Crowds at a Moscow stadium listened Thursday to Putin, who has lately surged in polls. Some people there said they had been ordered to attend.
MOSCOW—Confident he will return to the presidency by a comfortable margin, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin cast himself Thursday as a unifying leader, appealing to the legions of Russians who have taken to the streets against him "not to look abroad, not to run to the other side…but to join us."
Mr. Putin gathered tens of thousands of people for a rally 10 days before the presidential election to counter a series of large protests challenging his 12-year rule. Evoking the country's victories over Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1945, he declared: "The battle for Russia continues and the victory will be ours!"
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a rally of his supporters at the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow on Thursday.
But his televised speech was a conspicuous retreat from harsh invective against the largely young, middle-class urban protesters who demand fair elections. Having branded them in recent weeks as paid agents of the United States, he switched to an inclusive message, calling on all who "cherish, care about and believe in" Russia to unite.
"I dream that we all can be happy," he declared, smiling and hatless under a light snow in Moscow's biggest stadium. "The main thing is that we are together. We are a multiethnic but united and powerful people, the Russian people. We won't push anyone away."
Still, he warned the West: "We won't allow anyone to meddle in our affairs or impose their will upon us."
Mr. Putin's poll numbers have recovered from a dip in the early winter, when protests erupted over the allegedly fraudulent victory of his United Russia party in the Dec. 4 parliamentary election. A poll this week by the VTsIOM agency said 58.6% of voters favor Mr. Putin, up from 45% in mid-December.
The pro-Putin turnout on a mild winter day was at least as large as that for the biggest anti-Kremlin rallies.
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But it included many workers who are paid by or dependent on the state, and were sent to Moscow in chartered buses and a special train. Some said they were forced or coaxed. Three young men said their entire crew on a road-building project on Moscow's outskirts was put on a bus to Luzhniki stadium.
Police said 130,000 people converged on the stadium. Thousands fled to the subway as soon as they arrived. "We've already put our names down," a middle-age man said as he hurried off.
About three-fourths of the stadium's 78,360 seats were occupied as Mr. Putin spoke from a makeshift stage, surrounded by an additional 10,000 or more spectators on the field.
The rally was held on Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a holiday in honor of past military campaigns, and mirrored Russia's recent assertiveness on the world stage—in blocking Western efforts to condemn the regime in Syria and vowing to step up military spending to counter a North Atlantic Treaty Organization plan to cast a missile defense shield over Europe.
Some participants voiced genuine support for Mr. Putin, who asserts that only he can protect the country from the kind of political and economic turmoil that scarred it in the 1990s.
"Putin cares about the army, and the army is the pillar of the society," said Andrei Zhuralvlev, a retired paratrooper from Pskov. "The army was abandoned, but now it gets new equipment, more money."
Nadezhda Rumyantseva, a financial analyst from Moscow, said the anti-Kremlin protests "have awakened the people" from political apathy. But she added: "I don't want any revolutions, any changes. I remember all too vividly the empty shelves at stores."
Mr. Putin is expected to win the March 4 vote and return for a third presidential term. But a lack of real competition has fed the protests and questions about his legitimacy. Three of his four rivals are party leaders who years ago reached an accommodation with the Kremlin, which uses bureaucratic hurdles to keep genuine opposition parties off the ballot. Mr. Putin's poll comeback came as he avoided debates with his rivals and distanced himself from his own party, whose name and symbols were nowhere in evidence Thursday.
Nikolai Zlobin, director of the Russia and Eurasia Project at the World Security Institute in Washington, noted that Mr. Putin had also effectively mobilized his supporters in several cities—notably with a large rally in Moscow on Feb. 4.
"He feels like he won the Russian street and doesn't have to be afraid of the opposition," Mr. Zlobin said. "Today's speech sounded like a victory speech. Now he can portray himself as a unifier."
The seven-minute address gave little hint of Mr. Putin's governing program, however, beyond a promise to tackle "numerous problems facing us, including injustice, bribery, rudeness of civil servants, poverty and inequality." He didn't mention rigged elections.
But he did take a page from the anti-Kremlin rallies—a dialogue with the crowd. "I want to ask you: Will we be victorious?" he asked. "Yes!" the crowd roared back.
—Gregory L. White contributed to this article.
Write to Alexander Kolyandr at Alexander.Kolyandr@dowjones.com and Richard Boudreaux at richard.boudreaux@wsj.com
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