Whenever he shows up, the venues seem to be either cancelled outright or suffer from all sorts of electrical and infrastructure problems all of a sudden. Couple of times he chose to take his message to the people outside the closed venue, he was egged, with police preventing his followers from chasing the perpetrators. Of course, those are also the images that TV stations choose display whenever mentioning Kasparov in passing.
When you control the media, it's easy to hand-pick quotes and stock photos to portray even the most eloquent and intellectual speaker as crazy bum who's shouting in public places to gain self-promotion.
I don't know why this is downvoted as it's actually true. Kasparov was that great chess player who had a long battle with Karpov [1] and eventually won. Then for some reason he decided to abandon chess and go into politics instead. At that point he became uninteresting.
It's sad that people now remember Kasparov as "that guy who defeated Karpov", because he'd been absolute best in chess for a long time. It's actually even sadder that he dropped chess over politics altogether.
I'd say marginalized. Current crop of "folk heroes" now are mostly non-political figures turned politicians: corruption fighter Navalny, writers Bykov, Akunin and so on. Older politicians like Yavlinsky had their chance and failed spectacularly so their support is fairly limited. If you want to know the most influential political figure from Russian opposition, that's Navalny without doubt.
