Tank Town Symbolizes Putin's Campaign If Vladmir Putin reclaims the Russian presidency next week, he'll owe a word of gratitude to this bleak industrial outpost known for making military tanks. In December, amid a stunning wave of protests against Putin over fraud-stained elections, the city of smoke-belching factories 1,400 kilometers (900 miles) east of Moscow forced its way into the national consciousness: The tank plant's workers issued an impassioned manifesto voicing disgust with the demonstrators. "While we work round the clock in our factories and make products that earn the state money, they roam the streets bawling for their rights," the workers declared. For the Kremlin, it was a public relations coup that allowed Putin to project the sense that the Russian heartland still loved him. The reality was a bit different: Less than a third of the city of 370,000 people voted for Putin's party in the tainted December parliamentary poll - far lower than the national average. What mattered most for Putin, however, was the imagery contrasting protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, dismissed by the Kremlin as rich spoiled urbanites, with Putin's traditional blue-collar support base - which he portrays as the "real Russia." The tank factory allowed Putin to cast himself as the working man's hero - and sure enough, his approval rating has crept up gradually. Nizhny Tagil became an emblem of the values Putin is striving to foster: hard work, order and full-throated loyalty to the leadership. A pro-Putin rally by workers at the Uralvagonzavod plant on Dec. 24, the same day as a massive protest in Moscow, "proved a lifesaver for Kremlin strategists and government officials in the region," said political analyst Sergei Moshkin. A nationally televised call-in show with Putin included a video link to the Uralvagonzavod plant, where a cadre of workers stood stonily as their spokesman, Igor Kholmanskikh, vowed that he and his colleagues would help clear the streets of protesters if the police failed to do so. Kholmanskikh, who has become the poster boy for a campaign aimed at drawing the working class vote, traveled to Moscow in late February for a giant pro-Putin rally, where he denounced "those loafers who are always grumbling." Yet for all that, few among the steady trickle of employees trailing out of the Uralvagonzavod plant at the end of a recent shift appeared enthusiastic about the March 4 election in which Putin, currently prime minister, seeks to return to the presidency he held from 2000-2008. "Voting won't settle anything," said 27-year-old welder Sergei Zubov. Putin is going to win whatever happens, that much is clear. For others, however, the memories of the turbulent 1990s, when salaries often went unpaid for months, are a strong inducement to vote for a leader whose tenure in power was marked by stability and steadily rising prosperity. "Most people are worried about the prospect of more crises and they are sick of revolutions," said 41-year old Oleg Libin, who has worked at Uralvagonzavod for 15 years. Nizhny Tagil, despite a sprinkling of shiny new shops and restaurants, is largely a grim landscape of sooty neighborhoods, muddy, rutted roads and creaking government buildings.