At precisely the time the head of Russia's electoral commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, was announcing that Vladimir Putin had been elected President of Russia, a combat ballistic missile was launched by a Russian submarine from under the North Sea. It struck its target on the Kura range on the remote Kamchatka peninsula, which juts into the Pacific Ocean in the Russian Far East.
The first action of the Russian military, therefore, after the election of its new commander-in-chief was consistent with his stated policy of impressing upon the rest of the world that Russia is a power to be reckoned with. The military hardware still exists from the old Soviet days and with its arsenal of nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them, Russia retains the second most powerful destructive capacity on earth.
It is, however, a capacity that is costly to maintain and, hopefully, most unlikely ever to be used. In the field of conventional warfare things are different, and the current campaign in Chechnya has restored some pride to Russian ground forces whose morale and prestige had been badly shaken by the defeat in the previous Chechen war and the experience of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
What the main TV channels have been portraying as a victory in Chechnya undoubtedly boosted Mr Putin's campaign. The two pro-Kremlin channels also unashamedly pushed Mr Putin as their favourite candidate and used their power to denigrate members of the opposition.
The ultimate in political sycophancy was carried out by the main ORT channel when in the final week of the campaign it ran a documentary series on Mr Putin's life giving him a massive slice of publicity denied to his opponents. He was portrayed as "the good KGB man", the patriotic lad who joined the security services but was never a stukach (an informer). Calmness, efficiency and devotion to duty were repeatedly cited as his main characteristics. There was no mention of the slightest flaw in his personality.
As was the case in the parliamentary vote in December, the target for vehement attack was not the main Communist challengers but what can loosely be described as the democratic opposition. On Thursday evening, in one of the final broadcasts of the campaign, ORT descended to a new low in TV journalism with an attack on the democratic candidate Grigory Yavlinsky.
A series of interviews were edited in such a way that Mr Yavlinsky was portrayed as the favoured candidate of Jews and homosexuals, thus playing on prejudices which unfortunately are strong in sections of Russian society. It was the old Tsarist secret service which perpetrated the fraudulent anti-Semitic document, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", on the world in the early part of the 20th century. One had hoped, until Thursday night, that such attitudes had died out.
Under the circumstances it was a credit to those voters in the more sophisticated electorates in Moscow and St Petersburg who turned out in such large numbers for Mr Yavlinsky and in many cases put him in second place, ahead of the Communist leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov.
MR ZYUGANOV, with just short of 30 per cent of the vote, polled far stronger than anticipated, and the views of those who supported him and the other pro-Communist candidate, Mr Aman Tuleyev, will have to be taken into consideration by Mr Putin. He should also heed the message, from the capital in particular, that strong, if geographically concentrated support, exists for the concept of a liberal democracy in which human rights are strictly observed.
The craving by the ordinary Russian voter for order following the utter chaos of the Yeltsin administration played a major part in Mr Putin's success. He should also know that there are Russians who want order to be accompanied by the checks and balances of the law. Ms Liliya Sheptsova, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, put the fears concisely when she expressed the hope that in the area of human rights Mr Putin's policy would not be one of "freedom for me, order for you".
While she felt that this would not be the case, Mr Leonid Radzikovsky, the astute political commentator of the daily newspaper Segodnya, which supported Mr Yavlinsky, felt that liberal and democratic forces had now been marginalised in Russia. Mr Yavlinsky's total vote of under 6 per cent would seem to indicate that this is the case.
Mr Putin himself expressed sympathy with those who voted for the Communists, saying: "I want to point out the Communists achieved that level (of votes) even though - let us be direct and honest about this - they did not have that many opportunities in the media, especially electronic media." They voted for Mr Zyuganov, he said, because of their dissatisfaction with their lot, and their worries should be taken into account, he said. He made no similar reference to those who voted for Mr Yavlinsky.
On the political and economic front, Mr Putin is a strong centralist. He will want to curb the powers of regional governors, who have run their fiefdoms almost as independent republics. His character is such that he will also want to rein in the political influence used by the Russian super-rich, who effectively ran the country in the latter years of Mr Yeltsin's presidency.
While Russia's economy is perceived to be in a parlous condition this is not truly the case at present. The lessons learnt from the crash of August 1998, allied to the high price of oil, has put Russia into a relatively comfortable situation. Inflation was just 1 per cent last month, the lowest figure since the economic crash, the rouble is stable at a little over 28 to the dollar and hard currency reserves have risen to $15 billion.
Mr Putin starts his presidency, therefore, on a reasonably sound footing. His tasks in all areas are formidable but there is one thing he cannot, and most probably will not, even attempt to do. The Russian presidency under the 1993 constitution is vested with far greater powers than those available to most democratic leaders. Passing the buck simply isn't on.