The votes are still being counted in Kaliningrad, but a pro-Putin landslide is one of two inevitable results of yesterday’s Russian parliamentary elections. The other is a chorus of approval from the country’s Central Electoral Commission, dismissing claims of ballot-rigging as the work of a foreign-inspired fifth column and hailing the poll as free and fair. It was nothing of the sort.

The election for a new Duma has been, as the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov neatly put it, a farce. He and other opposition leaders have been locked up for “unauthorised” demonstrations. The United Russia party, founded solely to promote Mr Putin and his policies, has campaigned effectively unopposed on state-run and state-endorsed TV (there is no other kind). Public sector workers, and many in the private sector, have been pressured into voting at work even though the election was held on a Sunday, so that their bosses could supervise healthy turn-outs for United Russia or two other pro-Kremlin parties. New parties have been made almost impossible to form. Older liberal groupings have been kept out of the Duma with draconian new rules on the proportion of votes required to win a single seat. Regional governors – all now Putin appointees – have competed with each other to deliver United Russia majorities, and Moscow’s political commentariat has been reduced to discourse in a tortured new dialect in which “administrative resources”, “managed” electoral commissions and “special electoral cultures” are all pitiful euphemisms for electoral fraud.

That pro-Putin MPs would have won a majority is beyond doubt. Putin is certainly popular, but this is not democracy, or even a peculiar Russian version of it. It is a parody of democracy arranged by the tight cadre of former security personnel and cooperative business leaders whom Mr Putin has spent the past eight years installing in the Kremlin. Its purpose is to give Mr Putin a “moral mandate” to remain in power despite the constitutional ban on his serving more than two consecutive presidential terms.

How might he do this in practice? If he is sincere in ruling out the constitutional amendment that would allow him a third term, he has two options: to install a puppet such as his current Prime Minister as president when his term expires next March, then return to the presidency himself in four years’ time (or earlier, should the prime minister “fall ill”); or to emasculate the presidency and transfer its powers to another post created for him.

Either scenario presents an immediate danger to the wider world. Mr Putin is already at the centre of a depressingly Soviet personality cult that allows no parliamentary oversight and little private criticism of his judgment on vital international questions, such as the future of Kosovo and how to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. The longer he remains in power in such circumstances, the more isolated and ill-advised he his likely to become. In the meantime, what remains of Russia’s political culture will continue to atrophy, so that when the need for change becomes acute the chances of a smooth transition will be remote. That moment could come sooner than most people think. Mr Putin must use his popularity to change the country for the better, not to indulge his personal tastes or his personnel. Power will flow to his anointed successor, but whether the Putinites are more than just a strange phase or lead Russia into the 21st century will be determined in the next few years.