Yekaterinburg, Russia's fourth largest city and the capital of the Urals, has ambitious activists, several opposition news sites and has seen thousands attend protests against Vladimir Putin's plan to return to the Kremlin.
Yet the opposition admits it faces an uphill struggle to bring about change ahead of March 4 presidential elections, even in a region where Putin's United Russia party polled just 32 percent in December's parliamentary polls.
"March 4 will not be an election but a coronation. The political landscape has been cleared out and there is no competition," said activist Leonid Volkov who has organised several Yekaterinburg protests through social networks.
While protests in Moscow mustered tens of thousands of people with the help of the mass Internet use by the capital's burgeoning middle class, rallies in the provinces have been smaller and easily matched by pro-Putin demonstrations.
Volkov said that while Moscow is big enough to have a market for professional opposition politicians like Boris Nemtsov, in the regions they have been largely eradicated during Putin's decade in power.
"There need to be procedures through which this civic protest can give rise to new political leaders, that would be ideal," he said.
One of the most crucial decisions of Putin's first two presidential mandates from 2000-2008 was the cancellation of direct elections for regional governors which obliterated the chance of alternative regional voices rising to power.
"There are not many heroes," said veteran regional parliament member Georgy Persky, a long-time opposition politician who has been on the ticket of almost all parties except Putin's United Russia.
"You have to have a certain personality for (being an opposition leader). And in our society, such people are considered outcasts, they are not considered normal."
"If the territory were smaller, information would reach more people. These huge distances save our government," he said. "The information vacuum is worse in the provinces."
Despite President Dmitry Medvedev's order that local administrations sell media assets, the region's last independent television channel was bought in December by a state-owned gravel factory in the authorities' interest, he said.
Channels show pro-Putin rallies sweeping Russia but appear to underestimate the numbers of protestors.
"What they show on television is awful," said Aksana Panova, editor of liberal-leaning online news portal site Ura.ru based in Yekaterinburg which covers several regions across the heavily-industrialised Ural mountains.
But as Internet reach in the region stands at only 22 percent, most people spend most of their time in front of television, while sites like Ura.ru target "10-15 percent of the population, to show they are not alone," she said.
Ura.ru's recent publications include a long interview with opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a report on a plot to siphon $3 million from the regional budget, and a scoop about high officials wanting to make a private resort out of a special school for children with tuberculosis.
Panova accused the authorities of trying to have the site shut down by leaving provocative comments which were then used to launch criminal cases into "extremism".
"The pressure never stops," said Panova, who sold a stake in the news agency to an Austrian firm in December in the hope that a foreign investor would act as political leverage. "I don't know how else to protect us," she said.
Some 5,000 people attended the latest local anti-Putin protest on February 4 although a rally in support of the premier organised by labour unions the week earlier mustered similar numbers.
Regional protests are still fuelled by only a minority, and several activists in Yekaterinburg including Panova chose to board a plane and go to the Moscow rally on February 4 instead.
"Of course it's sad for me that politics are decided in Moscow," said Leonid Volkov. "If they don't pull through in Moscow, then in the regions it will be extremely difficult to continue."