Few people, least of all Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — who plans to return to Russia's presidency on March 4 — could have imagined last December that Russians would, for the first time in 20 years, wake up and rally in their tens of thousands against the government. Unlike the Arab Spring rebellions, the driving force behind the ongoing protests is not Russia's poor and disadvantaged, but rather the country's rising urban middle class. That is an important difference, for, historically, successful democratic transitions have almost always required a politically mobilized middle class.