Pulling for Putin.(Vladimir Putin)

In most countries, presidential candidates tend to have the same concerns. How to formulate a program, raise money, get the voters' attention. But Vladimir Bryntsalov, a millionaire businessman, has something else on his mind. Campaigning for the job occupied by Vladimir Putin, he wants to make sure that his "rival" doesn't take him too seriously. "I'm not going to criticize Putin and praise myself," says Bryntsalov. "The country is on the right track."

So why is he running? Mainly to air his own views, even if they're largely identical to Putin's. About one thing he's perfectly clear: "Only Putin can be president." Once Bryntsalov has collected the obligatory 2 million signatures needed to register his candidacy, he might drop out of the race altogether. "What's the point of wasting [the government's] money," he points out, "taking free television time and just repeating what Putin is saying?"

Confused? Don't be. It's all part of another ignominious low to which Russian democracy has sunk of late. These days Putin towers over the political landscape so commandingly that the main challenge his aides face is ensuring that the upcoming presidential vote on March 14 doesn't look as if it's taking place in North Korea. The problem has been particularly acute since December, when political parties allied with Putin swept the board in parliamentary elections. As a result of that rout, some of Russia's once assertive politicians have opted out of the contest altogether. Political insiders say the Kremlin worries that an uncontested election could cast doubts on Putin's claim to be a democratic leader--and rob him of political cover for potentially unpalatable economic reforms.

Thus, some of his allies are trying to do him a favor by running against him. In previous years both communists and pro-market liberals managed to do respectably in the presidential balloting. This time around the communists have opted for a strategy of passive-aggressiveness, nominating a second-tier candidate from an allied party as their candidate, while the two main liberal parties are boycotting the election altogether. Most of the contenders who are left--ranging from the bullet-headed bodyguard of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky to a former central-bank chief known by the nickname "Mr. Inflation"--seem to be motivated primarily by their eagerness to please the incumbent. "[The candidates] don't want to become president," says Georgy Satarov, a former aide to Boris Yeltsin. "They want to take part in the presidential election. In Russia, these are different things." Most, he says, are trying to generate official good will by conducting allegedly independent but actually tame campaigns.

One such, Sergei Glazyev, is a former communist who now belongs to the nationalist Motherland party--widely regarded as a Kremlin stalking-horse designed to undermine support for the "patriotic left," i.e., the archrival communists. After last month's parliamentary elections, Motherland hurried to join the pro-Putin bloc in the Duma. Small wonder, then, that Glazyev has spent most of his campaign so far evading questions about the policy differences between himself and the president. By the same token, Oleg Malyshkin, the Zhirinovsky bodyguard, says his candidacy is a feature of his party's "constructive opposition" to the Kremlin--though when asked about the details, he's hard-pressed to say what he and his colleagues oppose, and in practice Zhirinovsky's party almost always votes with the government. Another candidate, ...