MOSCOW -- Last Sunday's parliamentary elections in Russia have resulted in a sweeping defeat of democracy and a new start for the Russian nationalists.
The United Russia party, which was created to fit the political needs of Russian President Vladimir Putin, got about 37 percent of the vote. An aggressive populist group with the sickly sweet name Homeland, believed to be quietly supported by the Kremlin, did remarkably well, too. And the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, led by the buffoonish Vladimir Zhirinovsky and almost invariably supportive of Putin's authoritarian trend, was another winner.
All of the three major opposition parties, the Communists, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, have found themselves among the losers. The latter two liberal groups garnered fewer than the minimum 5 percent vote needed to be represented in Parliament. The Communists got a record-low 12.7 percent.