Aleksei Navalny, the shareholder-activist-blogger who helped stoke the rallies against you, said to me that nothing spurred the protests more than the daily experience of Muscovites having to sit in traffic while a car with a flashing blue light carrying some Putin crony behind tinted glass speeds past. “It is all about dignity,” said Navalny. “Who are these people? Why don’t they care about our rights? It doesn’t matter at all how good a career you build. You will stand in this traffic, and these people and their sons will drive past you with their blue lights.”

Image Thomas L. Friedman Credit... Josh Haner/The New York Times

Mr. Putin, you have substantial achievements. During your first eight years as president, starting in 2000, you stabilized a collapsing Russia and oversaw the emergence of a big urban middle class. Admittedly, you didn’t achieve this with kid gloves, and it was attended with widespread corruption and fueled by oil exports. But enough trickled down so that a real middle class of professionals and entrepreneurs emerged. They are your accidental political offspring — “maybe the first independent political class in modern Russian history,” says Max Trudolyubov, the editorial page editor of the Vedomosti newspaper — and now they want a voice in their future.

Have you spoken lately to Mikhail Dmitriev, the president of the Center for Strategic Research? He has been doing focus groups since 2009, which I am told your aides were shown but didn’t believe. The anti-Putin protests, Dmitriev found, were not driven by the unemployed but rather by “the highly skilled part of the Russian population” that has come to feel as though “Russian society is a two-lane highway, with one lane for the privileged individuals in proximity to state power,” with its own laws or lack of them, “and one lane for the rest of the population.”

Beginning in 2009, says Dmitriev, his focus groups all started indicating that this new “wealthy, self-respecting middle class,” felt that “they are not recognized as deserving individuals and entitled to be treated with equal rights of everyone else.” One phrase, he says, “suddenly appeared all over the country: ‘We are not cattle.’ ” This, he says, is when he realized that “this is a matter of dignity and self-respect.”

This struggle between you and your accidental offspring will play out over a long time. But, good sirs, have no doubt about this: politics is back in Russia. Watch out. You, Mr. Putin, will surely win the March presidential election, predicts Dmitriev, “but in a weakened way.” The Putin brand is declining, he says. “The trend is downward. This will ensure that Putin is a weak president with declining support.”