Vladimir Putin sought a third term as President of Russia in Sunday’s elections and it is more than likely that he would make it. Russians do not want a change and there is hardly any doubt that a majority of them voted Putin back to office. He has been Prime Minister for four years but the people of Russia are apprehensive that an alternative would be a change for the worse. Putin is alleged to have sold the resources of the country to an oligarchy. But it is feared that if Putin was thrown out of office, the oligarchy may have sold Russia itself. The cities may have voted against Putin. The controversial polls in the Centre were said to be a fraud and the rigging made a difference of 15%. There was an explosion of popular anger in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Such a protest had not been witnessed in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. The urban middle class has of late been indignant at the spread of corruption. All this undermined Putin’s position. But his constituency remained huge nevertheless. The consequence of the December agitation was that civil society groups and a growing number of independent election monitors kept a close watch on the polls to the extent possible in a system which still stifled freedom of speech.
Only two of the other four candidates—Communist Gennady Zyoganov and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky—were on the scene. The state-run TV channels backed Vladimir Putin to the hilt as Russia prepares to join the WTO later this year. The web on the internet did go against Putin but it did not reach people outside the cities in a vast country in the grip of winter.