EDITORIAL: Back to the USSR

After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Russia made only a brief stab at democracy. What followed under Vladimir Putin has been a steady slide back to the authoritarianism that has long blighted its history. The trend was dramatically highlighted in Sunday's fraud-marred parliamentary election.

The country's only election-monitoring outfit, Golos, tallied 1,300 irregularities. One election official described to The Associated Press how workers stuffed boxes with ballots for Putin's party, United Russia. In Chechnya the United Russia vote was ludicrously high - more than 99 percent.

Despite the fraud, United Russia emerged with a tally of just under 50 percent, a big drop from the 64 percent received four years ago.

Discontent with Putin is rising. Thousands protested the election in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Kansas Citian Steve Glorioso, in Moscow to serve as an election observer, said the city has a police-state feel, with officials interviewed in a BBC report denying the presence of thousands of troops on a main square - troops that Glorioso said he could see from his hotel window.

"The state denies what people can see with their own eyes," he remarked in an email.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - who has mostly refrained from public statements on Putin's regime - called for nullification of the vote and a new election.

Gorbachev is right. But Putin - planning to run for a third term as president in the March elections - isn't likely to take the advice. The coming months will undoubtedly provide more illustrations of how far Russia has veered from democracy, and back toward its old habit of one-man rule.

- The Kansas City Star