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The political career of Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia's third-richest man, crashed and burned last September, after he quarreled publicly with the Kremlin, and subsequently lost control of his liberal Right Cause party.

Now he's going to try something even more ambitious: he says he will challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia's presidency in elections slated for March 4.

It's probably no coincidence that Prokhorov's surprise declaration came just two days after 30,000 mostly young and middle-class Muscovites — angry over alleged vote-rigging in Russia's Dec. 4 parliamentary elections — gathered on a downtown square to demand an end to the Putin-era system of "managed democracy."

Prokhorov himself played a key role in exposing that system to the world, when he briefly stood up 3 months ago and accused Kremlin political architect Vladislav Surkov of being a "puppet master," who stage-manages all political parties that are allowed on the Russian ballot. He accused Surkov of trying to tell him who could be allowed in the leadership circle of his party, Right Cause, what candidates they might run, and what political positions to take.

On Monday, in an otherwise vague and rambling press conference, Prokhorov appeared to lay down the gauntlet to the Kremlin.

"I've made probably the most serious decision of my life: I'm running for president," he told a roomful of stunned reporters in Moscow. "Society is waking up, whether we want it or not. Authorities that have proven unable to hold a normal dialogue with the population are clearly on their way out... I want to be the candidate of the middle class."

Prokhorov, 46, is worth about $18 billion, according to Forbes. He is best known in the US as the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team. He made his fortune in the murky privatizations of former Soviet raw materials companies in the 1990s. In Russia, the bachelor-tycoon has often been in the news for his playboy lifestyle, his love of amateur athletics, and his passionate promotion of nanotechnology and electric automobiles.