RUSSIA:CHOOSING RUSSIA'S new president appears to be child's play.
A competition run by a Russian tabloid inviting schoolchildren to draw Vladimir Putin's successor in the Kremlin has attracted a blizzard of pictures of Dmitry Medvedev - but none of his three supposed challengers in Sunday's presidential election.
The drawings show Medvedev - in reality a diminutive bureaucrat with a bland public image - flying into space, cradling babies, meeting an old lady to raise her pension, dressed in a red singlet helping Putin in his judo suit lift up Russia.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and political unknown Andrei Bogdanov appeared to make no impression on Russia's children, and their campaigns have had little more success with their parents.
Medvedev, a deputy prime minister who worked with Putin in the 1990s in St Petersburg and became his chief of staff in the Kremlin in 2003, is expected to take more than 70 per cent of ballots. His campaign saw him travel around Russia with his hugely popular boss and enjoy vastly more airtime than any of the candidates.
A landslide victory for Medvedev is the only likely outcome of a ballot that will end Putin's eight-year reign in the Kremlin and see him move into the role of prime minister to work, at least in theory, as underling to his own protege.
With the result in no doubt, most pre-election discussion abroad has concentrated on the flagrant favouritism shown to Medvedev by national media and the decision by election officials to ban former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov from running.
Kasyanov could not have threatened Medvedev's victory, but he would have been the most vocal critic of the Kremlin and of Putin's legacy. This latter, he alleges, is notable above all for the emasculation of major independent media and political opposition in Russia.
By disqualifying Kasyanov for alleged fraud in his candidacy papers, Putin's team tried to erase even the minuscule possibility that Medvedev would not take the 50 per cent majority required on Sunday to avoid a second round.
Bogdanov was accused of fraud in the same way as Kasyanov was, but the case was quietly dropped, fuelling suspicions that he is a Kremlin-backed stooge whose role is to provide a semblance of opposition to Medvedev. Without him, the possible withdrawal of Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky could have left only one candidate standing, and so could have invalidated the vote.
Zhirinovsky has run twice before for the presidency, once on the platform of "a man for every woman and a bottle of vodka for every man". His presence in the race provides little more than colour and the constant possibility of a slanging match followed by a brawl, and his nationalist rants serve to burnish Medvedev's credentials as a moderate, sober statesman.
Zyuganov almost won the keys to the Kremlin from Boris Yeltsin in 1996, but wilted in the run-off before a resurgent president backed to the hilt by the West and by the "oligarchs" he created.
In the mid-1990s, when many Russians were deeply disillusioned with the post-Soviet promise of capitalism, Zyuganov's Communist Party held 157 seats in parliament. Now it has only 57 seats, and its message seems increasingly outdated to all but its hard core of mostly elderly, rural voters.
Putin is seen by most Russians as an unqualified success. He entered the Kremlin as a callow bureaucrat shadowed by the powerful oligarchs who had come to dominate an ailing Yeltsin.
Many of the industrial giants sold off cheaply by his predecessor during moments of political weakness are back under direct or indirect state control; the autonomy given to regional governors has been revoked; and former KGB colleagues of Putin's now hold sway in the Kremlin instead of the profiteers of Russia's quick-fire privatisation schemes.
Most Russians approve wholeheartedly of these changes, as they do Putin's often abrasive stance towards the West which, for a decade, patronised the former superpower with handouts and often deeply damaging lessons in political and economic reform.
Flush with oil and gas profits, Putin's Russia has paid its foreign debts and is extending its energy grip ever deeper into Europe.
His successor is already known but whether the still-vigorous Putin will happily play second fiddle to his protege is perhaps the most intriguing question posed by this meticulously orchestrated transfer of power.