This morning’s Moscow News urged anybody attending the anti-Putin protest to eat lots of food before venturing out into the -20 temperatures. So I started my day at the Starlight diner, loading up on bacon and pancakes, in the company of Arkady Ostrovsky – a friend and fellow journalist.

The march set off from October Square – just underneath the last surviving statue of Lenin in Moscow. The demonstrators are usually referred to as the “Moscow middle-class” – and there were certainly some chic fur-coats and fancy phones on display. But ideologically, they were a very diverse group.

Vladimir Putin’s public appearances are always interestingly theatrical. His performance yesterday at the Russia Forum, here in Moscow, was characteristically peculiar. At times, Putin was all swagger. At other times, he seemed rather uncertain. At one agonising point, he lost his place in his notes. I was told later that this only lasted for ten seconds. It felt like ten minutes.

What was most interesting, however, was his interaction with the foreign visitors, who had the dubious privilege of sharing the stage with him. (I was in the audience.) Putin was clearly keen to show off his intellect. He argued at length that the world’s economic problems were a crisis of over-production. This sounded to me like re-heated Leninism. Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor, sharing the stage with him, fairly politely refuted the “over-production” argument – which I’m not sure you are meant to do, when the Tsar is outlining how the world works.

The Russian winter has helped the country to repel foreign invaders, from Napoleon to Hitler. Might it now also help Vladimir Putin to hang onto power?

I have often hesitated over whether to describe Russia as a democracy. Yes, the country has elections. But so much about the political system seemed to be rigged: from the harassment of the political opposition, to the slavishly favourable coverage given on television to Vladimir Putin and the United Russia party. There were also frequent rumours of ballot-box stuffing during elections. But, whatever the flaws of Russian democracy, it is robust enough to have delivered a genuine slap-in-the-face to Putin’s United Russia party, which looks as if it could well lose its majority in the Duma, after the elections today.