The bad news is that only the “Big Four” officially sanctioned parties won seats in the March 14 regional elections. The good news is that all of them made decent showings nationwide. Since President Dmitry Medvedev proclaimed that it was not enough to have only one or two factions represented in national elections, the authorities have opened the door to all four parties this time around.

The fact that the Kremlin has gone back to the previous four-party model and has rejected the single-party sweep we saw in the elections in October is definitely a positive sign. But at the same time, the Kremlin has finally completed its liquidation of the few remaining liberal parties. The Union of Right Forces has been long dead,  and the Kremlin-created liberal party the Right Cause has not gone anywhere. And now, after the March elections, Yabloko has become the latest victim, losing all representation at the regional level. The result is that not only have these liberal parties been marginalized, but also large groups of voters have been deprived of politicians representing their interests. In the end, the political spectrum has become more narrow and primitive.

Unlike the October elections, last week’s vote was, on the whole, free but not fair. United Russia’s results were significantly worse this time, suffering a string of defeats in mayoral elections in the Urals and Siberia, as well as in single-mandate districts in a host of regional capitals.

The mayoral elections in Irkutsk showed how the authorities’ clumsy interference in elections can produce the directly opposite results. United Russia heavily supported Sergei Serebrennikov, mayor of Bratsk and an ally of oligarch Oleg Deripaska, in the Irkutsk mayoral race. When opinion polls showed Serebrennikov trailing his contender, the elections committee found a pretext to disqualify the leading candidate. But Irkutsk voters protested by rallying around a much weaker candidate backed by the Communist Party who ended up winning by a wide margin. This wasn’t the first time people voted not so much in support of their favorite candidate as against a United Russia outsider who was propped up by the authorities. This is strangely reminiscent of the historic elections of 1989 and 1990 — the first multiparty elections in the Soviet Union — when people voted against candidates from the Communist Party as protest votes.

United Russia certainly lost face in the March 14 vote. The party’s drop in popularity reflects the logical trend under which voters lose confidence in the authorities and the “party of power” during a crisis. At the same time, however, it was a small political victory for Medvedev, who made it clear after the embarrassing October electoral abuses that he would take steps against blatant administrative interference and manipulations.

Despite these positive changes, Russia’s electoral system is far from being truly free and fair. Improvements in the latest elections were achieved by slightly readjusting the system of manual control. The Kremlin locomotive was slowed down a bit, but to solve the larger  problem of unfair elections, the Kremlin has to take the electoral machine off manual control entirely.

Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.