In Russia Vote, Fear of Hardship Fuels Putin Support LYUBERTSY, Russia - It takes little more than a half-hour train ride from Moscow and a few hours walking the muddy streets of this raw, working-class suburb to get a sense of why Vladimir V. Putin will almost certainly win Russia's presidential election on Sunday. Stepping off the train, you arrive in what residents of the capital call "the rest of Russia." There are no skyscrapers or 10-lane highways. Instead of heading to trendy sushi bars or coffee shops with free Wi-Fi after work, residents grab a greasy sausage and a beer from a kiosk as they head home, being careful to avoid the child-size potholes in the road. Interviewed here in recent days, few said they were doing well. But for many here in Lyubertsy and other hardscrabble towns across Russia, any desire to live better is outweighed by a persistent fear of living worse. And there is no guarantee that things will remain on track without Mr. Putin at the helm. "We will stay in one place or return to the old, terrifying days of the 1990s," Lyudmila Kisilyova, a 60-year-old pensioner, said when asked what would happen if Mr. Putin lost the election. There is a huge difference today in comparison with those days. There was no work, there was nothing. The stores were empty, and it was a terrifying time to live. "I can't say that everything is great today: Pensions are small, and we're scared about the future of our children," she said. But life is better than in the 1990s. It is a sentiment that these days sounds alien in Moscow, where Mr. Putin has faced a challenge from a boisterous, though largely isolated, movement of urban elites whose ambitions and self-regard have outgrown the rigid confines of his rule. Those elites are not Mr. Putin's constituents, and he has done little to court them. Rather, he seems keenly aware that his electoral success is linked less to a desire for progress than to a fear of backsliding. Since announcing in September that he, not Russia's current president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, would be running in Sunday's election, he has repeatedly sought to remind Russians of the hardships they suffered in the years before he took power. "Under the flag of democracy, in the 1990s we received not a modern government, but an opaque fight among clans and numerous semifeudal fiefdoms," he wrote in an opinion article last month. We received not a new quality of life, but huge social costs; not a just and free society, but the highhandedness of a self-appointed elite, who openly neglected the interests of simple people. In a televised appearance shortly after he announced his return last year, he warned that stability in Russia was hanging by a thread. "It is enough to take two or three incorrect steps and all that came before could overcome us before we know it," he said. This sense of teetering on the edge is particularly acute here in Lyubertsy, a town with 172,000 people, a helicopter factory and the unfortunate distinction of being a birthplace of the Russian mob. In the waning days of the Soviet Union, criminal gangs of amateur bodybuilders called kachki held the city hostage, residents said. On their days off they would take the commuter train into Moscow and pummel the fashionable youth there for sport. These days, the gangs have been mostly brought to heel, their leaders jailed, dead or, as some locals said, working in government. Stores are filled with affordable clothing, furniture and food, and there are several tidy parks and a modern basketball arena for the Lyubertsy Triumph, whose record this season is 30-14. Most said they were aware of the recent protests in Moscow. But they had little good to say about them. "A nuthouse" is how the manager of a women's clothing store named Angelina described the protests. Her colleague chimed in, "That's for people who have free time and don't have to work for a living." Both had taken a smoking break and were standing under a large campaign billboard with Mr. Putin's face and the slogan "A Great Country; a Strong Leader."