The question of what constitutes democracy did not have time to be hashed out in the Russian public sphere before that sphere began disappearing a decade and a half ago. It was no surprise, then, that the exiles in Vilnius did not have a unified vision of the democracy to come.

Some participants suggested granting the right to vote only to people who are educated and pay taxes. Others debated Russia’s constitutional structure. Should power be taken away from the president and a stronger parliament created instead? Do the country’s problems lie with the Constitution itself, or with the man who has seized the powerful office of president? Who should decide? Russia’s current Constitution was drafted hastily behind closed doors in 1993, following then-president Boris Yeltsin’s bloody crackdown on a rebellious Parliament.

How to ensure that any new Constitution would be more representative? Who will run the country, and how, while such decisions are being made? Even if the Constitution remains unchanged, current electoral laws, and the institutions that enforce them, are unsuitable for the job of creating a democratic government. A transition period is inevitable, and inevitably it will be perilous.

The transition will require a wide-ranging public discussion. But what will be the language of a post-Putin Russia? That is, where will the Russian words for a new country be found? Key concepts have been distorted by misuse and discredited by decades of Soviet and then Putin-era propaganda. “Democrat” has become an insult; “freedom of speech” is invoked to legitimize hate speech even while people are being jailed for expressing their political views. The corruption of language reflects a general lack of trust in democratic mechanisms and widespread dismissal of democratic values.

Then there is the issue of securing the democratic gains that will undoubtedly be won hard, if they are won at all.

How would a Russian democracy protect itself from another hostile takeover from within? Over the last few years, activists have revived talk of lustration, a post-Communist concept that means weeding out certain people from certain offices. Some former Eastern European countries, for example, banned Soviet-era secret-police agents from holding any civic office. Russia opted against lustration back in the 1990s for fear of sowing social division. If it had made a different choice back then, Mr. Putin, as a former K.G.B. agent, would probably have been disqualified from holding state office.

But what should lustration be like? Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the Russian parliament who now lives in Ukraine, has argued for what he calls a “class-based approach.” (Mr. Ponomarev is a Marxist.) In his scheme, people who have risen above a certain rank in the civil service under the current regime would not be allowed to work for a future Russian state. Another approach calls for case-by-case review — which leaves open the question of what deeds should disqualify people from working for the state.