In December, tens of thousands of mostly affluent Muscovites tapped into a long-hidden well of political energy to pull off two boisterous protests against perceived fraud by Mr. Putin’s party in parliamentary elections. But the last rally was six weeks ago, before the long New Year’s holiday and the onset of the serious winter cold.

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Now it is anyone’s guess how much of that energy remains.

“This time around, the drive is partly lost,” said Masha Lipman, a prominent political analyst. “The cause is not quite clear, and the leadership is missing. Plus the weather.”

Of course, when it comes to the cold, Russians have a bit more fortitude than most. Shops and restaurants here in the capital remain open through the nastiest snowstorms, and Moscow schools do not cancel classes until the temperature reaches minus 15. Subzero temperatures are not enough to put off a weekend stroll outside, perhaps with an ice cream cone in hand.

But there are limits, especially for the fashionable types who have been attending these protests. Some would rather freeze, it seems, than wear a frumpy parka.

“If you have to choose between dressing warm or looking pretty, forget about it, dress warm,” Andrei Kozenko, a journalist, wrote this week on the Lenta.ru news portal. Pro-Kremlin activists “will say afterward that you looked bad in the photos, but at least you’ll be able to read their comments in the comfort of your office and not in an uncomfortable hospital ward with pneumonia.”

His colleague, Anastasia Karimova, has come down on the other side of the fashion-versus-function debate. In several photographs that have spread widely on Facebook and other sites, Ms. Karimova is seen standing outside in a blue bikini and high heels holding a sign that shows the date of the protest and the slogan “Cold is not scary.”

The authorities have sought to use the weather to their advantage.

Gennady Onishchenko, whose work as Russia’s top public health official is often directed against the government’s opponents, warned on Thursday that protesters risked getting sick.

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“If you go to a protest, wear your grandmother’s felt boots and coat, the ones that were a sign of outrageous wealth in the 1980s, if they haven’t been eaten by moths yet,” he said in a somewhat bewildering statement. “It’s better to refrain from this completely and find some other way to participate in the construction of a happier government.”

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Officials — apparently not trusting in the cold to keep all protesters away — have come up with other strategies.

Moscow’s education department announced last month that universities and colleges in the capital would hold a citywide open house for schoolchildren on the day of the protest, a move that the Russian Student Union called a “trap.”

The Civic Chamber, a government-appointed watchdog, said that as of Thursday it had received 50 complaints from teachers about being forced to attend a rally in support of Mr. Putin that was scheduled at the same time as the opposition protest. A number of similar complaints have been posted on Russian blogs.

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Even Kirill I, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, evoking past revolutions, called on believers this week to look warily upon the protest movement.

“Remember that the loudest yells, the most piercing words, are not always the proper, true and honest ones,” he said. “Twice our people were seduced in this way, and maybe more in the last 100 or so years.”

The authorities have, nevertheless, agreed to allow protesters to march for about a mile through a wealthy Moscow neighborhood close to the Kremlin and to hold a rally on Bolotnaya Square, an island in the Moscow River where the first protest in December was held. Organizers hope the event will last less than two hours.

On a Facebook group devoted to the protest, nearly 27,000 people have indicated they will attend. The more optimistic have pointed out that Saturday’s protest falls on the anniversary of a rally in 1990 against the Soviet authorities that drew hundreds of thousands of people.

At that protest, however, the temperature was above freezing.