a cycle and a trend.

But there are some big problems with this method. Roger Farmer, a macroeconomist at the University of California, Los Angeles, expresses his frustrations.

 [Prescott] proposed that we should evaluate our economic theories of business cycles by how well they explain…the wiggles. When his theory failed to clear the 8ft hurdle of the Olympic high jump, he lowered the bar to 5ft and persuaded us all that leaping over this high school bar was a success…

Keynesian economics is not about the wiggles. It is about permanent long-run shifts in the equilibrium.

In other words, modern macroeconomic theories all assume that recessions are temporary — that they don’t permanently damage the economy’s productive potential. If that assumption is wrong, then most modern macroeconomic theories are barking up the wrong tree.  It might mean that government needs to engineer a boom to undo the effect of a slump.

Some macroeconomists, such as Greg Mankiw and John Campbell of Harvard, have been presenting evidence  to this effect since the 1980s.

In fact, the evidence is now piling up that the 2008 recession did have lasting effects. Researchers at the Federal Reserve have crunched the numbers and have tentatively concluded that economies don’t usually bounce back on their own. They write:

 The finding that recessions tend to depress the long-run level of output may imply that demand shocks have permanent effects. The sustained deviation of the level of output from pre-crisis trend points to flaws in the way the economics profession models the recovery of output to economic shocks and raises further doubts about the reliance on measures of output gaps to determine economic slack. For policymakers, the results also point to the cost of recessions, especially deep and long ones, and provide a rationale for strong and rapid policy responses to economic downturns.

In general, this is bad news — it means that it may be decades before an extraordinary boom undoes the damage of the Great Recession. But there’s a silver lining, because it also means that the current economic expansion probably isn’t about to die of old age. It may simply be time to stop thinking of the business cycle as a cycle.