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After a decade of post-Soviet transformation in the 1990s, the Russian political regime established under Putin’s leadership in the 2000s had shown certain features of “electoral authoritarianism” (close to a “competitive” version), in which despite shortage of democratic essence, elections played a central role in Russian politics dominated by the Kremlin. Faced with a serious challenge by the mass political protests caused by massive electoral frauds in the December 2011 Duma elections, the Kremlin made a variety of efforts to suppress the protest movement and build a new formula of rule for maintaining and strengthening its power. First, the Putin regime took strenuous endeavors to make its victories in the national and regional elections much more certain by making various legal rearrangements (e. g., the restoration of direct election of governors, lowering of the requirements for party registrations, and return to the mixed electoral system for the Duma with the 5% threshold rule) and by diversifying the methods of manipulating the elections (e. g., obstructing opposition candidates’ entering the elections, gerrymandering the electoral districts, providing illegal fund to the ruling party’s candidates, strengthening control over election monitors). In order to make these moves for electoral victories more successful, the Kremlin tried to weaken further the position of the opposition by increasing arrests of and legal charges on opposition figures, holding smearing campaigns against them, and using violence in certain cases. At the same time, it also made Russian society more submissive to the regime by introducing a series of repressive measures that restricted political and civil rights of citizens and tightened its control over Russian media and internet communication. In the process of making a new formula of rule, a new political regime was being formed under Putin. It was getting close to a “hegemonic” type of “electoral authoritarianism” with the ruling power’s absolute domination in the national and regional elections. In those elections, real democracy was not there. Level of contestation between the Kremlin and the opposition was very low on the uneven electoral playing field, and certainty in the victory of the ruling party in the elections got extremely high.
