In Russia, a lopsided ballot

But virtually all of Russia's traditional opposition heavyweights have chosen to sit this election out. Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov, who won a healthy 30 percent of the vote when he ran against Putin in 2000, has tipped a little-known member of the near-defunct Agrarian Party, Nikolai Kharitonov, to carry the pro-Communist banner this time around. Russia's best-known liberal, Grigory Yavlinsky, who has run in every previous post-Soviet election, bowed out saying that "free, equal and politically competitive elections are impossible" this time. Even flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky has sent his bodyguard, a former boxer named Oleg Malyshkin, to be his standard-bearer.

"[The main opposition leaders] know that the best guarantee of their continued survival in Russia's new political climate is to stay on good terms with the Kremlin," says Boris Kagarlitsky, head of the Institute for Globalization Studies in Moscow, a left-leaning think tank. "They prefer to abstain, even if it means public disgrace, than to risk the wrath of the Kremlin by standing against Putin."

Putin's dominance was evident in December's parliamentary elections, which gave the pro-Kremlin United Russia party control of two-thirds of the State Duma's seats. In the new Duma's first session last week, United Russia voted itself the chairmanship of all 29 parliamentary committees.

A December opinion poll by the state-run VTsIOM agency found that 61 percent of Russians credit Putin with improving Russia's international standing, while 56 percent believe his policies have brought better living standards. In a survey by the nonstate ROMIR public opinion agency, 37 percent of respondents said they "fully trust" Putin, and another 45 percent said they are "more likely to trust him than not."

"People today cannot see any alternative to Putin," says Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of Panorama, an independent think tank. "And they're not going to see any alternatives, because none are being shown," he adds. Mr. Pribylovsky says Putin's popular image is a product of state- controlled television as well as relatively good economic times, based on high global prices for Russia's main export, oil.

In response to the opposition's bleak prospects this time around, a group of leading Russian liberals, including chess champion Garry Kasparov, journalists Yuliya Latynina and Yevgeny Kiselyov, and ex-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, set up a committee this month with the stated purpose of working for fair elections - in 2008.

"The key task of our committee is the election of a president representing civil society rather than an heir chosen by Putin," says the group's cochair, former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov.

• Olga Podolskaya in Moscow contributed to this report.

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