RUSSIA: United Russia is accused of conducting a PR campaign against corruption and having a too cosy relationship with the president, writes Dan McLaughlin.
United Russia, the party supported by President Vladimir Putin, looks set for victory in tomorrow's parliamentary elections, promising a crackdown on corruption, a reckoning with the country's "oligarchs" and a bright future for a poverty-ridden nation.
But political opponents, democracy watchdogs and now one of United Russia's most prominent members say the party that revels in righteous indignation is guilty of illegal campaigning and is in hock to the dubious tycoons it claims to revile.
Mr Putin and United Russia - whose slogan is "Together with the President!" - are feasting on popular political capital created by a legal onslaught against Yukos, Russia's leading oil firm, and the arrest of several top company officials on charges ranging from embezzlement to murder.
The jailing of billionaire former Yukos boss Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky and several wealthy associates is a welcome reminder to most ordinary Russians of Mr Putin's own election promise to "eliminate oligarchs as a class", and United Russia's leader - Interior Minister Mr Boris Gryzlov - has placed himself at the forefront of a very public anti-corruption campaign.
But now the member of United Russia who launched the inquiry into Yukos and Mr Khodorkovsky, and another into the Sibneft oil firm controlled by Chelsea football club's owner Mr Roman Abramovich, says Mr Gryzlov's crackdown on crime is little more than PR.
"I thought Gryzlov wanted to fight corruption," Mr Vladimir Yudin said this week.
"But he has become involved in what we are now combating - corruption and embezzlement."
Mr Yudin, who now faces expulsion from the party, said it had left him off a list of leading election candidates because his anti-oligarch campaign was worrying some powerful financiers of United Russia - including oil firms TNK, Lukoil and even Yukos itself.
"The President could end up being a hostage to the big capital that funds the party," said Mr Yudin, who was clearly bitter at his exclusion from the prestigious party list, but whose criticisms highlight a deep contradiction at the heart of United Russia.
Senior officials at TNK and Lukoil, as well as metals behemoth Russian Aluminium and steel giant Severstal, are running for election on the United Russia ticket; as many as a quarter of its candidates, according to some estimates, represent big business.
The party has lambasted its main rivals, the Communists, for welcoming a host of rich businessmen into its ranks, while trying to bury information about its own links to millionaires that most Russians regard as robber-barons who grew fat during the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s.
United Russia's main weapon is the media: since coming to power in 2000 Mr Putin has overseen the destruction or state takeover of Russia's last three independent nationwide television stations, emasculating by far the most influential information source in the country.
In the run-up to the election, the Communist Party and the main liberal blocs, Yabloko and the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS), have complained of United Russia's domination of national and local media, and of advertising space in towns and cities across the land.
Their complaints are well founded. At the Russian national team's recent football matches, the cameras have spent less time lingering on the players than on patriotic United Russia members sitting in the crowd.
The main two channels like to lead news reports with what Mr Putin and his allies have been up to; neither the war in Chechnya, nor heating shortages in Siberia or Western criticism of the Yukos onslaught can stem the merciless flow of presidential meetings with regional governors, or pronouncements from Mr Gryzlov on law and order.
United Russia did not risk entering candidates in a series of televised debates ahead of the election, apparently preferring to rely on stage-managed and overwhelmingly positive news coverage.
And while each major party is supposed to receive equal airtime, no restrictions are placed on how often the President himself can grace the nation's television screens.
And as both Mr Putin and United Russia have made clear, a vote for one is a vote for the other: they happily serve as each other's cheerleaders.
In its interim report on the election campaign, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said United Russia dominated media and advertising, and secured use of local administrative buildings and resources for its candidates alone, raising doubts as to "whether the prescribed limits on campaign spending are being followed".
"In their coverage of the election campaign, the state-owned TV channels have so far exhibited clear bias in favour of United Russia, and against the Communist Party of the Russian Federation," the OSCE said, noting that a warning from the Central Election Committee (CEC) had made no difference to programming.
That will not surprise the Kremlin's opponents. The rubber-stamp CEC regularly fails to upbraid Mr Putin for forgetting that he is supposed to be impartial in parliamentary politics: this year he made a speech at the United Russia conference, and openly backed the party's candidate in the race to become St Petersburg's governor.
Some 23 parties are running for 450 seats in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, but many are what Communist leader Mr Gennady Zyuganov calls the Kremlin's "test-tube parties, bred to bite off several percentage points from the Communist Party".
Opinion polls suggest United Russia will take at least 30 per cent of the vote, becoming the first pro-Kremlin bloc to win a parliamentary poll since the end of the Soviet Union. The Communists look set to take about 20 per cent, down from 24 per cent in 1999, with liberals from SPS and Yabloko gleaning less than 10 per cent each.
Turnout is expected to be low as Russians see little reason to vote when they are already pretty sure of the result.
But for the politicians and the country the stakes may be higher than first appear.
The party that controls the next parliament will oversee March's almost certain presidential election win for Mr Putin and, vitally, will be in control for the approach of 2008, when the constitution says the former KGB spy must quit the Kremlin.
They will decide which tycoons to squeeze and which to favour, and they will either anoint Russia's next political tsar or find a way to keep the current one on the throne.