Add to this the fact that Vladimir Putin is also only sort-of stepping down - he will instead return as prime minister - and you have a classic example of what the Kremlin once called "managed democracy".

	Most Russians will take a Putin-Medvedev package so long as Putin stays in charge

Everyone in Russia has known for the past three months who their next president will be. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy prime minister and a longtime Putin acolyte, was chosen by a small group of Kremlin cronies at a papal-style conclave in December and presented to the people.

How many will bother to go through the charade of voting is almost irrelevant - although Russians are a dutiful bunch, and slackers have been tempted with prizes or threatened with the sack. Even if this goes wrong, peripheral matters such as turn-out and margin of victory are fairly easy to fix, especially as Western observers are boycotting the vote.

Just to be on the safe side, the Kremlin has also banned any of Putin's serious critics from standing. Three unelectable misfits have been allowed to mount token challenges.

Most Russians don't seem to mind that they have so little say. They would much rather Putin dispensed with such niceties as the constitution - which precluded him from serving a third term - but they will happily take a Putin-Medvedev package so long as Putin remains in charge.

Western leaders are less happy. Moscow's diplomatic corps would like to believe that Medvedev could shed his mentor's influence and move Russia away from Putin's confrontational approach. A few cling to encouraging traits: unlike Putin, the 42-year-old is not a former KGB spy - he was a lawyer and a businessman - and is a relative liberal on the economy. He has also been less caustic towards the West than his mentor.

However, the consensus is that such optimism is misplaced. From the time that he began sharing a desk with Putin at St Petersburg city hall in 1992, Medvedev has shown nothing but subservience towards his boss, who is a decade older. Even if he did try to break free, the Kremlin machine is against him. Medvedev would need to create a faction of loyalists, and, as the administration is full of Putin's ex-KGB comrades, his chances seem slight.

Indeed, Medvedev has shown no inclination of pursuing his own course. He has even had voice coaching lessons to make him sound more like Putin, and this week promised to change nothing that his predecessor has done.

For Russians, this is welcome news. Since Putin came to power in 2000, Russia has become a much better place to live for many.

In the chaotic decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Russians lived in misery, deeply resentful of the tiny cadre of oligarchs that accumulated vast wealth at their expense. The income disparity is still stark, but an energy-driven boom has given Russia new lustre. With the economy expanding at about 10 per cent and a small but aggressively consumerist middle class finding its feet, this is a country transformed.

Many still cannot get to grips with the idea of a disposable income. "I feel like I'm bathing in chocolate," says Irina Babinsteva, the wife of a construction company proprietor in Tyumen. Whereas once she had to save for six months to buy an illicit pair of Levi jeans, Babintseva now takes four holidays a year and does her shopping in Miami and Milan.

Russians are so terrified that instability will cause a return to the 1990s, or the shortages of Communist times, that many support Putin out of self-preservation: even the poor believe that he represents their best chance. He has also restored a sense of national pride and his attacks on the West are broadly welcomed.

In exchange for the promise of prosperity and stability, however, Russians have been asked to sacrifice democracy. Freedom of expression has been curtailed, the independence of parliament crushed and concepts of transparency and accountability ditched.

Just as Putin has used the trappings of Soviet and Tsarist rule to make Russia appear formidable again, so he has resurrected some of the more unwholesome attributes of the communist past. Local human rights activists say that Putin has jailed hundreds of people - possibly many more - for political reasons.