Despite riding a wave of apparent popularity following the military conflict with Georgia, the Kremlin continues to wrestle with its legitimacy problem. The fact remains that -- despite appeals to nationalism, despite assertions that the country is surrounded by ravenous enemies, despite trumped-up "popular" movements and demonstrations -- Russia's strictly managed democracy is not capable of producing real legitimacy. And the more the seams of that management show, the less legitimate the country's government appears both at home and abroad.

Elections -- or the semblance of elections -- remain a key feature of the Russian political system, perhaps the only one that enables the authorities to continue describing it as a "democracy," even if it has to qualify that term with opaque modifiers like "managed" and "sovereign." Giving up elections entirely -- and even the Soviet Union's "socialist democracy" didn't abandon the pretense of voting -- is not a realistic option, although suspending them under the pretext of some national emergency or to prevent interference by foreign "enemies" is always on the table in Russia. Russia under Vladimir Putin has done away with voting for executive-branch heads of federation subjects and is moving toward abolishing mayoral elections as well. But national legislative and executive elections seem obligatory -- and, therefore, the problem of managing them remains.

Election management, though, when done right, is not done during election season, but during the years between elections when attention is slight. And Russia's Central Election Commission (TsIK) has been busy. Earlier this summer it launched a broadside attack against the foundations of international election monitoring at a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This week, Janez Lenarcic -- the new head of the OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which oversees election monitoring -- was in Moscow for talks with TsIK Chairman Vladimir Churov, at which he declared directly, "We are open to dialogue, but the basic principles on which our mandate is predicated cannot be a subject for that dialogue."

In addition, the TsIK has begun an intense series of "distance learning" seminars for journalists across the country on covering elections. The commission has conceded that the laws on media coverage of voting are so complex and open to interpretation -- and that the penalties are so draconian -- that many media outlets minimize their attention to elections. During a seminar on September 3, TsIK member Maiya Grishina told journalists not to be intimidated: "All you have to do is cover elections objectively and reliably."

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

The commission has also turned its attention to the problem of history. Russia held elections throughout the perestroika period and the reign of President Boris Yeltsin. Although those elections left much to be desired from the point of view of pure democracy, they were clearly much less "managed" than Russian elections have been since Putinism matured around 2003 or 2004. The mere fact that the party of power in the 1993 elections, Russia's Democratic Choice headed by acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, failed to poll the 5 percent required to gain seats in the Duma gives a pretty good idea of how things have changed. Putin's Unified Russia polled 70.7 percent in December 2007.

The pre-Putin elections left behind a rich legacy of data on voter registration, turnout, voting patterns, and so on that reached down to the level of each individual polling station. And this information provides countless opportunities for comparative analyse