These are strange days. In  four days' time, Russia will hold a presidential election. Yet walking the streets, or watching the television, you'd barely know it. True, on a slew of Moscow billboards there are public-information posters put up by the Moscow city government urging citizens to vote as their "patriotic duty." And there are a few building-sized posters of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. But there's no tension in the air, no excitement. I've heard no one talking about the election in the line at the cinema or in crowded cafes; at Moscow dinners, Russians gossip about which of their bureaucrat friends is in with the incoming regime and who's out. Foreigners, or at least foreign journalists, speculate with horror about a reign of benign good management which the Medvedev regime could herald: we'll all be out of a job if Russia stops being Evil, they joke.

The difference between the overwhelming ordinariness of these strange pre-election days and the looming chaos of the first Russian election I ever covered, in 1996, is staggering. Most of the differences are good, in all frankness. Back then, the Communists looked as though they were heading for a resounding victory over Boris Yeltsin, and everyone with a stake in the new order - in other words, anyone with any energy, intelligence and initiative - were in a state of shock over the imminent collapse of Russia's experiment with capitalism. It was truly a dramatic moment loaded with almost Biblical symbolism. The new Russia was to be weighed in the balance, and probably would be found wanting. Democracy had enabled the new elite to make money and build businesses, and most smart people of that time were firmly behind Yeltsin, faute de mieux. But it was that same democracy that was about to destroy everything they had built; democracy, in those days, meant giving power to the dark unwashed masses which enlightened Russian elites have always claimed to speak for, but have always secretly been terrified of.

Small wonder that Putin found few objectors, even among the elites, as he systematically dismantled any real democracy in Russia in favour of the current system the Kremlin spin doctors call "sovereign democracy." It's a system that preserves the outward forms of the  democratic process such as campaigns, candidates, debates and votes - but in reality everyone participating, from voters to candidates, knows full well that only the Kremlin's candidate has a realistic chance.

Back in the mid-1990s it always seemed that the West had the luxury of having no news, while Russia was deluged with the stuff - and none of it good. Western elites worried about such trivia as politicians' sex scandals and other fluff, wheras in Russia every day saw a new existential crisis breaking on the front pages. Russians lived their lives hunched like soldiers under fire, so many crises hanging over their heads that they had little choice but to try and slog through their days in the hope that the stacked jeopardies wouldn't engulf them. Now, after many of those crises broke and ebbed, Russians are only too glad to take a rest from politics. Ask Russians, and most will tell you they have seen nothing good come of democracy. They're happy to leave politics to their rulers, to swap freedom for stability, in a kind of parody of Rousseau's Social Contract. Eerily quiet as this non-election may be, it's not hard to see why ordinary Russians are so proud of their new non-democratic democracy: the old, democratic sort was messy, dangerous and brought nothing but chaos and upheaval. For all Russia's ongoing problems of poverty, alcoholism and the rest, this time round most Russians feel themselves better off than two, five or ten years ago. The pain has receded; its time to feel comfortably numb.