Allan Little's Russian diary

The BBC's Allan Little is covering the run-up to the Russian Presidential elections, due to be held on 2 March.

Friday:

Whether this election is fair or not, just think of the logistics of it.

This is a country which stretches across eleven time zones, thousands and thousands of kilometres and has over 100,000 registered electors.

I went to see the man whose job it is to organise this huge logistical feat and get all the ballots back in in time for a declaration of who has won by 10am Moscow time on Monday.

His name is Vladimir Churov and he is the head of the Russian electoral commission.

I was very intrigued by the decision by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe not to send election monitors to Russia. This is the first time since Russia's democracy came into being in the early 1990s.

The OSCE accused Russia - and Mr Churov in particular - of imposing so many restrictions that it would be impossible for the monitors to do their job.

Orange technologies

Well, this is something I put to Mr Churov and he was very very revealing in his answer. He thought 70 monitors here for just two days before the election began was more than enough for 96,000 polling stations.

He went on to say that many western monitors came to Russia with a political agenda of their own and what he described as certain political technologies, "orange technologies". He said some of their activities amounted to what he called "an attempt at a coup d'état."

It's clear in Vladimir Putin's circle that there is extreme concern about what happened in Ukraine; the Orange Revolution which brought the pro-democracy party to power there.

Russia views that with great disquiet and great anxiety and it explains a lot about why the authorities here often use a sledgehammer to crack a nut - why they are so heavy-handed in cracking down on opposition demonstrations - especially by those who are perceived to be the pro-western liberal democratic opposition.

Dying democracy

There was one hope among the liberal democrats. That was Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Prime Minister during Mr Putin's first term here.

He had intended to be the liberal democratic candidate in this election, but he was disqualified by Mr Churov, who said that 13% of the hundreds of thousands of signatures that the law here requires you to collect, were in fact invalid.

That's something Mr Kasyanov challenges. He says the decision to disqualify him from the election was taken by Vladimir Putin himself.

A few minutes ago I caught up with him on Red Square, inbetween his appointments. He said that Vladimir Putin's decision to exclude him from the ballot is a signal that democracy in Russia is, in effect, dying.

Thursday:

The cathedral was dynamited by the Soviets in the 1930s

I was waiting for Father Vsevoled Chaplin, an arch-priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.

We were in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on the banks of the Moscow River in the city centre.

It is one of the most striking buildings in a city full of extraordinary architectural spectacle – gleaming white stone walls, beautiful arched gables in the eastern Orthodox style, immense golden domes chiming with those of the Kremlin just downstream.

And suddenly, there he was emerging from a celebration to mark the Name Day of the head of the Church, Russian Patriarch – Gennadi Zyuganov himself, the leader of the Communist Party and a candidate in Sunday’s presidential election.

I watched him browsing the religious trinkets in the Cathedral gift shop. He seemed genuinely absorbed.

Palace of the Soviets

My producer, Dina Newman and I approached him. Would Gennadi Andrejevic care to give us an interview? We asked. He declines, politely, and told us to come back to him after the election on Sunday.

I wanted to ask him about how his predecessors – the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – had dynamited this very Cathedral in the 1930s and planned to replace it with a 100-storey secular building called the Palace of the Soviets.

Imagine the signal that generations of Bolsheviks were sending out to the people: you used to belong to the Church and worship the Almighty; now you belong to the Proletariat and you worship the Party.

Not by accident did the Communist State plan to put the Palace of the Soviets on this sacred Christian site – the Communist Party moved onto the territory of the Church in a figurative, as well as a literal, sense – the political commissars of the Stalinist State would become the new priesthood. In the end the monumental palace was never built – the ground here was too soft to take the weight.

So the Soviets built a huge public swimming pool. In the atheist state, Christians would bring their children here, in secret, to baptise them.

Abornost

Only in the 1990s did the Church rebuild the original Cathedral. The new one is identical to the one that was destroyed. When Father Chaplin arrived I asked him about this.

I suggested to him that in the Western Christian tradition, people had had to live for centuries with the idea that there can be more than one valid way of interpreting things, even the Scriptures, and that therefore in the western dispute, disagreement, pluralism had evolved as something natural, whereas in the lands of the Eastern Orthodox Church, where that had been no Reformation, there remained a popular fondness for the idea that there was one overarching truth that permitted no real challenge.

“You know the Russian word ‘abornost’?” he asked me. “It comes from a verb meaning to gather together. We believe in the importance of our collectivity, our unity, our togetherness. We prefer this to constant competition between different ideas, which divides people against each other”.

Had the Church left its stamp on Russian public life?

Does this partly explain why Vladimir Putin has so successfully rallied the Russian people under his leadership, the new Tsar Putin, embodying as he does the collective values of contemporary Russian-ness?

Does it explain why the opposition is now so marginalised. Maybe it does.

It is a question I would love to have put to Gennadi Zyuganov in the vaults of the Church his communist forebears demolished.

Wednesday:

No-one here in the Russian capital doubts the outcome of Sunday's presidential election.

It's almost certain to be a landslide victory for Vladimir Putin's chosen man Dmitri Medvedev.

This puts the Kremlin in a tricky position.

The government wants Mr Medvedev to win by a convincing majority - "the more votes, the greater the legitimacy" as the Moscow Times puts it today - but not with so great a majority that he polls better than Mr Putin polled at the last presidential in 2004.

Many in the Kremlin will continue to regard Mr Putin as the country's real boss even after he steps down from the presidency.

So crucial to what the Kremlin wants is how the young will vote. There is now a generation of 18 year olds who are the first generation to have grown up entirely under a Russian, rather than a Soviet, flag.

They are too young to remember much of life before Vladimir Putin, never mind remember the Soviet Union.

Soviets or Russians?

When the result is so predictable why should they feel they have a stake at all in the democratic process?

Some, indeed, don't. "We have much more freedom to choose than our parents had at our age," Elena, who's 17 and not yet old enough to vote, told me.

"We can choose which restaurant to go to, which movie to see, which music to listen to. But we can't yet choose our president. He's been chosen for us already".

I spent part of this morning today in an elegant 18th century palace just outside the walls of the Kremlin where generations of students have studied at Moscow State University.

Georgi, who's 18, told me he was optimistic about his country's future, but with reservations. "Look at those symbols over there" he said, gesturing toward the roof tops of the Kremlin.

"We have red stars (the communist symbol) alongside our double-headed eagle (the symbol of Imperial Russia). I can't understand where our country is going, when it is not clear where we are coming from. Are we Soviets or Russians? It's not clear".

"I disagree" a young woman called Ann cut in. "Our country has been moving forward in a good way these last twenty years. I think we will continue to move that way whoever our president is. "I truly believe that Russia will be a democracy".

Independent minds

Yasen Zasursky has been teaching journalism at Moscow State for decades. He's seen generations of students come through the changing system.

He remembers Soviet elections from his childhood in the 1990s. "There is no doubt that this generation is much more free thinking than previous generations" he told me.

"The Soviet system demanded uniformity. They haven't known this. Their interests are broad and diverse. They are open to the world.

We study journalism in Spain and France and America and Latin America. They speak English. They read the British newspapers on the World Wide Web.

Some of them know Chinese. They have very independent minds."

The election may be predictable. But the 18 year olds I met this morning were sharp, articulate, tremendously thoughtful, engaged, well informed, and open to an entire world of possibility - here in Russia as well as beyond.

They have their anxieties about their country's future. But it is their country and - it seemed to me - they are embarking on their adult lives with extraordinary optimism.

Read Allan's earlier installments

What do you think of Russia under Putin? Send us your comments on Allan's diary.

The Putin Project, the BBC World Service's in-depth coverage of Putin's Russia can be found here.