The Russian awakening I never saw coming

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My colleague Jeffrey Simpson has a tradition I admire. Every December, he looks back on and owns up to the errors of judgment he made in his national affairs column over the previous 12 months.

The Worldview blog is too new to have traditions, but I thought I'd borrow from Jeffrey after a remarkable few weeks in Russia.

On Sept. 25 – after watching the assembled supporters at Moscow's Luzhniki Sports Palace clap enthusiastically for President Dmitry Medvedev's announcement that he would step aside so that his predecessor and mentor Vladimir Putin could return to the presidency – I declared it to be the death of Russian democracy.

"Saturday afternoon, at a political rally in Moscow's Luzhniki Sports Palace, Russia's two-decade experiment with democracy came to an end. A different, more authoritarian, system with only a mirage of choice, is now firmly in place," I wrote that day.

"Russia's new political model is often called Putinism, after the man who built it and who will soon return as its unequivocal head. Elections are still to be held, and Putinism is far freer in most aspects than the totalitarianism that Russians lived under for most of the Soviet era. But it is a one-man show, completely dominated by Vladimir Putin, the man who served as Russia's president from 2000 to 2008, and who is now primed to return to the Kremlin after a token four years as prime minister."

I was right about Mr. Putin's intention, but wrong about how Russians would respond to it. After 12 years of silently accepting the argument that the sometimes chaotic country needed a strongman like Mr. Putin to rule it, a majority cast their ballots for the opposition in a Dec. 4 parliamentary election. Afterwards – as evidence emerged that the ruling United Russia party's total had been inflated by widespread ballot-stuffing – they took to the streets to demand a new and fairer vote.

Instead of marking the end of Russian democracy, the Sept. 24 meeting at Luzhniki may eventually be looked back on as a moment that kindled a rebirth of competitive politics in the country.

The tens of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities since Dec. 4 don't themselves represent a serious threat to Mr. Putin's hold on power. But the feeling they embody – the sense that Russians want to be consulted about the direction of their country – has cast doubt on a power transfer that was designed and announced without first considering how the public would respond.

Polls suggest the ex-KGB agent has suffered a sharp drop in support over the past few months, although he still remains the country's most popular politician. After being able to claim for most of the past decade that he had the backing of two-thirds of the population, Mr. Putin's approval rating is now at 41 per cent and falling.

It now appears that Mr. Putin may garner less than 50 per cent of the vote in the March 4 presidential election, meaning his trip back to the Kremlin – initially expected to be almost uncontested – may involve a second-round runoff against whichever candidate claims the second-largest share.

The opposition, so far, remains deeply divided and unable to decide on a candidate that would have the mass backing to seize the opportunity that Mr. Putin's declining popularity presents.

The collection of liberals, nationalists, communists, socialists and anarchists that have taken to the streets in recent weeks agree on little other than the need to stand up to Mr. Putin.

Protest leaders will try again to build momentum and unity on Saturday, when more than 30,000 people have already signalled via a Facebook page that they plan to join a rally on Prospekt Sakharov (named for the famous Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov) in central Moscow. The expectation is the protest will surpass the estimated crowd of 50,000 that gathered Dec. 10 on Bolotnaya Square for the biggest demonstration Russia has seen since Boris Yeltsin confronted parliament in 1993.

What has been more amazing for me than the size of the rallies has been the fact that Russians – the majority of whom seemed almost disinterested for the past 12 years as Mr. Putin clamped down on freedom of speech, persecuted political opponents and even cancelled the election of regional governors – have become politicized again.

During a four-hour train trip I took Monday from St. Petersburg to Moscow, it seemed as though everyone around me was talking politics. It's been the same at the dinners I've had with old Russian friends. Some are loudly in favour of the protests, others worried about what they saw as the lack of trustworthy figures beyond Mr. Putin, who has been either the country's president or prime minister since 1999. Few disagree with the opposition's central claim that Mr. Putin's government is now riddled with corruption that is holding the country back.

The whole conversation is a shock to this former Moscow correspondent (I lived here for three years in what could be called the early Putin era). I had become used to Russians caring little for politics, other than to occasionally lament the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite Mr. Putin's claims, this is not (yet) a "colour revolution" like those seen in neighbouring Georgia and Ukraine in the early 2000s.

But it is an awakening. And one that I – like the Kremlin – never saw coming.