Russia's experiment with parliamentary democracy, never full-hearted, is more or less dead. The country's wellbeing now depends more than ever on Vladimir Putin. On December 7th, in the election for Russia's lower house of parliament, the Duma, had surprising results. Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his ultra-nationalist, ultra-misnamed Liberal Democrats nearly doubled their vote over the last election in 1999. Yabloko and the SPS, on the other hand, were wiped out overnight: both fell short of the 5% needed to get their party-list candidates into the Duma. The only non-surprise was that United Russia itself came first. Together with its single-mandate deputies, it has 222 seats, just shy of half the Duma. The Duma that results is a democrat's nightmare: three parties whose only ideologies are an almost slavish loyalty to President Vladimir Putin and varying degrees of nationalism, plus one made of the dregs of seven decades of totalitarian rule. Having spent his first term securing the state's finances with the help of soaring oil prices, and with his re-election next March in effect guaranteed, Putin is now ready to push reforms that will spread wealth into the rest of the economy, says Chris Weafer, the chief strategist at Alfa-Bank in Moscow. To some, all this confirms the suspicions that rather than being a flowering of democracy, the 1990s were just a momentary lapse of Russia's normal authoritarianism.