MOSCOW — Here is the rub for Vladimir V. Putin: The people who stood outside the Kremlin on Saturday, chanting epithets directed at him, are the ones who have prospered greatly during his 12 years in power. They were well traveled and well mannered; they wore hipster glasses. They were wonky (some held aloft graphs showing statistical deviations that they said proved election fraud). In short, they were young urban professionals, a group that benefited handsomely from Moscow’s skyrocketing real estate market and the trickle-down effect of the nation’s oil wealth.
Maria A. Mikhaylova came to the demonstration in designer eyeglasses and with her hair tied back with a white ribbon, the symbol of the new opposition movement. Ms. Mikhaylova, 35, works in a Moscow bank, and said her goal was not to upend Mr. Putin’s government. “We don’t want any violence,” she said, but rather to compel the political system to take account of the concerns of people like her.
“I work a lot, and I’m doing all right,” she said. “And I could be doing a lot of other things with my weekend than standing here.”
It is a paradox, but one that has been documented by social scientists: the residents of Moscow and other large cities tend to express greater frustration with Prime Minister Putin as his government has helped make them wealthier. One explanation is the high level of public corruption here, which threatens new personal wealth. A second is a phenomenon seen in Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, that economic growth can inadvertently undermine autocratic rule by creating an urban professional class that clamors for new political rights.
“This is not a protest of empty pots,” said Viktor A. Shenderovich, a political commentator, on the radio station Ekho Moskvy. “This is political, not economic. The coal miners came out because they were not paid. The people coming onto the streets of Moscow are very well off. These are people protesting because they were humiliated. They were not asked. They were just told, ‘Putin is coming back.’ ”
Nor was it a protest by the intelligentsia, the class that rose up against the Soviet government two decades ago.
On Sunday, President Dmitry A. Medvedev turned to Facebook, the same medium that helped generate the rally of tens of thousands of people, and issued a statement saying that he disagreed with the protesters’ slogans, but that he had ordered an investigation into reports of fraud in the parliamentary elections last week.
“People have the right to express their position, which is what they did yesterday,” Mr. Medvedev wrote Sunday, adding: “I agree neither with the slogans, nor the statements voiced at the protests. Nevertheless, I have ordered checks into all the reports from polling stations regarding the compliance with the election laws.”
The protesters themselves seemed uncertain about where their effort was heading. But they were giddy nonetheless.
“It is impossible to impede us,” wrote Roman Volobuyev in the online magazine Afisha. “It will be difficult. Some of us will need to change our professions. Some of us will have to do the opposite — finally actually do our job. To build a party without first notarizing it with” the Kremlin’s most influential political strategist, Vladislav Y. Surkov.
“To report the news,” Mr. Volobuyev wrote. “To file lawsuits — thousands of them every day. Coming out with placards and standing in a crowd — I know, it’s a stupid pastime, but we have to do it.”
It must be frustrating for Mr. Putin that those now protesting have enjoyed growing wealth while he has been the country’s predominant figure, first as president and now as prime minister. From 2000, the year he assumed the presidency, until 2008, wages, adjusted for inflation, grew at an average of nearly 15 percent a year. But while salaries are still rising, they are increasing much more slowly today — at an average of 1.3 percent per year since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008, according to data compiled by Citibank.
And as they become wealthier, residents of cities are prone to venting their frustration with the political system.
In a 2010 study of Muscovites’ political leanings, Mikhail E. Dmitriyev, president of the Center for Strategic Development, a research organization in Moscow, zeroed in on real estate. Property values in Moscow tripled from 2002 until 2010 — significantly raising residents’ net worth but not their satisfaction with the government, because it also raised the stakes in real estate lawsuits that are typically handled in notoriously corrupt courts.
“In Moscow, rising incomes correlate with respondents’ saying discontent is rising,” Mr. Dmitriyev wrote. Moscow and other cities, he wrote, are incubating a hostile population, especially of young men.
“These are five million individuals dangerously concentrated within a 10-mile proximity around the Kremlin,” he wrote.
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