No wonder they like Putin.

Times Online:

Vladimir Putin's victory in the Duma elections on Sunday was widely foreseen, but the result has been grudgingly received in the West. The official election-observing worthies wagged their fingers: there were rumours of ballot-stuffing, or of intimidation in workplaces, and they complained that the Russian media had presented an almost uniformly glowing report of the Government for weeks before the elections. No doubt there are elements of truth in this.

A Russian electorate is still rather a strange animal, a hybrid of old and new. In the old Soviet days, elections were an excuse for a party - an event in some provincial, dead place. Little old ladies turned out in great numbers, and voted fairly resolutely for the one-party candidate who was offering the tea and cakes (and music, generally heavily amplified). The same still happens, and there was also, again from Soviet times, an element of the rotten borough about the election: people will vote for the boss or his candidate, much as vast estate-owners used to do in England.

But there is also a new feature in Russian political life, the emergence of a real public opinion, and no amount of criticism will sweep that away. President Putin is popular, and from a Russian perspective, you can easily see why. Indeed, the outcome of his recent election more than slightly resembles General de Gaulle's success in 1958.