The closing days of Russia’s 2011 election campaign did not go well for Vladimir Putin. On November 20th—for the first time in his 12-year rule—Putin was booed by a thousands-strong crowd at a Moscow stadium. Russian television carried his speech—and the boos—live, but edited the soundtrack during subsequent playbacks. Unaccustomed to such reception, the premier cancelled two announced public appearances at antidrug concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg (his deputy, Dmitri Kozak, did appear at the St. Petersburg event—and was booed by the audience). For many analysts, this marked a turning-point for Putin’s regime. Opinion polls confirm that most Russians—outside of Putin’s stage-managed party congresses—are less than enthusiastic about his return to the presidency in 2012. The latest poll by the Levada Center puts Putin’s electoral support at 31 percent. Even if one adds the 7 percent who wish to vote for outgoing President Dmitri Medvedev, the ruling “tandem” claims just 38 percent of the vote—not too impressive, considering the regime’s tight control over television.

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With its support base shrinking, Putin’s party, United Russia, is taking a different route to preserve its majority in the upcoming parliamentary election. As the campaign draws to a close, the evidence of state-sponsored fraud is coming from all around the country. Government officials in Chelyabinsk and Izhevsk are conditioning budget allocations on United Russia’s vote tally. Authorities in Novokuznetsk and energy company executives in Astrakhan are openly pressuring employees to back the ruling party. Officials in Volgograd are trying to persuade local priests to canvass their parishioners for United Russia during sermons. The governor of Tula is sending letters to voters suggesting that ballots marked for any party other than United Russia will be considered “void.” A local Moscow official is instructing plant managers to collect their current and former employees’ absentee voting certificates—which can be used to receive ballots at any polling place—for inflating United Russia’s figures (in all, the Central Electoral Commission has printed 2.6 million absentee certificates). In St. Petersburg, Novaya Gazeta has uncovered a scheme to organize paid multiple voting.

In the most important sense, Russia’s 2011 election was rigged long before the first vote was cast: nine opposition groups, from the left-wing United Labor Front to the center-right Popular Freedom Party, were barred from the ballot altogether. Yabloko, the only pro-democracy party that did make it onto the register, encountered problems as soon as its poll numbers began to approach the 5 percent threshold for Duma representation: the Moscow metro chief ordered its posters removed from the stations; and television channels refused to air its campaign ads that mentioned Putin and Medvedev by name and referred to United Russia leaders as “puffed vegetables.” Meanwhile, government officials prohibited Ekho Moskvy radio from airing a Popular Freedom Party ad urging Russians to vote against all by spoiling their ballots.

There is no doubt that official figures published on December 5th will give United Russia yet another parliamentary majority. But it is one thing to manipulate elections when you have at least tacit popular acceptance—as was the case in 2003 and 2007—and quite another to do so against the backdrop of growing public impatience. The next few years will bring Vladimir Putin anything but a Brezhnev-style stagnation he is hoping for.