When surveyed last year, by a nearly four to one margin Russians said that opposition parties were able to freely express their views on national television and in national newspapers. Even 56 percent of Communist Party voters agreed! None of this even takes account that during the past month—the official campaign season—each party running for the Duma received three hours of prime national television air time, and that the televised party debates, in which all parties except United Russia chose to take part, were watched by about the same percentage of people that watched the final U.S. presidential debates in 2000.

So while Kasparov contends that the only reason that the Russian people shun the liberal opposition is because of the regime’s control over the media, Grigory Yavlinksy is probably much closer to the truth when he told a reporter that his liberal party Yabloko already has 97 percent name recognition. The problem is not that the opposition cannot get its message out to the Russian public. The problem is that the messengers have completely alienated their natural constituency: Russia’s rapidly growing middle class.

Consider what a middle class voter would do if faced with the following choice: to support a political movement that unites a former chess champion with links to American neocons and whose family resides overseas; a former prime minister, popularly nicknamed “Misha 2 percent” for allegedly taking that much in kickbacks while in office; and an ex-punk rocker, released from prison just a few years ago, who vows to restore the Russian empire by any means necessary. The sum total of their political agenda: “A Russia without Putin!”

Or, to support the party of the current president, which has pledged to continue the policies that have already increased wages from $81 per month to $550 per month, dramatically increased social spending and reduced poverty from 27 percent to 15 percent. As any pollster will tell you, this is a “no-brainer.”

But why run a campaign against the interests of the middle class? Perhaps some Russian liberals are just not aware of how much the country has improved economically. Earlier this year, Grigory Yavlinsky boasted to a reporter that he hardly reads the press anymore (“I have aides to do that”) and hasn’t watched Russian television in four or five years!

But these are minor public relations gaffes in comparison to the ill-concealed contempt for the Russian people to whom, ostensibly, they are appealing for support. As Boris Berezovsky, who claims to be funding the opposition from his exile in London, puts it: “The problem is that, for centuries, the Russian authorities have been violating the Russian people, turning it into cattle.”

This bovine image of the Russian electorate is a favorite among the country’s liberal elite. From Yuri Afanasyev’s comment in 1991 that: “Many of our people seem reduced to a condition resembling that of cattle and, what is more frightening, they do not ask to live any other way”, to the outrageous statements by former Deputy Prime Minister Alfred Kokh that Russians are incapable of earning money and “can’t make anything new” (Kokh, by the way, then became the manager of the Union of Right Forces’ 2003 Duma campaign). Cattle, obviously, need cattle herders, of which there seems to be no shortage among the Russian liberal opposition.

Their utterly cynical assumption that politics, at least in Russia, doesn’t need to appeal to the voters at all, but is really about replacing the “bad” people-herders with “good” people-herders, has lead the opposition directly to the scorched earth policy that was adopted in the current Duma campaign. What does it matter how people vote, or even if they vote at all, for as Limonov vowed at the last Moscow rally before the elections, Another Russia does not intend to accept any results as legitimate.

Small wonder, then, that most Russians view the liberal opposition as simply wanting to take away the prosperity they have worked so hard to obtain? Nor is it any wonder that the Western media’s uncritical adulation of this opposition, and of Another Russia in particular, is viewed by Russians with deep suspicion?

Far from indicating a retreat from democracy, the Russian electorate’s decisive rejection of the current liberal opposition is a good sign that the country is progressing toward a mature democracy. Indeed, we can thank our lucky stars that the overwhelming majority of Russians have far too much common sense to vote for such extremists, even when disguised in “liberal” clothing.

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