BECAUSE RUSSIA is becoming a key player once again in global geopolitics, the United States and its European allies need to develop a clear-eyed vision of the new system Russian President Vladimir Putin is constructing. The conduct of Sunday's parliamentary elections offer a clear - and unpleasant -indication of where Putin's "sovereign democracy" is headed.
The destination is not a revived version of Stalinist despotism. But neither is it a system that bears any resemblance to the liberal democracies of Europe and North America.
The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe only grazed the target when they lamented Monday that the balloting for the Russian Duma failed to meet their "standards for democratic elections." Their joint statement criticized the use of administrative resources for Putin's party, government-controlled media coverage that strongly favored his party, and electoral rules that had the "cumulative effect of thwarting political pluralism."
The crucial result is that all the parties opposed to Putin's power system have been eliminated from Parliament. Putin's United Russia party will have 315 of 450 seats in the new Duma, and the other three parties that qualified all play ball with the Kremlin.
Putin portrayed opposition parties as tools of Western secret services. He likened them to the democratic movements that won recent elections in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan - former Soviet Republics that became independent after the Soviet Union's demise in 1991. This was more than the sort of appeal to patriotism that conservative politicians commonly use in the West. Putin turned the parliamentary election into a vehicle for completely expelling his liberal opposition from participation in governing Russia.
There is no gulag in today's Russia, no daily executions of class enemies in the cellar of the Lubyanka, the old KGB headquarters. But with the opposition removed from the Duma, Russian democrats wishing to work for pluralism and the rule of law must operate outside the power system, as dissidents.
Then there is the question of Putin's hold on power after he cedes the presidency next March to a successor, as he is constitutionally required to do. He has publicly defined the victory of United Russia as a vote of confidence in himself. He has hinted that he will lead the party after March, and that his party will supervise the government - even if, as expected, Putin anoints his own successor.
The picture that emerges is of a party-state in the political mold of the old communist system. A crucial difference is that Putin's role will be to keep peace between the Kremlin factions who control not only the government but also Russia's fabulously lucrative oil and natural-gas conglomerates. Putin is shaping a Godfather-state in Russia.
