Vladimir Putin is still the tsar

Russians don’t fancy Western democracy nor do they wish for a return of USSR-style regimes. They want a government respectful of traditional values.

Confined to the back pages of newspapers and onscreen news crawls, the recent Russian elections have for all intents and purposes been treated as non-existent. United Russia, the party supposedly run by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev but universally known as the president’s party (meaning Vladimir Putin’s) garnered 54.21% of the vote. Other parties that gained entry to parliament were the Communist Party (15.34%), the Liberal Democrats led by nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskij and Fair Russia (6.16%).

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