The wave of protests against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Russia brings back memories of another winter when Moscow stood poised for change. And it has made me wonder whether at long last, the cynical and apathetic Russians I met back then have been finally replaced by a new generation ready to fight again.

A little over 20 years ago, watching the end of the Soviet Union from my perch in the freezing center of Moscow, I chatted with a Western journalist who had been based in the USSR for many years. As we witnessed the seemingly-sudden collapse of a once-mighty superpower, he pondered his own future. He had covered the top foreign policy story of that era: the Cold War contest between the U.S. and the Soviets. But Russia, he predicted, was about to become just another Third World country, a poor backwater. Covering Moscow now would amount to a demotion.

My jaded colleague exaggerated. Russia will forever remain an important state on the world stage. But the two decades since the end of Communism have proven the cynics right in many respects.

Revolution fatigue meant that the end of the USSR did not come wrapped in high hopes for a thriving democracy. The crumbling Soviet system was not toppled by people expecting to build a utopia. It fell when Russians, like other Eastern Europeans, recognized that the search for utopia had brought disaster. In the final days of 1991, as the Soviet flag was lowered one last time from the Kremlin, the Russian people looked beaten, tired and disappointed.

Many fought valiantly, even gave their lives to topple the Soviet regime. But this was a revolution of an exhausted people, who had had enough of changing the world.

For years, their modest expectations proved, if anything, too ambitious. The energetic leader of the anti-Soviet revolution, Boris Yeltsin, underwent an embarrassing public decline into alcoholism. The economy lurched into an ill-advised privatization scheme (advised by Western experts, incidentally) spawning a few billionaires and sending the country through a series of crises that wiped out the savings of those hoping to join the middle class.

One of Yeltsin’s last moves was to bring Putin aboard as his prime minister. Putin quickly took the reins from the fading Yeltsin, and restored a measure of lost dignity to what was left of the empire.

With an iron fist, the former KGB man pulverized an insurgency in Chechnya. And he stabilized the economy with the benefit of strong oil and gas prices.

But Putin also built an empire of corruption and authoritarianism. A few Russians, the so-called oligarchs, amassed great wealth, but nobody was allowed to challenge Putin’s political dominance.

Most Russians have supported Putin, but those who dared challenge him faced horrific ends. Many journalists have been killed under mysterious circumstances.

When Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of the then-oil giant Yukos, started venturing into politics, he quickly found himself and his firm under investigation. Tax agents concocted fraud charges, imposed huge fines, and pushed the company into bankruptcy. In 2005, Khodorkovsky was sent to prison in Siberia.

But the apathy and cynicism of the Russian people may have come to an end.

Russian voters allowed Putin to play games with the system. The democracy charade, in which opposition candidates received no media attention at all and Putin and his men had full-time coverage, went on largely unchallenged.

Russians mostly looked the other way in 2008 when Putin, facing a two-term limit as president, brought in Dmitry Medvedev to take the presidency while he became prime minister.

But something happened last September. When Putin and Medvedev announced they would swap jobs again, many Russians decided they had had enough of looking the other way. The plan, which may well succeed, would give Putin almost a quarter of a century in power. Some democracy!

With people everywhere, from Egypt to Tibet, clamoring for a greater say in the political system, the once apathetic and cynical Russians took to the streets, even as the cruel Russian winter started to set in.

Russians will go to the polls next month, and there is every reason to expect Putin will be elected president for a third time. But the Russian people may have shaken off the self-defeating pessimism that followed their last revolution. Russian history is still being written.