Quotes of the Day

The deep red glow in the night sky above the Kremlin was not the image Vladimir Putin wanted for his election victory. But just after the polls closed on Sunday evening one of Moscow's great buildings, the Manezh, a landmark of Empire style architecture just 100m from the Kremlin walls, went up in flames. By 1 am, as Putin was giving his victory press conference a few hundred meters away, the building was burning out of control and two firemen had died.

The only consolation this time is that the fire does not seem to have been an act of terrorism, even though one usually careful official, chairman of the Central Election Commission Alexander Veshnyakov, suggested it had been a "provocation." Most other officials claimed it was due to negligence — a spark from welding equipment, or a reveler throwing a firecracker through the window. In any case, like so much of Russia's infrastructure the early 19th century building was an accident waiting to happen — so badly maintained, a Moscow city official said later, that it went up like a tinder box.

Muscovites love the Manezh, and the fire dominated much of the media the next day. But it did not really spoil the mood after Putin's landslide victory, for the simple reason that there was no mood to spoil. The final result was 71.2% to Putin, 13.8% for his nearest rival, the communist Nikolai Kharitonov. No-one had expected anything different, but while the president enjoys consistently high approval ratings he does not generate affection. He had largely ignored the campaign and had refused to debate with the other candidates on the grounds that it was boring. At his post-election press conference he proclaimed his intention to "strengthen the multiparty system and a civil society and do everything to guarantee the freedom of the mass media." This generated some surprise as he has done exactly the opposite in his first term. Sounds nice, a skeptical senior U.S. diplomat commented the next day, "but these are things we'd like to see in deeds as well as words."

The liberal image did not last the press conference: asked about the turnout and fears expressed before the election of a boycott, Putin switched from reformer to KGB mode. Boycotting is not a form of political struggle, he said darkly. "it is sabotage."

Comments on the Putin victory were ironic, resigned or cynical. In its daily analysis one of the main financial consulting organizations, the United Financial Group, expressed relief that the election was a "respectable landslide," that fell mercifully short of the "disreputable" mega-majorities of the Soviet period. In places like Chechnya, though, the leadership exceeded the bounds of respectability. Officials admitted openly to stuffing the ballot boxes, and the turnout — in a republic that has been systematically destroyed since Putin came to power — was declared to be almost 90%. The only people who did not turn out to vote, remarked the political satirist Viktor Shenderovich, were Maskhadov and Basayev — the two main guerrilla leaders. Election monitors from the Council of Europe reported violations in a quarter of the 1500 voting precincts visited, and like other observers, sharply criticized the blanket coverage that Putin received on the main national TV channels.

But though diplomats and other observers are privately convinced that the election results were massaged and molded by the Kremlin, no-one quite understands why. There is little doubt that Putin would have won anyway. The president and his aides seem to suffer either from deep insecurity or a simple reflex desire to control all aspects of any event. Meanwhile local political leaders have quickly relapsed to the old Soviet habit of overfulfilling the plan — in this case pumping up the turnout or the results in an effort to demonstrate their loyalty to the Kremlin.

As crowds gathered to look at the blackened remains of the Manezh building, the desire to control reality seemed still to be at work. NTV, the last major network occasionally to have spasms of candor, reported that men in plainclothes had told its cameramen not to film the blackened ruins of the building against the backdrop of the Kremlin walls. They did not seem to realize it was too late. The Manezh fire was yet another reminder that, for all the president's attempts to create a reassuring virtual reality in this country, the real world, messy and often tragic, will find a way to break through the Vladimir Putin's carefully constructed controls.

• PAUL QUINN-JUDGE
• Putin's stage-managed landslide doesn't impress Russians