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The past week was an eventful one in Russian politics. On June 22, days after President Dmitri Medvedev told Britain’s Financial Times that he “would like the whole of political spectrum to be represented in our parliament,” the Ministry of Justice denied registration—and thus access to December’s parliamentary elections—to the Popular Freedom Party, a pro-democracy opposition bloc co-founded by the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov. The decision came as no surprise: the Popular Freedom Party became the eighth political group to be rejected by the Russian authorities since 2007.

The explanation for the refusal was customary: alleged irregularities in the submitted list of party members. To be precise, in 79 out of 46,148. One of the 79, Konstantin Baranovsky, a journalist and party member from Nizhny Novgorod, was very surprised to learn that, according to the Russian Ministry of Justice, he does not exist. Officials also announced that they had received “personally written statements from citizens” denying their affiliation with the party. (They neglected to mention that, for several weeks, Popular Freedom Party activists across Russia reported receiving visits from police officials pressuring them to make statements denouncing their membership.)

Despite the total blackout of the opposition on Russian TV, recent polls showed that the Popular Freedom Party was within reach of parliamentary seats. For a regime that only survives with a political monopoly, even a handful of opposition legislators using the Duma rostrum to denounce government corruption and demand gubernatorial elections, judicial independence, media freedom, freedom of assembly, and amnesty for political prisoners, could be seen as an existential threat.

Reacting to the news from Moscow, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the move to bar Russia’s opposition from the ballot, with Ashton noting that such decisions “reduce the choice available to [Russia’s] electorate,” and Clinton raising the question of “how this decision … is consistent with Russia’s international commitments.” US senators went even further, suggesting in a joint bipartisan statement that the “decision calls into question the legitimacy and credibility of the upcoming Duma elections.”

But the Kremlin would not be itself if it did not have a prepared answer. On June 25—two days after the ban on the Popular Freedom Party—the lavish headquarters of Moscow’s International Trade Center hosted the convention of Right Cause, an officially sanctioned “center-right” party intended as a surrogate for the disenfranchised democrats in the December 4 vote. While calling for modest “reforms,” like elections for mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg (but not for the rest of Russia’s regional governors), the party’s newly installed leader, Forbes billionaire and New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, proposed to “exclude the word ‘opposition’ from our lexicon,” and made sure to stress that he is not against Vladimir Putin. On Monday, he was invited to the Kremlin for a meeting with President Medvedev, which was widely reported in the official media. It is highly unlikely that pro-democracy voters will fall for this hoax. But, of course, it has been a long time since voters decided the outcomes of Russian elections.

Earlier this month, Vladimir Churov, the head of Russia’s central electoral commission, wrote to the director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, inviting the watchdog to monitor the Duma elections. It is expected that an early assessment team from the OSCE will arrive in Moscow in August. This may seem like a welcome change from 2007, when OSCE observers had to cancel their mission altogether, citing “unprecedented restrictions” imposed by the Russian authorities. But this time, it is unlikely to make any difference. Russia’s 2011 election campaign has ended before it began.