That is one reason why Vladimir Putin's amazingly sudden rise to power, despite his brutal venture in Chechnya, has been more or less welcomed in the West. To float an answer to this question is to guess how Putin's Russia will differ from Yeltsin's. Although Putin paints himself as an ardent advo-cate of equality before the law and publicly accountable government, his critics do not hesitate to denounce him as a closet autocrat. The two articles here by Nikolai Sokov and Oleg Panfilov, although written from distinct perspectives, both suggest that the new president, during his tenure as prime minister and acting head of state, has pursued state strength by sacrificing important elements of liberalism and democracy. That the Russian political system is only weakly democratic, even today, is the least that might be said.
Voters have no influence over important political deci-sions, and they know it.
Parliamentary elections in Russia, in particular, coexist with unaccountable government, because parliamentary committees offer no serious form of monitoring and control over the central ministries. Richard Rose, in his contribution here, explains why the link between voters and their representatives, too, remains so attenuated in Russia. Basically, voters in parliamentary elections cannot punish or reward incumbent parties, based on past performance, not only because the executive has kept its distance from all parties but also because the parties loosely associated with the Kremlin over the past decade have kaleidoscopically dissolved and re-coalesced from election to election. Thus, more than three-fifths of the PR seats in the new Duma were won by parties that had no seats in the last Duma and, indeed, did not exist in 1995. But they also cast doubt on Putin's ability to rule with an iron hand.