“His career has been accompanied by scandals,” went a typical report on the popular Channel One right before the December elections. “It was the elderly who were the first to feel the results of the work of Nemtsov’s government on their purses. Pensions dropped to the lowest level in all Russia’s history. Boris Nemtsov used to gather the press just to say that he did not care who the pensioners, deprived of money, would vote for,”

Meanwhile, a different kind of propaganda war was being waged on the streets. Russia has relatively conservative attitudes toward homosexuality, and all autumn long Nizhny Novgorod was blanketed with tens of thousands of leaflets saying that Nemtsov’s liberal, pro-Western opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, ardently favoured gay rights and employed canvassers with AIDS. Neither was true.

Intimidation and violence came next. Businesses cut off donations after receiving threats from government officials, said Sergei Veltishchev, an organizer for the Union of Right Forces. The party was refused advertising space on everything from billboards to newspapers to television.

A few weeks before the elections, Nemtsov gave up, renouncing his party at a news conference. The party’s remaining candidates in the region were too fearful to campaign. That left Putin’s United Russia unchallenged.