One-party democracy?

Before parliamentary elections held last December, pressure was felt at two of the region's largest universities, Volga State and Lobachevsky State, shown here. Students said they were warned not to join marches sponsored by the opposition coalition. And they said that before the elections, administrators issued a threat: if you do not vote for the ruling party, you will be evicted from your dorms.

Lost in all the horserace excitement over the New York Times and its front-page story about John McCain and the lobbyist, was a series the Times published with arictles that, "will examine the crackdown in Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin."

Does the regime under Putin -- recent past and future -- have legitimacy. And is there a different standard of legitimacy as Russians look in the mirror and out the window:

The Times reports that the meaning of the youth vote is very different in Russia. Check out the caption under the picture above. Or this graph:

"The city’s children, too, were pressed into service. At schools, teachers gave them pamphlets promoting “Putin’s Plan” and told them to lobby their parents. Some were threatened with bad grades if they failed to attend “Children’s Referendums” at polling places, a ploy to ensure that their parents would show up and vote for the ruling party."

Other passages:

"Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy. He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes.

"While those tactics have been widely recognized, they have been especially heavy-handed at the local level...

"Mr. Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. For most Russians, life is freer now than it was in the old days. Criticism of the Kremlin is tolerated, as long as it is not done in any broadly organized way, and access to the Internet is unfettered. The economy, with its abundance of consumer goods and heady rate of growth, bears little resemblance to the one under Communism.

"Still, as was made plain in dozens of interviews with political leaders, officials and residents of Nizhny Novgorod over several weeks, a new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that has deployed a nationwide cadre of loyalists that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party. Fearing such retribution, many of the people interviewed for this article asked not to be identified..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24putin.html

One wonders if the Russian Federalism you read about in the paper constitution, which legend says was written in part on many of Boris Yeltsin's vodka cocktail napkins, has melted away like bar cubes.