Nominations for Russia's presidential elections have closed and if opinion polls are to be believed, there will be few surprises when voting takes place next month - acting President Vladimir Putin will triumph, perhaps even in the first round.

The transfer of power from President Yeltsin, who resigned at the end of last year, has been smooth. Democratic proprieties were preserved and, for the first time in Russia's modern history, the constitution appears to be working. But, as always in Russia, appearances can be deceiving.

Clearly, Russia is no longer a dictatorship. President Yeltsin may have plotted with his clique of advisers in the Kremlin for years, but he had to follow certain legal procedures and constitutional niceties. It is equally obvious that no Russian leader can hope to rule without democratic credentials: Vladimir Putin already holds all the levers of power but it is unthinkable he could continue to remain in control without submitting himself to a vote.

These achievements, however, do not mean the country is now a democracy by Western standards - Russia remains a state in which a popular vote is used to legitimise a transfer of power which has already taken place. Vladimir Putin was the fourth prime minister Yeltsin appointed in one year and with every appointment, the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, was made less relevant. The Duma did not make or dissolve governments; it was reduced to the role of legitimising governments which had already been formed.

After Putin was appointed prime minister last year, the Kremlin sponsored a new political party, Unity. A few months later, it captured almost 20 per cent of the seats in parliament and is now the second-largest party in the Duma. Now, Putin is hoping to gain a full presidential term after he is safely installed in the Kremlin.

At every stage, the real political shift took place before the electors even voted; the purpose of the elections was only to confirm the choice already made inside the Kremlin palaces. Control over financial resources, the media, the military and the security services is crucial in the conduct of a Russian electoral campaign. These advantages belong to a person who already holds power and who needs only the legitimacy of the electorate, rather than the electorate's active support. In that respect, little has changed in Russia.

Moreover, the behaviour of the Russian electorate is hardly that of a mature democracy. The wild swings in political preferences (the party supported by Yeltsin in the past, and run by former prime minister Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, fell from 59 parliamentary seats at the last elections to a mere seven today, while three new parties instantly became important powerbrokers) indicate an electorate which is more interested in personalities than ideology and which yearns for stability and predictability at all costs. Putin's major asset in the forthcoming elections, apart from his control of all funds and state institutions, is that he remains a devil Russians know, and may yet learn to love.

In former communist countries in eastern Europe, a man who ran the security services would have hardly presented good electoral material. In Russia, however, Putin's KGB connections are a source of pride, and the vicious war he unleashed against Chechnya, whose people are, after all, Russia's own citizens, is now one of Putin's main sources of popularity. Mr Yeltsin has left a more democratic country behind him. He has not, however, created a true democracy.

What kind of a leader is Putin likely to be? His 15 years of service in the KGB have been recalled by all and sundry, but this is the easy part; the key to his personality is what he did inside the organisation and how he rose to the top.

His initial career was conventional. We know he was taken on after graduating from the Leningrad State University law faculty, a familiar recruiting ground for the KGB. It is believed he volunteered for KGB work before this and we know he was obsessed with spy novels while still at school.

He specialised in German studies and worked for a long time in the KGB's first main directorate (now the Foreign Intelligence Service) in East Germany. His role - under the cover of running a Soviet "cultural centre" - was to co-ordinate the activities of the East German security services, the Stasi, with those of the Soviet Union. The work was crucial to Moscow - these were the 1980s when the reliability of the Warsaw Pact was being questioned.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Putin decided to ride the peak of Russia's "wave of democracy" in St Petersburg, where he went to university. He was close to the reformist Anatoly Sobchak, at whose funeral yesterday he cried openly.

Sobchak ran St Petersburg between 1991 and 1996 and named Putin as deputy mayor. Both in St Petersburg and in Moscow, however, Putin always preferred the shadowy jobs - in St Petersburg this was the so-called "operational committee", which organised all the economic activity of the city, while in Moscow, he initially occupied the post of secretary to President Yeltsin's staff and was a wheeler-dealer behind the scenes.

Like his predecessors, Putin stayed close to Yeltsin and his family, and was rewarded with the post of prime minister. However, in all other respects, Putin managed his affairs quite differently.

First, he was aware of the importance of acquiring an image of a corruption-fighter - only days after his appointment to President Yeltsin's staff he called a press conference to boast about the arrest of a few criminals.

This carefully nurtured image of being incorruptible persuaded the Kremlin that Putin was the best man to guarantee President Yeltsin and his close family the legal immunity from future prosecution which they required before the Yeltsin retired.

Putin was also aware of the need to project an image of a healthy and simple man: while Yeltsin was in and out of hospitals, Putin popped up at sports awards ceremonies, conferring decorations on young athletes. The television pictures of the new prime minister in a polo neck sweater, or practising martial arts, were all intended to convey an image of dynamism which ordinary Russians respect. So is Putin's use of swear words and criminal slang, which frequently appear in his speeches.

In short, he knew how to penetrate the minds of ordinary Russians: without ever appearing to want the presidential job, he conveyed all the right messages of a patriotic leader, both young and incorruptible, both simple and experienced at the same time.

On foreign relations, Putin is a Russian conservative. He does not believe the country has much to gain by offering co-operation with the West; that it is is more likely to be respected as a power if it does not follow Western priorities. The publication of a new defence doctrine last month is a case in point - the document puts great emphasis on Russia's nuclear weapons, just about the only criteria on which the country can still claim to be a superpower.

On economic affairs, Putin is an agnostic - he is not against privatisation and will do nothing to reverse what has already been done, but he does not believe that privatisation is necessarily good. One of his first acts as President was to order Russian companies to repatriate all their foreign currency earnings, the classic instinct of someone who believes in managing an economy by decree.

The West will have to get used to its first "normal" Russian leader - a man who does not believe Russia should become like any other European country; a president surrounded by his friends in the security services; a man who instinctively believes that "order" and central control are preferable to economic reform and privatisation.

It could have been worse, but it certainly could have been better.

Jonathan Eyal is director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London

joeyal@ibm.net