Despite the whispers of revolution, who would bet against Vladimir matching Leonid?
Sunday night was Vladimir Putin's Brezhnev moment. It was when he ceased simply being an elected leader and segued towards a lifetime presidency. Having neatly sidestepped the rules by doing a stint as prime minister (no Russian leader can serve more than two consecutive presidential terms) Putin can now go on and on. Brezhnev did 18 years, Stalin 31. Despite the whispers of revolution lapping at the Kremlin's walls, who would bet against Vladimir matching Leonid?
The election – more of a coronation, really – differed from previous Russian polls in one respect. After the public outrage that followed last December's rigged parliamentary poll in Russia, Putin ordered that live web cameras be fitted in each of the country's 91,000 polling stations.
Over the past 48 hours, these cameras have reproduced a fascinating slice of Russian provincial life. We have seen cleaners mopping the floors of sports-halls, election officials dozing on the job, even a jolly Saturday evening disco at a polling station in sub-zero Siberia. Chekhov, that great chronicler of the ordinary, would have cheered.
But the cameras didn't do what, superficially at least, they were "intended" to do. They didn't stop the fraud. Opposition activists have posted video footage of a host of electoral violations including ballot-box stuffing and paid supporters of Putin being ferried around in an armada of buses to vote in multiple locations. Nor did the cameras catch election officials who fudged totals once polls had closed – the most common form of fraud in December.
For a long time now, "elections" in Russia's ritualised imitation democracy have lacked one crucial element: drama. This was no different.
Since he announced last autumn that he was standing for a third time to be president – taking his chair back from Dmitry Medvedev – Putin's victory was a foregone conclusion. It was achieved against a bunch of uninspiring hand-picked opponents, with the invincible advantage of 24-hour pro-Putin state television. There was never any doubt about the result.
But the Putin who returns to the Kremlin in May faces a radically different Russia from the quiescent one he has ruled for the past 12 years. Although he still enjoys support in the provinces, for the protesters who will gather on Monday in their tens of thousands in Moscow's Pushkin Square he has become a figure of loathing and derision. (A recent protest video compares him to Montgomery Burns, the ageing greedy miser from the Simpsons)
Putin is well aware that the protests now shaking Russia are the most serious since perestroika. They are spearheaded by a sophisticated urban middle class, but they include all kinds of Russians fed up with the falsehoods, feudal condescension and galactic thieving that have characterised his regime.
The demonstrators don't agree on who should replace Russia's Duracell leader. But they are united in their desire to get rid of him.
Confronted with the spectre of an Orange Revolution in Russia, Putin has two options. He can try to assuage the demonstrators with the vague promise of liberal reforms, or he can use the same lugubriously repressive KGB tactics that have served on previous occasions: black PR against key opposition figures; arrests; and the perennial libel that his enemies are traitorous western stooges and US-backed "fifth columnists".
Putin appears inclined towards the second, more thuggish, option. The Kremlin hassent hundreds of riot police and grey army vans to encircle Red Square. It's hard to know if he really believes Hillary Clinton is paying the demonstrators, as he has claimed. Does he really believe the crowds will seize the Kremlin? But in recent months he has slipped further away from reality. Putin's worldview has always been one of anti-Americanism and chippy Soviet xenophobia.
For the west, Putin's return means that Moscow will once again be a tricky and often paranoid partner. Only in the job for a few weeks, the US's new ambassador in Moscow, Michael McFaul, has been on the receiving end of a nasty Kremlin smear campaign. The Kremlin has deployed one of its favoured tricks – creating a fake "McFaul" Twitter account, using an upper-case i as an l. With Putin back on the international stage, the "reset" between Barack Obama's Washington and Medvedev's Moscow will go straight in the dustbin.
Relations between Britain and Russia are also in for a bumpy ride. This autumn, an inquest will be held into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Scotland Yard's evidence will be presented in public for the first time – almost certainly confirming that Litvinenko was the victim of a state-sponsored assassination, sanctioned at the top levels of Russian power. Putin – president again, and inclined to see conspiracy in everything – won't like this much. But, he says, he'll still come to the London Olympics.
At home, Putin has failed to explain why he wants to stay in power for another six years, with the option of another six in 2018. In the absence of any fresh leadership, Russia faces a period of stagnation, frustration, emigration – similar to Brezhnev's Soviet Union. In international relations, it will continue to play a spoiling role, weighing up its own strategic interests against the frisson of annoying the Americans. Many of the best and brightest Russians will leave. Especially if the protests fail to deliver any tangible political change.
For those demonstrating on Monday on Pushkin Square, the difficulty is this: how to bring about the end of the regime? There is no easy answer. Putin has no desire to step down. And given the personalist nature of the system he has created there isn't anybody who can make him. Moreover, Putin understands only too well the logic of the corrupt government model he has created. Any real successor would probably seize his assets, which total billions of dollars, and put him in a jail cell.
Russian politics, then, is entering a period of uncertainty. But we can assume for now that Putin will carry on, as will those who oppose him.