Vladimir Putin still has the support of a majority of Russians, his spokesman said Sunday after a mass protest challenged the premier's authority two months before he stands in presidential polls.

Organizers said 120,000 people attended the rally in central Moscow Saturday where protesters chanted slogans against Prime Minister Putin and called for the annulment of disputed December parliamentary elections won by his party.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, called on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Saturday to heed protester demands and quit politics instead of seeking a third term as Russian president.

"I would advise Vladimir Putin to leave now. He has had three terms: two as president and one as prime minister. Three terms -- that is enough," Gorbachev told Moscow Echo radio in an interview.

Tens of thousands of people on Saturday filled an avenue in Moscow to protest against the alleged rigging of parliamentary polls, in a new challenge to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's authority.

Clutching white balloons and banners with the slogan "For Free Elections", the protestors thronged Sakharov Avenue in Moscow, symbolically named after the Nobel-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov who for years defied the USSR.

Lenin is still in his mausoleum on Red Square, his statue stares down on central squares and hammers and sickles are a familiar sight on buildings.

Twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet past is still very present in Russia.

A fragment of a Russian satellite that fell back to Earth after a failed launch crashed into a village in Siberia hitting a house on a street named after cosmonauts, officials said Saturday.

The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit Friday due to a failure with its Soyuz rocket, in the latest setback for Russian space program which has now lost over half a dozen satellites in the last year.

The U.N. Security Council on Friday condemned suicide attacks in the Syrian capital but remained deadlocked on a full resolution on the crisis with the Russian and U.S. ambassadors trading personal barbs.

Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin hit out at what he called the "Stanford dictionary of expletives" used against him by U.S. ambassador Susan Rice.

Deputy Russian Prime Minister and one-time presidential hopeful Sergei Ivanov, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, has been appointed the Kremlin chief of staff, Kremlin spokeswoman Natalia Timakova.

"(President Dmitry) Medvedev has appointed Sergei Ivanov as the head of his administration," Natalia Timakova told Agence France Presse.

President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday warned that "extremists" were seeking to whip up instability in Russia through the protest wave that has rattled the Kremlin after disputed parliamentary polls.

In his last annual address to the nation before his expected handover of power to Vladimir Putin next year, Medvedev sternly vowed that Russia would not allow the West to interfere in its biggest outburst of protests in years.

France denounced Wednesday what it said was the "unprecedented massacre" of 120 people by Syrian forces and urged Russia to accelerate talks for a U.N. Security Council resolution on the crisis.

At his regular briefing, French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said: "Everything must be put in motion to end this murderous spiral into which Bashar Assad is dragging his people, deeper each day."

Russia's lower house of parliament on Wednesday voted in strongman Vladimir Putin's ally and former Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin as its new speaker as it met for its first session.

The first session of the State Duma dominated by Putin's United Russia ruling party came in defiance of mass protests sparked by opposition claims it was elected in rigged polls.