Vladimir Putin is up for re-election. At the time of writing, the outcome is unclear: Is Putin going to get 93 percent of the vote, or will the Kremlin settle for a cool—and totally reasonable—82 percent? At one point during the 2011 parliamentary elections, Russian-state-media polls showed 146 percent in favor of the ruling party, so no number is off the table—only the idea that this election is free, fair, or real.
“Our presidential election is not really democracy; it’s costly bureaucracy,” said Putin’s spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, in an interview for The New York Times in August of last year. Peskov, known for telling the truth with the frequency of a solar eclipse, is right. Be it a babushka in Siberia or the C.I.A. station chief in Moscow, no one will be surprised by the outcome.
