December 2011 will be remembered as a tumultuous month in Russia, if not a seminal one. Observers both Russian and foreign were surprised by the December 4 Duma election, in which United Russia failed to muster 50 percent of the vote despite significant ballot box stuffing and voter fraud. More importantly, in Moscow, St. Petersburg and dozens of other cities across the country, massive post-election protests caught most people—including Russia’s leadership—completely off-guard. 

Perhaps we should not have been so surprised. For several years, Russia has been stagnating, at least politically, and in turn the political system has degraded and society has become demoralized. Vladimir Putin, representing the antithesis of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, raised hopes for many Russians of a more stable and secure future. Indeed, most Russians were ready to close the books on the unhappy, chaotic decade of the 1990s. They longed for stability at home and recovery on the world stage, and Putin got credit for delivering both with the help of the second Chechen war and the soaring price of oil. But as Putin prospered from happenstance during his first two terms as President (2000–08), lately he and his own policies and judgments have suffered from it. The economy is stalled, neo-patrimonial corruption is rife and assaults against human rights and sheer decency are on the rise. Above all, it seems, Putin’s little Potemkin village act with Dmitri Medvedev finally prompted a critical mass of Russians to take umbrage at being manipulated as though they were a bunch of gullible teenagers. When Putin announced on September 24, 2011, that he would reoccupy the presidency in March, according to a deal that had been worked out with Medvedev “several years ago”, that was the last straw. 

After the September announcement but before the December 4 election, Putin was booed by thousands of spectators at a sporting event. Medvedev became the brunt of jokes on the internet and radio and was widely derided for a staged event at Moscow State University. Weeks before the election, polls showed that large numbers of Russian voters were itching for a chance to voice their displeasure with the party in power. On December 4, they scratched the itch, despite efforts by nervous authorities to limit the damage by resorting to old tricks: denying registration to certain opposition parties, perpetrating other administrative abuses and showering disproportionate and favorable media attention on United Russia. Similar efforts during previous Duma and presidential elections were met with general indifference, even a sense of resignation. Not this time, as the most politically dynamic part of the population—the so-called middle class, journalists, the intelligentsia and youth—mobilized as never before. A Levada Center poll of...