A good Guardian newsfeed on the developments in Moscow as demonstrators are arrested gives us this:

Andrei Buzin, an election expert at Golos, said that the falsifications were not widespread enough to have left Putin with less than 50% of the vote and require a run-off, but the vote was still skewed. "I wouldn’t call these elections free or fair," Buzin said.

This is an important point. It is scarcely surprising that there have been crass abuses in an election on this scale, and plenty of them. But they did not happen (apparently) on a scale big enough to matter, ie to the point of seriously calling into question the strong Putin first-round victory.

In other words, Putin won because many millions of Russians really did vote for him and not for any of other candidates who in their different ways did offer alternative policies for Russia (some of them insane). That gives the result a substantive legitimacy which can not be wished away.

That’s the reality.

Another reality is that unless something utterly extraordinary happens, protests against this result in Moscow and elsewhere will not build up into a significant Putin-threatening nationwide movement. Too many Russians either don’t care, or if they do care prefer Putin to carry on.

The threat to Putin’s position (if there is a threat) comes rather from a growing sense among the intellectual elite in Moscow and elsewhere that Russia is underperforming and letting itself down, above all through corruption. But even then a goodly proportion of those intellectuals will favour radical ‘nationalist’ solutions to these problems rather than more ‘Western-style’ pluralism and transparency.

If there is ever to be a showdown which leads to Putin’s untimely fall from power it’s much more likely to be in the long, dark Kremlin corridors within the ruling establishment, rather than a doomed attempt by Russian protesters to be Western Occupiers or Ukrainian-style Orange revolutionaries.