Putin's other big asset was a divided and irrelevant opposition. He has kept it that way. The biggest party, the Communists, is still led by Gennady Zyuganov, who has been losing elections since the mid-1990s. Potentially more serious challengers, such as the charismatic chess champion Garry Kasparov, have been hamstrung by constant harassment when they want to campaign, and portrayed in the media as foreign-backed dilettantes. Several of the parties, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky's misnamed Liberal Democrats (clownishly extreme nationalists who dependably vote for the Kremlin line), exist solely to siphon off support from any real political force that might try to occupy the same niche.

The unique constellation of popular sentiment and economic circumstance that made all this possible is now changing — irreversibly. It is not just that the stunts that once impressed Russians now jar and irritate them. A recent example was a Black Sea diving trip where Putin "happened" to discover two antique amphorae on the sea-bed. A shame-faced archaeologist later admitted that the trophies had been carefully placed there for PR reasons. Though Putin is still the least unpopular politician in Russia, he can no longer appear before a crowd at a big sporting or cultural event without being booed. This became humiliatingly clear at a martial arts contest in Moscow last November, where Putin took the microphone to congratulate the winner and received a public roasting, with boos and catcalls that even the pliant official media struggled to disguise.

Secondly, the ghosts of the 1990s no longer spook the voters. For years, the idea of a weak Russia being looted by spivs and their foreign accomplices resonated powerfully with voters. They had seen their meagre savings vanish in the inflationary frenzy of the Soviet collapse. Their pathetic wages and pensions were paid late. Privatisation gave them worthless vouchers, while enriching a narrow class of tycoons. That experience discredited the whole idea of democracy (and the state propaganda machine under Putin ensured that the connection remained in many voters' minds). It also did not help that many senior opposition figures, such as the otherwise impressive Boris Nemtsov, or the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, were inextricably linked in voters' minds with the scams and sleaze of the 1990s. 

But that has changed. Now, stagnation, not instability, riles the voters. It seems intolerable that the tired, visionless Putin and his jowly grey cronies will run Russia for at least another 12 years. The constitution, changed while he has been taking a turn as prime minister and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev keeps the presidential seat warm for him, allows him two more terms, now extended from four to six years. A generation of Russians will have grown up under Putin's exclusive tutelage. In Russia's thriving consumer society, people have got used to choice and excellence in their private lives; now they want it in public life too.