ON a Friday night last November Vladimir Putin was running three hours late. A group of foreign academics, journalists and selected Russian TV cameras were quarantined in a restaurant in an equestrian centre. Deadlines were lapsing and Putin’s guests began asking questions about the odd location. Everything from the oak beams, log fires and snug bars had been rigged. The venue had been constructed for this one meal.

Putin finally emerged wearing a ski jacket. He stopped in the entrance. An unseen hand removed the puffer jacket, another slipped an elegant sports coat onto his shoulders. Putin hardly paused, but in a flash he had changed roles. He emerged on the other side of this catwalk as the tanned chief executive of Russia Inc.

He had just made the biggest mistake of his career. In front of millions, he forced his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, to nominate him for another two terms as president. In a spectacular miscalculation of political timing, Putin had destroyed not only Medvedev’s career as a reformer but severely damaged his own. He had made nonsense of the elections that followed — a parliamentary vote in December and the presidential one this coming Sunday — because everyone already knew the result. This might have worked for the old Russia — passive, fatalistic, offline — but the new middle class was not buying it.

Four mass demonstrations later, Putin’s campaign is on a knife edge. He has to be elected president on the first round on Sunday. If he succeeds, most political analysts in Russia are agreed that a third term of office as president will be a transitional one. There is unlikely to be a fourth.

This was not in the script. The man who had pulled Russia back from the brink of collapse had a vision. That vision — to restore Russia to what he saw as its rightful place in the world, one which was not just deserved but ordained — needed him to stay in power for at least another two terms. Not anyone else, just him, Vladimir Putin. How did the man with the penchant for Soviet slang and the swagger of the new Russia, lose his greatest asset: his political nose for what Russians thought?

Putin’s family lived through one of the bleakest periods of Soviet history, the Nazi siege of Leningrad. His father was a commando, one of only four to return from one mission. The family lost their first son, to diphtheria, and when Putin was born in 1952, he was regarded as miracle of fate.

Until 1996, Putin was a virtual unknown. But he had also become indispensable to the democrats because of his skills in taming the monster created through the chaotic privatisations of the Russian economy: the oligarch.

What Putin created was not a restoration of the Soviet state. Nor was it totalitarian, because Putin’s reach was not total. He created instead a personalised state, one with his name written right through it like a stick of rock. Putin lost no time in creating his own cult following. As Boris Yeltsin was swaying under the influence of drink and a series of mini-strokes, Putin, his prime minister, was active.

There are two questions Putin faces in this third and final period of office. Can he separate himself from the dead hand of the elite around him — can he separate himself from Putinism? The second is even harder to achieve. Can Russia separate itself peacefully from him?  — The Guardian, London