http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2012/03/russian_prime_minister_vladimir_putin_has_rigged_the_country_s_elections_to_guarantee_he_will_win.html
If you are wondering which of the candidates opposing Vladimir Putin on Sunday is a stooge, rest assured: They all are.
By Masha Gessen
On March 4, I expect the Russian consulate in Washington, D.C., to be crowded with Russian citizens coming to cast their votes in the presidential election. Voting has become a surprisingly popular pastime among Russians of late, and the consulate will probably see a record number of visitors on Sunday. I'll be one of them because I am in the United States promoting The Man Without a Face, my biography of Putin, the prime minister and certain victor of this week’s election.
The ballot I’ll be issued will be identical to the ones used in Russia. In fact, with five candidates, including four party nominees and an independent, it will look much like a ballot in any democratic country with a multiparty system. But what it actually represents is the systematic—and successful—dismantling of Russian democratic institutions begun a dozen years ago.
Within days of taking office as president in May 2000, Vladimir Putin issued his first decree and introduced a bill in parliament aimed at undoing the fragile mechanisms of democracy. To begin, he made the country's 89 elected governors accountable to presidential envoys (most of them former KGB officers) whom he appointed to supervise seven newly created districts of the country. The bill did away with elections for members of the upper house of parliament; instead, they would now be appointed by governors and regional legislatures. A year later, a new law, also initiated by Putin, recast the procedure for forming political parties. The requirements were made so arduous that in effect no party can be registered unless the Kremlin wants it to be registered.
In 2003, in anticipation of Putin's first re-election bid, similar barriers were created for presidential candidates. In 2004, Putin abolished gubernatorial elections altogether—governors are appointed by the president—and canceled direct elections to the lower house of parliament, whose members are now chosen by voting for political parties. (As a result, most regions are represented by people who have never lived there.) Finally, in 2007, Putin introduced even more onerous restrictions to entering the presidential race—and the following year his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, pushed through a constitutional reform that increased the president's term of office from four to six years, opening the possibility that Putin could serve in that position for another 12 years.
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