WHEN Tatyana, a businesswoman in Moscow, called the district council to find out if she had been granted a licence for her new restaurant, the official made a strange request.

The licence should be no problem, he said. But times were busy with the presidential election on March 14 approaching. Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor, wanted a good turnout to ensure the result was valid. So could she get 50 people to vote in their district to help to swell the numbers?

Tatyana, who asked for her real name not to be used, said: “I couldn’t believe it. That’s so totally, you know . . . Soviet.”

The latest polls show 65-70 per cent support for President Putin, who is seeking a second term.

But the validity of the election is not so certain. At least 50 per cent of the electorate must turn out, or a new vote will have to be held, with new candidates. Only 56 per cent voted in parliamentary elections in December, so, in the past few weeks, the Kremlin has ordered officials across Russia to make sure that voters turn out.

Murat Akhedzhak, deputy governor of the Krasnodar region in southern Russia, said that his office had been told “66 per cent minimum, or else the firing squad”, according to the newspaper Izvestia. Gennadi Khodyrev, Governor of the city of Nizhny Novgorod, has ordered his administration to ensure a turnout of at least 70 per cent, according to local media.

The decree has sparked accusations of intimidation and ballot-rigging from opposition candidates already incensed by the shamelessly pro-Putin bias of the state-controlled media.

It has also rekindled distinctly Soviet instincts among local officials long accustomed to obeying orders without question to please their bosses in Moscow.

Sergei Glazyev, the populist candidate, said on Ekho Moskvy radio: “Under the administration’s pressure, people are being drawn into the crime of rigging the vote results.”

Regional leaders, more worried about their own careers than anything else, have been bribing and threatening voters to make sure that they turn out. Some of their efforts are relatively benign. In Moscow, Radio Dinamit FM is offering free tickets to its annual rock concert on March 29 to voters aged between 18 and 35. In Kaliningrad, officials plan to set up grocery stalls offering 10 per cent discounts at polling booths.

But others illustrate how Mr Putin’s efforts to rebuild a strong, centralised state are undermining democracy and fostering corruption and negligence in the bureaucracy.In Khabarovsk, hospitals posted official notices saying that they would refuse treatment unless patients had filled out absentee ballots.

“The doctors were asked to guarantee the high turnout rate,” a source in the local administration told the Kommersant newspaper.

Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights ombudsman, who intervened last week, blamed the order on local health officials. Prosecutors repealed it at his request.

Nevertheless, authorities in Khabarovsk have also ordered two local mobile-phone operators to send text messages to their clients reminding them to vote, Kommersant reported.

In Tatyana’s case, local officials were simply trying to steal voters from other constituencies to make sure that they reached their target turnout. She had to get her family and staff to apply for absentee ballots and, come Sunday, to vote in the district where she wanted to open her restaurant. Once she took the list of 50 names to the council, the licence would be forthcoming, she was told.

She said: “It was very simple: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. But what was strange was that they usually want money, not votes. I guess it’s a sign of the times.”

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