MOSCOW, Nov 25: Russia hea-ds on Sunday into a final week of campaigning in parliamentary elections that have turned into a referendum on whether Presi-dent Vladimir Putin should stay at the helm of the resurgent power.

Nearly eight years after he took over from Boris Yeltsin, the ex-KGB officer is the lead candidate for the ruling United Russia party that is all but sure to sweep the vote next Sunday.

Putin has said that a big victory for the party will give him a “moral right” to retain a role in politics, but Russians so far have been kept in the dark about his specific plans.

A clearer picture could emerge when Putin addresses an election rally in his home town of Saint Petersburg on Monday, the same day that parliament is formally to set the date for the presidential election in March.

Recent weeks have seen growing calls by supporters for Putin to stay on in a leadership role, despite a constitutional bar on him holding the office of president for more than two consecutive terms.

After insisting he would step down next year, Putin made the surprise move last month of accepting the top spot on United Russia’s candidate list and suggested he could become prime minister.

At a rally of some 5,000 flag-waving young supporters in a Moscow sports stadium last week, the 55-year-old Kremlin leader cast himself as the guarantor of Russia’s hard-won political stability and oil-driven economic revival. He assailed his political opponents, calling them western-backed “jackals” who want “a Russia that is weak and sick, a society that is disoriented and divided”.

“They want to go out into the streets. They’ve learnt from western specialists. They’ve trained in neighbouring republics. Now they want to cause provocations,” Putin said, referring to uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine that have brought pro-western leaders to power in the former Soviet republics.

On Saturday, some of Putin’s fiercest critics — led by chess legend Garry Kasparov — did take to the streets to display their opposition to Putin and underline their view that the upcoming vote will be anything but fair.

But though these critics get robust coverage in western media, they have little impact among Russians in general — precisely because, they say, the Kremlin has stifled free media and effectively silenced real opposition voices.

Kasparov, left-wing activist and writer Eduard Limonov and a handful of supporters were arrested following the demonstration.

Resorting to what his opponents call “fear tactics”, Putin is warning of a return to the chaos of the 1990s, striking a chord with Russians who remember the “shock therapy” reforms that sent prices skyrocketing.

Critics accuse Putin of putting Russia’s nascent democracy in a deep freeze by tightening Kremlin control over the media and dominating every aspect of government.

Under Putin’s leadership, a separatist insurgency has been brutally crushed in Chechnya and Russia’s once-wealthiest businessman, Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now sits in a Siberian jail, convicted of fraud and tax evasion.

Relations with the West have been strained over a range of issues from missile defence to energy policy.

Accusing Russia of trying to impose restrictions on its election observers, the OSCE has decided to call off its monitoring mission, fueling concerns about the credibility of Sunday’s vote.

But as snow dusts Moscow’s Pushkin square, where a statue of poet Alexander Pushkin stands next to a movie theatre showing American blockbuster “Beowulf”, Dinara Gaunudina said her life had improved under Putin.

“Everything has gotten better. Putin is the leader we need at this time,”said Gaunudina, shrugging off suggestion that Russia may be reverting to authoritarian rule.

Under new electoral rules brought in by Putin after the last elections in 2003, Russians vote for parties, not candidates, and only those which garner at least seven per cent of the national vote win seats, up from five per cent previously.—AFP