My university apparently has access to Financial Times. I'm going to copy and paste the article here for a little while for discussion purposes, then delete it since I don't think I'm actually supposed to rip this information off their page.

Every morning when Svetlana arrives at Susanin Square in the centre of Kostroma, she has to remind herself that she is doing this out of idealism. The soft-spoken 28-year-old is a campaign volunteer for the Russian opposition in regional elections scheduled for this Sunday, and things are not going well.

“People react negatively to us,” says Svetlana as she tries to hand out flyers for RPR Parnas, a party that was co-founded by Boris Nemtsov, the veteran opposition leader shot dead earlier this year. “The relentless propaganda works and people have it in their brains that we are the fifth column.”

A few days ago, two women asked Svetlana why there were Russian flags on top of her stand and suggested that the party should instead fly American ones since it was a US lackey.

Sunday’s elections, in which 16 regions will choose governors and 14 will select parliaments, illustrate just how far president Vladimir Putin has progressed in hollowing out the country’s democratic institutions during his 15 years in power, and how resigned to that the population has become.

“The few who do listen to us say yes, everything you say about the corruption of the regime is right, but nothing is ever going to change, and no matter who rules they will always steal and lie,” says Svetlana. “Nobody believes in elections or that they can change Russia.”

Kostroma in central Russia is the only region where the Democratic Coalition, an alliance of the Progress party of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and RPR-Parnas, was even allowed to run.

Both the opposition and the Kremlin see Sunday’s vote as a test for the Duma elections a year from now. Those, in turn, may have consequences for the next presidential election, as Mr Putin discovered four years ago when brazen fraud during the parliamentary vote triggered a protest movement against him that challenged his return to the presidency a few months later.

For now, Mr Putin looks invincible. According to independent pollster Levada, his approval rating stood at 83 per cent in August. Yet that was down 6 percentage points from its record high of 89 per cent in June and the lowest since May last year immediately after the annexation of Crimea. The Public Opinion Foundation, a polling group that serves the government, has observed a similar trend. Both pollsters see the bleak economic situation behind the dip in support.

But in Kostroma, one of Russia’s most economically depressed regions, few are ready to transform their dissatisfaction into a vote for the Democratic Coalition.

Oleg, a 65-year-old former engineer and construction worker who tries to make ends meet on a Rbs5,800 ($85) a month pension, has no illusions about his country. “We have this paradox that the communists lost power but somehow power ended up in the hands of their children,” he says, observing Svetlana’s campaign stand from a safe distance.

He believes that Mr Putin’s United Russia party is today’s equivalent of the Soviet Union’s Communist party, and politicians and KGB agents carved up the nation’s wealth among themselves. “Is that democracy? I don’t think so,” he says. “So what is this circus called election?”

Indeed, the cards have been stacked heavily against the opposition.

Originally, the Democratic Alliance planned to compete in four regions, including Novosibirsk in Siberia, which includes the country’s third-largest city; Magadan, a sparsely populated, resource-rich territory north-east of Japan; and Kaluga, a manufacturing hub south of Moscow and top foreign investment destination in Russia.

The common thread is that in the course of the recession, service sector revenues have dropped drastically in large, well-off urban agglomerations and resource-producing regions, suggesting a potential for growing dissatisfaction among the middle class.

But under Mr Putin’s leadership, the legal framework has changed so that candidates for governor, mayor or regional parliaments must garner a certain number of signatures to compete. Those collected by the opposition were found invalid by the authorities. The coalition appealed, but lost everywhere but Kostroma.

Ilya Yashin, a friend of Mr Nemtsov’s and RPR-Parnas’ top candidate in Kostroma, is convinced this was by design. “They gave us this region because it is the most difficult for us,” he says. “It has large rural areas which are hard to cover without a lot of time and money.” The bureaucratic hassles and court battles meant the party started campaigning only less than a month ahead of the vote. “The authorities want us to lose so they can claim that the opposition doesn’t have any popular support,” says Mr Yashin.

The opposition’s plight in Kostroma reflects a broader shift over more than a decade in which Mr Putin has gradually changed beyond recognition an electoral system that was once largely open and competitive, if corrupt, when he won his first presidential election in 2000.

The president abolished gubernatorial elections in 2004. He reinstated them in 2012, only to tweak the system again in 2013 so that regional authorities could decide themselves whether to hold a direct vote for governors or mayors.

“We should therefore not call this ‘elections’ — they are an imitation of elections, just like many of our institutions are imitations of democratic institutions,” says Solomon Ginzburg, an opposition member of the regional Duma in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

In Kostroma, the opposition candidates and campaigners are under no illusion about their prospects. “Of course we won’t succeed in changing the government. Of course United Russia will continue to hold the majority in parliament,” Mr Yashin tells a small group of local residents at a campaign stop in the courtyard of a dilapidated Soviet-era high-rise apartment building. “But at least I will represent you. What I can and will do is finally get this government to do its job.”

The article was published on September 10th.

I do agree with the overall sentiment that it would be near impossible to change the status quo in Russian politics. It's great that there are still people who are trying to change the political scene from inside the country, but, IMO, any real developments can only be influenced by outside events, like the oil price drop which impacted the price of ruble.