Election Bolsters Putin’s Control

Pro-Kremlin parties were sweeping to victory in parliamentary elections Sunday, fortifying President Vladimir V. Putin’s grip on power as he pushes for economic reforms and stronger state authority.

The Putin-backed United Russia and two other generally pro-Kremlin parties were capturing nearly 60% of the vote, while the Communists were receiving just 13%, according to results with more than four-fifths of all ballots counted.

Two key Western-style democratic parties were below the 5% threshold required to win seats allocated by party preference and were facing the prospect of being nearly wiped out of parliament.

The strong showing by United Russia, which led the polling with 37%, and its nationalist allies should make it easier for Putin to enact the legislation he desires. United Russia ran as “the party of power” that was already engaged in the main work of government, saying it could be counted on to support Putin in the State Duma, the 450-seat lower house of parliament.

“Many parties and blocs were struggling for slots in the Duma whereas we struggled for Russia. And we are doing our best to resolve real tasks now,” Boris Gryzlov, a United Russia leader, said in televised remarks as early returns came in.

Critics fear that a Putin-dominated Duma may vote to change the constitution to enable him to remain in office past 2008, when by current law he would have to step down. He is considered a shoo-in for reelection to a second term in March.

The new Duma “will allow President Putin to stay in the Kremlin as long as he wishes -- most likely for life,” predicted Dmitry Furman, a senior analyst at the Institute of Europe, a Moscow think tank.

But many United Russia backers expect the party’s strong showing to help Putin bring improvements to their lives.

“It’s a sort of turning point in the history of the country,” Ilija Somov, 25, a businessman from Nizhny Novgorod who supports United Russia, said before the results were known.

“I think that the pace of the country’s development is speeding up, and the elections are going to decide how quickly the development can go.”

Putin “is doing a good job -- considering the mess he inherited,” said an elderly woman who shuffled out of a polling station in Moscow with the aid of a cane. She declined to give her name or say how she voted.

United Russia supporters have credited the party with helping Putin suppress separatism in war-torn Chechnya -- though it took mass arrests and allegedly rigged elections to do it -- and carry out economic reforms that have improved living conditions for middle-class residents in places such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Under United Russia’s leadership, the Duma streamlined the tax system, cutting the income tax to a flat rate of 13%. A working majority for pro-Kremlin parties, said Alfa Bank analyst Chris Weaver, is likely to help Putin push through additional reforms, including cleaning up the entrenched corruption and easing the bureaucracy that many businesspeople say have discouraged foreign investment.

Many Russians believe that during Boris N. Yeltsin’s presidency, after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the sudden switch to democratic freedoms and market economics led to chaos in society -- soaring crime rates, loss of job security and a breakdown in health care and social services.

Putin and his supporters are trying to rebuild a strong state authority, using their control of state-run television and their influence over newly tamed independent stations.

They have moved to take power back from the so-called oligarchs who became fabulously wealthy in the corrupt privatizations of state assets in the 1990s.

Many key officials in Putin’s administration have backgrounds in the Soviet-era security services such as the KGB, in which Putin served as a colonel.

Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov blasted Sunday’s results as rigged. “These are not really elections,” Zyuganov said. “This is a dirty and humiliating spectacle for the country, and for all of us, in which some serious people are taking part.”

Zyuganov charged that Putin had told underlings early this year that “whatever the cost is, squeeze out the required results by getting more than 300” seats in the new parliament.

Robert Barry, deputy director of the observer mission sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Sunday’s balloting “was well-organized and we have not noted any major irregularities at this point.”

He added, however, that there had been serious democratic shortcomings during the campaign. “It was not a level playing field,” he said. “The state-run media [have] been heavily biased” in favor of United Russia.

With more than four-fifths of the votes counted, United Russia led with 37%, the Communists had 13% and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party had 12%. The Homeland-National Patriotic Union bloc received 9%, while the two most democratically oriented parties -- Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces -- each had 4%. The Agrarian Party, a splinter group from the Communists, also received 4%.

Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief at Echo of Moscow radio, predicted that United Russia and its two allies -- Homeland and the Liberal Democratic Party -- would win about 310 seats in the 450-seat Duma. Seats in the Federation Council, the upper house, were not up for election.

Constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority in the lower house, as well as approval by a three-quarter vote in the overwhelmingly pro-Putin upper house and the endorsement of two-thirds of Russia’s regional legislatures.

Half of the seats in the Duma will be allocated proportionally to parties that win more than 5%. The other half will be filled directly, with the winners in district races getting seats. Results in the district races are not expected until today at the earliest.

Putin “will want a new term,” after 2008, Zyuganov, the Communist, predicted.

“He needs unlimited power, or to be more precise, authoritarian rule. In order to get that, a docile team is necessary that will keep pushing the buttons. Everyone has been lined up: state-owned television channels, the governors.”

The election results catapult fourth-place finisher Homeland to unexpected prominence. The party advocates imposing up to $30 billion a year in new taxes on companies that control the nation’s mineral wealth and imprisoning Russia’s billionaire oligarchs.

Created only in September -- some say as a Kremlin plot to draw votes away from the Communists -- Homeland is an alliance of nationalists and former Communists whose leader, left-wing economist Sergei Glazyev, has recently become one of Russia’s 10 most popular politicians.

Homeland has sent shivers through Russia’s biggest industry, oil production, by advocating a controversial “rent” program that would require oil companies to return a major share of their profits to the public for the right to use natural resources.

“Today the people gave a clear answer that an end will be put to the irresponsible course under which oligarchs fill their pockets at the expense of social justice,” Glazyev declared Sunday night.

Many supporters of the pro-Kremlin parties think that having government assert real authority wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Andrei Monastyrny, 33, a manager of an industrial equipment repair facility in Moscow, declined to say clearly whom he voted for, but strongly implied it was United Russia. “I think that becoming an authoritarian country is the optimum way for Russia,” he said. “I think our mentality is so much different. Democracy the way America views it would not work here.”

That’s precisely the sort of attitude feared by Yuri Basov, 57, an artist who voted for the Union of Right Forces.

“Unfortunately, the Duma reflects exactly the kind of society we have today. It doesn’t even understand that freedom is a crucial thing,” Basov said. “Society itself fails to realize it, and it’s going to take too much time for them to wake up to this fact.”

Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank, said that the election results “mean that the ‘managed democracy’ designed by the Kremlin is becoming more and more controllable.”

“Mao Tse-tung once said that the gun produces authority,” Piontkovsky said. “Putin in his turn quite correctly adheres to the principle that television produces authority. This dash United Russia made since September, when in the polls it was running head-to-head with the Communists, can be explained mostly by the television brainwashing or zombifying the population has been subjected to in the last few months.”

The “surprisingly high showing” by the Liberal Democrats and “what is even more worrisome, the success of the national-socialist Homeland movement,” shows “the growth of nationalist sentiments in society,” Piontkovsky said.

“The worst thing about these results is that the growing role of these quasi-fascist parties will be shifting the focus of the Kremlin policy accordingly. It is clear to me now that we are sliding more and more toward a police state,” he added.

In televised remarks, Dmitry Rogozin, a Homeland leader, fended off accusations that the party has fascist tendencies.

People have “a terribly negative reaction toward bandit capitalism and its results: the impoverishment of the people, the humiliation of the country, and what is happening in the Caucasus, when none of us can feel safe, because everything is being blown up, not only in the Stavropol territory but in Moscow too,” he said.

An attack Friday on a commuter train in the Stavropol region of the North Caucasus, near Chechnya, left 42 dead. Chechen separatists were suspected.

A middle-aged man in the town where the train blast occurred was shown on ORT television Sunday as he headed to a polling station. “I will be voting for the Homeland bloc,” he said. “These events demonstrated once again that there is no authority, there is no protection.”

Danila, 22, a construction worker who gave only his first name, was among the many apathetic or bitter citizens who ignored the balloting.

“What difference does it make if it’s Person A or Person B?” he said, before heading in to a noisy bar. “It’ll still be the same parties arguing.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.