BIISK, Russia – The imprisonment of a man who was involved in a traffic accident that killed one of Russia’s best-known politicians triggered protests across the country this weekend, especially among motorists who view the jailing as a chilling failure of the courts to protect average citizens from vengeful authorities.

Outraged supporters of a railway worker, Oleg Shcherbinsky, who was hit from behind last summer by a speeding car carrying the Altai region’s governor, rallied Saturday and yesterday in 22 Russian cities, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok in the Far East. Shcherbinsky was convicted at a closed trial this month and sentenced to four years in a labor colony.

“For the people in power, we are all nobodies,” a 33-year-old railway worker from Mr. Shcherbinsky’s home village outside Biisk, Alexander Kiryanov, said. “After this story, how can anyone believe in justice for the people?”

Nowhere is the privilege – and abuse – of power more visible to ordinary Russians than on the roads, where politicians and bureaucrats, who have special license plates and blue lights for their luxury vehicles, speed recklessly, force other drivers aside, and generally flout the rules. At the same time, ordinary citizens are subject to constant harassment from traffic police, who routinely demand small bribes. These irritants have become the source of open anger because many motorists can easily imagine themselves suffering Mr. Shcherbinsky’s fate.

“We have a caste system on our roads: The elite who do what they want and everybody else who is supposed to get out of their way,” the head of a motorists’ club in Moscow that organized yesterday’s rally in the city, Vyacheslav Lysakov, said. “Those who have power should observe the law and only then demand that everyone else do it.”