None of that is enough to paint Russia white. The demonstrators have removed Putin's political legitimacy. But they are too few in number, and too Moscow-based, to remove him before the March 4 election. No candidate offers a real challenge and protests are not yet a battering ram that could open the system and permit a truly free election. The great gulf in Russian politics has always been between the intelligentsia and the narod — the people. The growth of a real middle class is beginning to bridge that gap. But that is the work of decades.

The real question is what happens after the election. In theory, Putin could relaunch himself. Optimists remember bouts of real reforms in the past. It was Putin who pushed through the flat tax (of 13 per cent) in 2001, which has been a huge success. In the same year Russia introduced full private ownership of land, breaking a great collectivist taboo that even predated the Bolshevik revolution. Putin has also nudged Russia towards full membership of the World Trade Organisation. 

But a convincing relaunch seems unlikely. Putin's roots are so deep within the corrupt system he has created that he cannot change it without toppling his own position. The biggest threat would be a free media. It would necessarily ask questions on two devastatingly sensitive topics. Where did the money go? And who authorised the murders of investigative journalists? The web of corruption leads to the very top of the political system. Perhaps even more alarming would be questions about the mysterious apartment-block bombings of late 1999, in which 293 Russians died. The authorities blamed shadowy terrorist groups. But the investigation was perfunctory and the huge beneficiary of the public panic that ensued was the then new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who promptly succeeded the stricken Yeltsin as president. One of the bombings, in the provincial town of Ryazan, was botched — and the culprits turned out to be officers of the secret police, the FSB. Every Russian journalist or politician who has tried to investigate these crimes has ended up in jail, in exile, or dead.

More likely is that Putin's colleagues try to throw him overboard, once the election is safely out of the way. Their own ranks look pretty talentless. Some believe that a bargain is looming with the country's best-known political prisoner, the former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has spent nearly a decade behind bars on bogus fraud charges. In late January he issued a public appeal — not backing the protesters, but urging them to talk to Putin to reshape Russian politics. Khodorkovsky, and perhaps only he, could guarantee a safe exit for the current regime, while at the same time leading Russia to the destiny it deserves: a free, lawful society, at peace with its citizens and its neighbours. That may seem wild fantasy. But so do most things in Russia, until they happen.