About 1,000 people gathered in Moscow on Saturday to support a new anti-Kremlin coalition that has said it will field a presidential candidate in 2012.
Four liberal opposition politicians called on the crowd to help mount a challenge to prime minister Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party in 2011 parliamentary elections and the 2012 vote.
"We stand for free elections, for a Russia without lawlessness and corruption," Mikhail Kasyanov, who was prime minister during Putin's first term as president in 2000-2004, told the crowd.
Kasyanov joined prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov and two other liberal politicians in a bid to unite Russia's fractured opposition as elections near. Putin has hinted he will either run for president in 2012 or support the protege he steered into the Kremlin in 2008, president Dmitry Medvedev.
"We formed the coalition to put forward a single candidate for the elections in 2012. We will stand against the party of thieves and traitors United Russia," Nemtsov said, addressing the crowd on a square across the river from the Kremlin.
"Our aim is to throw this clique from power," he said.
More than 100 police monitored the rally, which was held with the permission of Moscow authorities.
The size of the crowd underscored the uphill battle faced by liberal Kremlin opponents who were pushed to the margins of Russian politics during Putin's 2000-2008 presidency.
In an opinion poll last month by the independent Levada Centre, two percent of respondents said they would vote for the allliance if it were running in parliamentary elections.
That score put them behind United Russia, the Communists and the other two parties that are now represented in parliament.
Nemtsov said the alliance would aim to seek registration as a party -- which is required if it is to run in parliamentary elections -- in the spring.
That effort will test the mood of the Kremlin, which critics say has used technicalities and dirty tricks to kept opponents off ballots in recent years.
"In today's circumstances, this is a step forward," Gennady Vasin, a 49-year-old bank employee, said of the coalition's formation. "We want Russia to be democratic and free. We want an end to corruption."
Yuri Volnov, a 36-year-old manager at an IT company, expressed cautious optimism about the alliance's prospects.
"We can't be sure this will work, but we have to try something," said Volnov, who carried his eight-month-old son.
