"I'll tell you why we have no democ-racy," says Boris Nemtsov, suddenly dropping his customary nonchalant swagger and looking serious. "We spilled too little blood for democracy." It is a bright January afternoon, a few weeks after the election that wiped Mr Nemtsov's liberal-democratic party, the Union of Right Forces (SPS), off the political map. Yabloko, the party of social democracy since the first Duma in 1993, was extinguished too. Both fell short of the 5% needed to form a Duma block. The pro-Kremlin United Russia got just over two-thirds of the seats, giving it total control. Two other Kremlin stooge parties, the long-running Liberal Democrats (nasty nationalists) and the newly created Motherland (slightly less nasty nationalists), both of which were formed to cater for hardline voters, shared the rest of the seats with the fading Communists, the only group that might conceivably count as an opposition. The state-run media favoured United Russia; one channel showed, in full, Mr Putin's 29-minute speech to party activists on the eve of the campaign (itself of dubious legality, because he is not allowed to campaign). Regional leaders also pulled out all the stops, the most eager ones claiming turnouts 20-30% higher than the national average. There were reports of government employees being obliged to vote for the Kremlin's party.
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