Starting on the edge of the Bering Strait and ending in Kaliningrad nearly 24 hours later, Russian voters will tomorrow play a tightly scripted supporting role in a presidential election with four candidates but only one conceivable winner. Dmitri Medvedev, helped by a zealous party organisation and fawning coverage on every Russian TV channel, should romp home with at least 70 per cent of the vote. This is “managed democracy” in action. It is a travesty of the real thing, a betrayal of the long-dashed hopes of liberals inside and outside Russia and a major plank of Vladimir Putin's legacy. But any Western leader who assumes that “ordinary” Russians share such indignation has gravely misunderstood the Putin phenomenon and will struggle to work constructively with whatever follows it.
The day after Mr Putin's first election victory, a respected political commentator in Moscow was asked if the new President would be an improvement on Boris Yeltsin. “Of course,” came the reply. “Putin shows up for work.” Mr Yeltsin's drunken decrepitude in his last years in power prompted mirth abroad but deep shame at home. Though not directly to blame for the loss of the Soviet empire, his was the bloated face of Russian democracy that seemed to have brought only violence, inflation, political chaos and breakneck enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, for whom the financial collapse of 1998 was the last straw. Unlike the four prime ministers who had preceded him in as many years, Mr Putin understood that Russians' yearning for order at almost any cost gave him a powerful mandate, should he choose to use it.
He used it, first, in Chechnya. While still Prime Minister, he seized on a series of still unsolved bombings as a pretext to reinvade the breakaway republic and reverse the humiliations that Chechen rebels had inflicted on Russian forces in the 1994-96 war. The second war was marked by appalling atrocities on both sides. Challenged to account for those carried out by Russian forces, he muzzled Russian media outlets that reported them and argued that the integrity of the entire country was at stake. It was not, but Mr Putin had accurately judged that most Russians considered Western notions of human rights a luxury next to the vital task of restoring some of their country's shattered pride.
The lesson was quickly applied elsewhere. Businessmen who dared to cross Mr Putin have been bullied into exile or, as in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos chairman, into prison, with little regard for new laws on private property on which Russia's economic recovery ostensibly depends. Elections to regional governorships have been scrapped. The Duma has been tamed by United Russia, the party founded in Mr Putin's name, and by laws making the establishment of other new parties virtually impossible. Parliament's upper chamber has been packed with appointees. Charities and NGOs, especially those with foreign ties, have been tied up in red tape precisely to prevent them doing useful work. Most dramatically, many of the biggest privatisations of the 1990s have been thrown into reverse to create such “national champions” as Gazprom, which provides Europe with a quarter of its gas and has not hesitated to cut or threaten to cut supplies on nakedly political grounds.
It has been, in retrospect, a masterly consolidation of power. Mr Putin's resolve at first surprised even those closest to him. His methods have always been incremental. The combination has proved unstoppable; even the world's richest Russian, Roman Abramovich, now serving a second term as governor of remote Chukotka, has had to submit to Mr Putin's rules - and their success domestically has emboldened the outgoing President abroad.
When President Bush first met Mr Putin, in a Slovenian castle, he emerged with “a sense of his soul” and a forecast of a close working relationship. Like most Western leaders, he has been disappointed. The first hallmark of Russian foreign policy under Mr Putin has been a maverick assertiveness, often for its own sake, that has sabotaged progress on containing the Iranian nuclear threat and more recently sustained forlorn Serbian dreams of preventing Kosovan independence. The second is a nostalgia for Soviet thinking that continues to divide the world into “spheres of influence”, refuses to see globalisation's potential benefits to Russia and leaves many Western diplomats baffled and dismayed.
The nostalgia is at least explicable. Mr Putin has called the Soviet collapse “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century” - a remark his critics attributed to his KGB training. That undoubtedly has formed him, but so has a world view shared by his whole generation that dates precisely from 1942. History may have been suspended for much of the Soviet experiment, but it matters desperately in post-Soviet Russia. Mr Putin's hugely popular brand of nationalism, based explicitly on the heroic narrative of Russia's victory over Fascism in the Second World War, is the ideological underpinning of Russia's shift from nascent democracy to autocracy.
The financial underpinning for this shift has been the price of oil. Thanks to record revenues from oil at up to $100 a barrel, on Mr Putin's watch, the Russian economy has grown at between 6 and 7 per cent a year, repaid its foreign debts, built up impressive hard currency reserves and conquered inflation, unemployment and endemic poverty. It has also funded a neon-lit, Mercedes-powered consumer boom from St Petersburg to Vladivostok that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. But if Mr Putin takes the credit for this boom, he is also to blame for bequeathing to Mr Medvedev the third most dangerous country in the world for journalists, where freedom of assembly does not exist and kleptocracy reigns instead of the “dictatorship of the law” that he once promised.
This is not what Tony Blair hoped for when he rushed to pay court to Mr Putin in 2000. Since then, the oligarchs have fallen ever harder for Knightsbridge, but Britain's official relationship with Moscow has foundered on a series of diplomatic quarrels, culminating in the puerile closure of British Council offices in Russia in response to Scotland Yard's extradition request in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
Under Mr Putin, the dream of an open Russia has shrivelled. He had a chance to bring Russians the stability they craved but also the freedoms, both personal and economic, on which enduring prosperity and happiness depend. He has wasted that chance. His popularity at home is unassailable, but he has earned it as a consummate opportunist who has left his country over-reliant on its natural wealth, preoccupied with the battles of the 20th century and underprepared for the challenges of the 21st. History will treat him more harshly than has the Russian public, whose goodwill Mr Medvedev must now harness to more a more enlightened purpose.
