Vladimir Putin, rather suddenly, is shifting from Good Czar to Bad Czar in the minds of the Russian people. A telltale sign—even more startling than growing street demonstrations against his rule—was the jeers that greeted his appearance at a recent martial-arts fight in Moscow. Putin, as his image makers have incessantly reminded since their man scaled the Kremlin heights eleven years ago, is an ardent sportsman with a black belt in judo. The mostly-male throng at the “no rules” fight was supposed to be his kind of he-man crowd—and until now, it has been.

The possible downfall of the autocratic Putin—now prime minister, with plans to return to the presidency in elections in March—might look like an opening for the forces of liberalism in Russia. Putin, after all, is their bête noire—and it is the liberals, more than any other faction in Russia, who have steadfastly and courageously, at cost to their lives, pointed out the endemic corruption and the abuses of power at the core of his rotten regime. The crowds now chanting “Putin is a thief!” are echoing a staple liberal refrain.

But a post-Putin era is unlikely to be a liberal one. Russian liberalism—which identifies itself with Western-style democracy—has a tepid mass following, its ranks consistently overestimated over the last twenty years by ever-hopeful Western governments, analysts, and journalists. And the current groundswell of protest, while promising on the surface, looks more like a popular rejection of a strongman who has overstayed his welcome—not like a rejection of the model of strongman rule.

IN THE MOST RECENT parliamentary elections, in which Putin’s United Russia party snagged a woeful (though still largest) share of about half the vote, the liberal Yabloko party just managed to crack 3 percent. (The Communists, in second place, got about 19 percent.) Yes, the election was something less than “free and fair” and yes, Team Putin, since 2000, has routinely stigmatized Yabloko as a foreign, anti-Russian presence. But even at the peak of its influence, in the early 1990s, just after the crack-up of the Soviet Union, Yabloko never got more than 8 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, the ascendant force in Russia is a decidedly illiberal nationalism—uglier, in fact, than anything Putin himself has offered. The most popular political slogan in the nation is the noxious “Russia for the Russians”—backed by some 60 percent of citizens in opinion polls. The resentment behind that slogan is directed at non-ethnic Russians from the Caucasus region of Russia and at dark-skinned immigrants from former Soviet Republics, particularly in Central Asia. Such peoples are blamed for crime, for breeding too fast (relative to ethnic Russians), for much that ails a stagnant, unhappy society.