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ELECTIONS HAVE TAKEN PLACE AT REGULAR INTERVALS to the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma. Successive changes in the electoral law have, however, allowed the central authorities to establish an increasing degree of influence over the outcome. The success of the United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) party in December 2007, on the evidence of a national post-election survey, is largely to be explained by its association with president putin, and his own association with a rapid rate of economic advance. in turn, this suggests that the future of the party and of the dominant position it has been able to establish are heavily dependent on the continuing success of the Kremlin in maintaining a rate of economic advance that ordinary Russians find satisfactory.

Elections with a limited choice of candidate had already begun to take place in the last years of the USSR. But the first multiparty as well as multicandidate elections were held in 1993, to a newly established Federal Assembly; and since then elections have regularly taken place on the same basis to the lower house of the new Assembly, the State Duma (the upper house, the Federation Council, was directly elected the same year but has since then been formed in other ways). These first fully competitive elections established a parliament that was to hold office for just two years, to 1995; from this time onwards elections have been held every four years, in accordance with the provisions of the 1993 constitution. The Duma's predecessor, the Russian Supreme Soviet, had been strongly oppositional, and a breakdown in relations with the Kremlin led directly to its …