MOSCOW – On a cold and sunny Saturday afternoon, thousands of Muscovites came out to protest the March 4 presidential elections in which Vladimir Putin swept to his third presidential term with more than 63 percent of the vote. It was not the huge, euphoric, smiling crowd that thronged the city's squares in December and February. But it was also not the angry, sullen crowd that had come out to Pushkin Square the day after the election.

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Many hadn't come at all, either because they were tired of coming out -- this was the sixth large protest in three months -- or because they were out of town for a long weekend. Those who did show up seemed deflated. Gone was the electricity in the air, the witty posters. Many had come not because of a new, giddy sense of empowerment that fueled the initial protests, or even out of anger over a crooked electoral system, but because they felt they simply had to.

"If I didn't come today, it would mean that I deserve this government," Elena, a professor at Moscow State University, told me, adding that she was coming to the inexorable conclusion that she wanted to emigrate.

"Without steps to change and enforce the law, I don't see a point in these protests," said another Elena, a young lawyer who was there with her boss. He did not have much faith in the political reforms proposed by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev -- gubernatorial elections and an easing of party registration rules.

"I think that it's important not to lose what we've gained in these months," a white-collar worker in his thirties named Petr said. And yet, he felt the momentum dissipating. "Of course, we're going to keep coming to these protests," he said of himself and his friends, who both work in state-owned television. "But I think this format is starting to feel a little old. I think the protest organizers need to think of something else."

The rally's organizers, for their part, seem to have heard their constituency. "I think that, with this, the three-month cycle [of protests] has ended," journalist and ring leader of the rallies' organizing committee Serguei Parkhomenko told the press. "There will be new events, without a doubt, but only when there is a need for them. We're not going to organize them automatically." Members of the organizing committee have spoken of flash mobs, like last month's Big White Circle, a smiling human chain around the 10-mile circumference of Moscow's Garden Ring road, and events with a more aggressive bent.

And indeed, after a week of soul-searching and post-mortems of "the revolution," the rally felt like the closing chord of a long and ebullient improvisation. Earlier this week, at a press conference held by the Voters' League, organized by several public intellectuals to help train election monitors, writer Boris Akunin -- another central figure in this winter's movement -- declared the "romantic" period of the protests over. A couple of days earlier, the police violently broke up a protest by a few hundred people who tried to stay on Pushkin Square after a permitted mass rally, and Putin congratulated the police on their "professional" behavior. "I think people have understood that they can't charge the OMON with white balloons and ribbons," Akunin said at the press conference, referring to the special police that enforce order at such events, and to the ubiquitous symbols of the protests. "Civil society will begin to develop along a different trajectory, along a trajectory of self-organization, and fighting for victory in local elections," Akunin added.

If past protests were organized around the vague demand of fair elections -- or new parliamentary elections -- and to chant the charged but useless slogan "Russia without Putin," Saturday's rally was centered on thanking election monitors. Tens of thousands of previously politically inactive people, riding the wave of the winter's giddiness, had signed up to monitor elections. More than 80,000 people in Moscow, and more than 130,000 nationwide volunteered for the tedious work of breathing down the necks of members of local election committees -- the cogs in the great machine that would keep falsifying the vote, even when Putin's press secretary declared that it was Putin, first and foremost, who was interested in a clean election. (When I traveled to Irkutsk in the weeks before the election, local party leaders told me the puzzling command from Moscow was victory for Putin in the first round -- that is, over 51 percent -- but no violations.)

Tens of thousands of these people, young and old, and, as one observer pointed out, used to comfort, stayed up till dawn on a Sunday night to make sure the votes were counted properly. Most of my Russian friends had signed up to be observers, many of them later bragged how many votes they had "saved" for one candidate or another. This winter, in other words, tedious but necessary political work has become not only a trend, but a necessity for a lot of these people.

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