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Since the demise of Sukarno, Russia has drifted far from the Indonesian mainstream. Nonetheless, Indonesia’s leaders would do well to take heed of what’s happening there.

On Dec. 4, Russians went to the polls to elect a new state Duma, or lower house of Parliament. While he was not running in the election, the vote was seen as a test of the popularity of strongman Vladimir Putin, who is seeking to regain the Russian presidency after three years as prime minister, replacing his former aide Dmitry Medvedev.

Most observers initially expected the United Russia party to secure a thumping majority. Putin’s party had, after all, engineered Russia’s remarkable economic turnaround after the fall of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic tenure. A brusque St. Petersburg veteran, Putin is popular and ruthless, an embodiment of Russian machismo.

However, Putin’s return to the center stage wasn’t quite so well-received. The slick but cynical power exchange with Medvedev in September outraged millions of ordinary Russians. As a result, Putin’s standing in the opinion polls plummeted. Public sentiment turned ugly. Denied access to the mainstream media, ordinary Russians vented their anger whenever Putin appeared. On one occasion he was booed at a mixed martial arts match, an incident captured on YouTube and watched by millions.

Moreover, Putin’s United Russia fared even worse as voters realized that they would be enduring yet another term of massive, institutionalized corruption and abuse of power by high-handed party apparatchiks.

In the end, Putin received a stinging rebuke as his party won just 49.3 percent of the vote, leaving it with about 238 seats in the 450-seat Duma compared with its previous 315. To make matters worse, allegations of electoral fraud — also immortalized on YouTube — have led to demonstrations in Moscow. More are in the offing, leading some to wonder whether the world will witness yet another “spring.”

Putin reacted in his tough-guy way, sending the police to crack down and insisting that he would still run for president in March 2012. Nevertheless, United Russia’s electoral drubbing cannot help but damage his image as a popular, performance-driven autocrat.

What can Indonesia learn from Putin’s (excuse my pun) Russian reversal?

First, it again shows the power of the alternative media. Putin’s control of Russia’s newspapers and televisions may be absolute, but this stranglehold can do nothing to prevent Russians from turning to the blogs and social networks to express their disenchantment.

As with the Arab Spring, Facebook, YouTube and Russia’s own VKontakte have emerged as powerful tools to mobilize the masses. This is especially true in vast countries like Russia, where there have been protests even in peripheral areas like Vladivostok.

Putin’s obsessive deployment of spin — witness the proliferation of photos of him doing manly things like hunting and horseback riding — cannot hide the fact that Russia has become an infinitely dysfunctional place under his watch. The oil boom and Russia’s rising middle class — 20 percent of the population — sits uneasily with the fact that the number of people living under the official poverty line increased from 20.6 million in 2010 to 22.9 million this year.

Also, the abuses of civil liberties under Putin are just as brutal as anything that occurred under the czars or the Communist Party.

The last straw for Russians, however, was probably Putin’s attempt to swap positions with Medvedev. Such blatant realpolitik disillusioned many of Putin’s former supporters.

As for Indonesia, the risk is that the republic’s elite is unwittingly replicating Putin’s mendacity, ignoring the lessons of the fall of the New Order. With the 2014 elections looming, we are witnessing Jakarta’s power brokers up to their same old horse-trading and realigning of allegiances. It would be a mistake for them to assume that high-level maneuvering will assure victory in 2014. It fundamentally misreads the changes that Indonesia has gone through.

True, the republic is now an open, lively democracy. But its middle classes — like their Russian counterparts — are also increasingly suspicious of their political classes.

Treating political parties and loyalties like the personal property of a handful of influential families is the first step down the road to perdition. The people — in Indonesia, Russia and the world over— are reawakening to the fact that it is they, and not their rulers, who are ultimately sovereign.

Those who can understand this and act accordingly will prosper. Those who do not will be consigned to oblivion.

Karim Raslan is a columnist who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.