The Putin circle calls the new Russia a sovereign democracy - a democracy defended against hostile foreign meddling.
But the odd - and very Russian - paradox is this: that this retreat from the democratic experiment in the 1990s seems genuinely popular.

Russians have voted to endorse it, and so it carries a democratic - or at least a popular - legitimacy of its own. And so the big question "Is Russia a democracy?" remains open.

More than half a century ago, America's greatest Soviet analyst, George Kennan, wrote a letter to the US state department from Moscow.

In it, he said that ever since the Bolshevik revolution, American diplomats had been trying to answer the question: "How has Bolshevism changed Russia?"

It was, he had concluded, the wrong question. It was more important to consider how Russia had changed Bolshevism.

Perhaps we should similarly invert today's question and ask not how democracy has changed Russia, but how Russia - eternal, enduring, long-suffering - is changing democracy.