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Something strange was going on in Khabarovsk. Army conscripts, braving a fierce late-February blizzard, swept snow from the steps outside the Platinum Forum, a new sports complex in this city of 580,000 in Russia's far east — 6,500 km from Moscow, just 32 km from the Chinese border. Elsewhere, municipal workers were carefully trimming snow-covered trees on the city's main streets. And the TV weatherman warned of traffic jams, though not because of snow drifts. "You will be having a very high visitor," he predicted, but he wouldn't say who — and neither would the newspapers.

A news blackout is an odd way to kick off a presidential campaign swing, but almost everything about Vladimir Putin's re-election effort — which is expected to carry him to a landslide victory next week — seems odd. When Putin arrived in Khabarovsk, for instance, he didn't even pretend to be enjoying his time on the stump. His presidential motorcade swept straight from the airport to the edge of the city, where Putin presided at a tightly scripted ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of a transport bridge (even though it had been in use for a year). He posed with some workers but didn't chat, headed into town for a brisk meeting with regional governors and sped back to the airport.

As his cortege sailed down Amur Boulevard, commuters at a bus stop watched in silence. Putin wasn't looking out the window, and no one in the crowd waved or even smiled — though virtually all of those who bother to vote will cast their ballots for him. A young office worker named Nastya Khristenko was scathing about the secrecy that enveloped Putin's visit, but said she would "definitely" vote for him. "We voted Yeltsin for two terms, and we'll do the same for Putin," she explained. "Nothing good came of Yeltsin, and nothing good will come from him. But we don't know anyone else."

The presidential campaign swing through Khabarovsk is a handy snapshot of the parallel worlds that make up Putin's Russia on the eve of the March 14 election. The numbers say Putin is wildly popular, with approval ratings in the upper 70s and polls suggesting he'll get between 64% and 80% of the vote. But it's hard to find anyone who is truly excited about him. Most credible opponents declined to run after pro-Putin parties won parliamentary elections in December that were widely judged unfair. Those candidates still in the race are barely serious opponents, like Sergei Mironov, whose campaign motto amounts to "Re-elect Putin."

The lack of enthusiasm is puzzling, since Putin's Russia appears to be doing very well indeed — and Putin seems to deserve plenty of credit for it. After becoming President in 2000, he pulled the Russian people out of a 10-year inferiority complex brought on by the chaos and corruption of the post-Soviet era, especially his predecessor Boris Yeltsin's last years in office, which were clouded by alcohol and infirmity. The articulate, well-educated young Putin restored morale with his energy, machismo and, initially at least, his promise to bring the secessionist republic of Chechnya swiftly to heel. Thanks to high oil prices, Russia today is awash in petro-dollars and the mood among its investors is upbeat. The stock market was up 58% last year and GDP grew by 7.3%. Now Putin talks confidently of doubling GDP, slashing bureaucracy and modernizing the army during his second term.

But look closer and the alarming parallel world emerges. Over the past four years, Putin has consolidated control over key Russian media outlets, established supremacy over parliament, and cracked down on powerful businessmen like oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was jailed in October on fraud charges and is awaiting trial. In late February, Putin fired Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and replaced him with Mikhail Fradkov, whose main quality is thought to be complete subservience (see box).

But even Putin's strong grip hasn't brought society under any semblance of control. Russia is still among the world's most corrupt countries — between Mozambique and Algeria near the bottom of monitoring group Transparency International's list. Some 31 million Russians — over 20% of the population — live below the poverty line of $74 per month, according to the World Bank. At just under 62, average male life expectancy is 12 years less than in Western Europe, thanks to continuing high rates of alcoholism and the resurgence of diseases like tuberculosis. HIV/AIDS is growing faster in Russia and the former Soviet states than anywhere else in the world. Chechnya remains a bloody mess, with an average of seven Russian soldiers and an unknown number of Chechens dying or disappearing every week. Chechen suicide bombers have struck just meters from the Kremlin.

Ordinary Russians are rarely reminded of any of this, thanks to the firm grip the Kremlin keeps on the media. The only two TV networks broadcasting nationwide, ORT and RTR, are state-owned. So are the two main radio stations. The other major TV network, NTV, is controlled by the oil monopoly Gazprom, in which the government has a controlling share.

Joseph Stalin used to say: "No man, no problem." Putin's approach is nonlethal and thoroughly modern: no news, no problem. When the President traveled to the Barents Sea in the Arctic last month to view the launch of a sea-based intercontinental missile, for example, it was meant to be a great photo op. But the missile misfired. That would have been a small embarrassment to any Western politician. Not to Putin. State TV simply ignored the story, so most Russians never heard about it.

Instead, as the election draws near, the people are being fed a daily ration of flattering reports about Putin, and local officials have been cracking down on the slightest hint of dissent. In St. Petersburg two weeks ago, a small group of young demonstrators were arrested for reportedly "defiling state symbols." Their offense: wearing rubber Putin masks as they protested the electoral "farce."

Media control is only part of the apparent drift toward authoritarianism that is worrying observers both in Russia and the West. Another is the rise of the Siloviki, the former security and military officials who now occupy many of the highest posts in government. Those concerns broke into the open last fall, with the the arrest and imprisonment of Yukos chief Khodorkovsky. The tycoon had infuriated Putin by bankrolling his own faction in parliament, and alarmed those around the President who want to keep control of the country's oil wealth by entering into talks to sell a major stake of Yukos to U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. He's still awaiting trial on charges of fraud, tax evasion and forgery, and at the end of last year, Yukos was hit with a demand for back taxes of over $3 billion. Putin's foreign admirers are now voicing their doubts. "We don't need another Peter the Great," says one British official.

In other words, if Putin's Russia is made up of parallel worlds, it is only because Putin himself is. "There are two sides to this man," says a senior U.S. diplomat with a long experience of Russia. "On one side, the modernizer who recognizes the need to have a liberal economy. On the other side is Putin the kgb veteran who believes in the strong state." Neither side is likely to triumph, leaving a curious political situation that Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces, a small opposition party that was knocked out of parliament in the December elections, calls "Putinism — a [new] Russian variant of totalitarianism. It combines formal observation of all the political niceties, and the real concentration of all power in one person."

There are those who say that Putin's version of state control is precisely what Russia needs right now. "The best-case scenario is that he will leave Russia in a state of guided democracy, a sort of semidemocracy," says an official who worked closely with Putin in the Kremlin for several years and remains a firm admirer. "It sounds terrible, but Russians are not ready for the real thing. You travel with him and whenever he meets anyone, from governors down, all they do is ask for personal favors — more money, a better pension or an apartment. It's the old cliché of everybody wanting the good Czar who will keep them in their place and reward them for being good." But even this strong Putin supporter isn't confident of the future. "The worst case," he says, "is that the people around [Putin] will realize he has only four years left" — under Russia's current constitution, the President may only serve two four-year terms in succession — "and will try to grab as much of the country's resources as possible."

When Putin was elevated to power, he seemed very different from his predecessors. He was certainly very different from Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin, both of whom had risen gradually through the Soviet communist power structures. Putin had grown up in Leningrad — he described himself as having been a "punk" — and became involved in politics in 1991 after 16 years in the kgb, retiring as a lieutenant colonel with an undistinguished career in foreign intelligence. From his posting in Dresden in East Germany, he watched the Soviet empire crumble, but it was only when he returned home to Leningrad that he experienced the full shock of the last days of the Soviet Union. At one point, he was even forced to moonlight as a cab driver. His experiences marked him for life, say those who know him, and probably strengthened the conviction, already firmly inculcated in him by the kgb, that Russia needs a strong state to survive.

After leaving the KGB, he drifted into work for Leningrad's reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, concentrating first on contacts with foreign businessmen and then in 1996 helping run Sobchak's unsuccessful re-election campaign. The race was so nasty that, his semi-official biography says, he slept with a loaded shotgun in his room. After the election, Putin was out of work for a few months — another shock for someone who had been a member of an élite Soviet unit. In August 1996 he was offered an obscure job in the Kremlin. Very quickly, though, by luck or patronage, he found himself on the fast track: head of the KGB's successor, the FSB, in July 1998 and 13 months later Prime Minister. "We were looking for someone who could fulfill two roles," says Gleb Pavlovsky, a close consultant to Boris Yeltsin and a key figure in the search for a successor. "First, to guarantee the interests of the élite; second, to get elected. Putin turned out to be capable of doing both."

Until recently, Putin was also capable of reassuring Western leaders that he had put Russia on the right track. But now they're not so sure. According to a government minister from a state on Russia's southern flank, when Putin's name came up in a recent conversation with Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defense Secretary said: "My institution does not trust him." Putin "believes the state is incomparably more important than anything else, including citizens," says Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of Yabloko, another small opposition party knocked out of parliament last December. "That's why he wants to control the business sector — Yukos and the rest — as well as everything else. The problem is, this will not work in the modern world."

At home, Putin has yet to address what may be the biggest threat of all to Russia's future: HIV/AIDS. There are as many as 1.5 million hiv-positive cases in Russia today, and according to the World Bank there will be between 5.4 million and 14.5 million by 2020. The spread of HIV/AIDS has been particularly swift because of a catastrophic increase in intravenous drug use, yet the Kremlin seems hardly aware of the problem. Specialists believe the official figures are drastically understated. By 2010, the World Bank estimates that the spread of HIV/AIDS will start cutting dangerously into the working age population and depress GDP growth by over 4%. By 2020, lost GDP growth will exceed 10%, the Bank believes.

Eventually, of course, problems such as HIV/AIDS can devastate a country whether the news media report them or not. So now that he has stabilized the economy and consolidated his authority, will Putin use his extraordinary power to try to improve the lives of ordinary people? That's a question that Russians — after centuries of suffering — are probably too jaded to ask. And it's a question to which Putin himself may not even know the answer. The Duma has signaled that it would be happy to amend the constitution to give him five or even seven years in his second term to figure it out. So far, he's turned them down.

Meanwhile, if he decides to turn the screws, he'll probably do it discreetly: a quiet tightening up in the provinces, perhaps. Western companies might find themselves squeezed out of some sectors of the economy. Or the last independent radio station with real credibility, Ekho Moskvy, might gradually find its voice stifled. But there's always the danger that random moves could be misread as a trend. According to Pavlovsky, Putin "improvises in making policy. And when he doesn't see a clear solution to a given situation, he can be irresolute." There are no clear or easy solutions to the challenges facing Russia now, and if Putin is unsure about the future, he's not alone. Most of his countrymen feel precisely the same way.

• PAUL QUINN-JUDGE | Moscow
• Cruising to a landslide election win next week, Russia's President has extraordinary power