"If I'm going to a demonstration," he said, "then I go with friends. Otherwise, it's important not to get paranoid." He casually opened his computer and showed me vicious, profanity-laced threats he has received via his page on vKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site. "This has been going on for five or six years. I'm used to it." He is, of course, one of the formative members of the opposition, one of the stalwarts of protest rallies that for years drew more police than demonstrators and frequently ended in detention.

Ilya Yashin (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters) Ilya Yashin (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

I asked him if he thought the movement had stalled, since fewer people have been attending marches lately than in the heady turbulent months of outrage following the tainted elections to the State Duma last December that turned the opposition into a force for Putin to reckon with. (This was not the first March of Millions that drew only tens of thousands.) After all, since then a raft of new, repressive legislation has been introduced that raises fines on demonstrators and turns libel and slander into a felony, among other things. Perhaps more important, the government has met none of the opposition's demands. Currents of skepticism and discouragement have understandably run through the talk of many of my Russian friends when the subject comes up.

"Well, any movement has its ups and downs," Yashin said. "Some folks are tired, the ones who expected quick results. But quick results are unrealistic." He summed up the changes in fortune of the Soviet-era protest movement, which petered along in the late 1980s -- until 1991's reactionary coup attempt brought a half-million people onto Moscow's streets and effectively broke the Communists' grip on power. "You can't run a marathon in a sprint, you have to pace yourself. We will have the next action in December, since we don't want to tire people out."

So what is the next step? I asked. The Coordinating Council? Which former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov announced at the last demonstration, and which anti-corruption activist Aleksey Navalny has begun promoting on his Live Journal blog?

"Yes. The Coordinating Council will be the legitimate organ of the opposition and will represent the demands of society to the government. Some 30,000 have registered to vote, and we have about 250 candidates for 45 seats. Putin has said there's no one to talk to in the opposition. Well, the Coordinating Council will be the one he can talk to."

But was a council really what's needed to galvanize the Russian masses?

The council was not to be just another committee staffed with that eternal bane of Russia, bureaucrats. "We want to use the council to form a new kind of political culture," Yashin said. "Those who want to be on it must show all the time that they are engaging in politics, not just that they have a well-known name. We have to keep our politicians in shape. It was not for nothing that Navalny said that we have to go to demonstrations as we go to our jobs."