The breaking of the Communist Party's control over the State Duma in Russia is to be welcomed. The party, under Mr Gennady Zyuganov, had little constructive thinking to offer. It played its own role in creating Russia's many crises since the Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. Allied to some extreme rightwing and ultra-chauvinist elements it paid little more than lip service to its formal commitment to internationalism and included in its ranks many racists, anti-semites and outright xenophobes.
Despite the victory of the pro-Kremlin parties, the communists are still the largest party in Russia's lower house and actually increased their percentage of the vote since the last election. But its allies - independents and agrarians who were communists in all but name - have been wiped out and it is to be expected that Mr Putin's government will be more stable and subject to less friction in the Duma than its predecessors.
It would be wrong, however, to welcome the results of the election as a victory for democracy. While international observers have rightly regarded Sunday's voting process as free and fair, serious questions are being asked about the way the Kremlin manipulated television coverage to its own advantage. Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, the former prime minister who is expected to be the main economic policy maker in the new Duma, has described the vote as a victory for those Russians who want to live as people do in western Europe. But the means by which those votes were obtained ran contrary to the European ideals of a free media and particularly to the concept of public-service broadcasting.
The propaganda emanating from the two pro-government television stations was concentrated almost in its entirety against the Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) party led by the former prime minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, and Moscow's mayor, Mr Yuri Luzhkov. The battle was between the non-communists who supported President Yeltsin and Mr Putin, and the non-communists who did not. In this contest the pro-Kremlin forces were the clear winners with almost 40 per cent of the vote. The composition of this pro-Kremlin alliance, however, left a lot to be desired. Its largest partner - the Unity Bloc - under Emergencies Minister, Mr Sergei Shoigu, gained popularity for its identification with the war in Chechnya. It is so lacking in policy content that it has been described as a "virtual party."
Mr Kiriyenko's Union of Right Forces, while offering a legitimate free-market economic programme, contains a number of prominent and extremely influential members whose probity is seriously open to question. The third party in the alliance, under the leadership of the rabble-rouser, Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is an organisation in whose company no democrat should feel comfortable. On the other side, Mr Luzhkov strayed far from the democratic path in using his prerogatives as mayor of Moscow to ensure his re-election to that post and to engineer a major OVR success in the capital. The cynicism of the politicians seems to have rubbed off on the electorate.