The main lesson from the rival anti-Putin and pro-Putin demonstrations held on Feb. 4 is that both civil society and the authorities are walking down a dangerous path of escalation.

I was inundated with congratulations from friends, colleagues and journalists following the Supreme Court ruling a week ago in favor of the Republican Party of Russia, which I headed until it was liquidated five years ago.

One of the most common criticisms of the "Decembrists 2.0" protest movement is that it has no program, strategy or vision. But the opposite is true. Taken together, the five demands put forward by protesters at the Bolotnaya Ploshchad and Prospekt Akademika Sakharova rallies comprise a coherent program with a clear strategic goal.

It is already clear that Russia will experience a systemic political crisis in 2012. The country's leaders and institutions will completely lose the people's trust by next summer. The authorities will become vacillating and weak and will flounder from one crisis to another.

As it is clear to almost everyone, the State Duma elections results were fabricated. The question now is: Will the Kremlin-approved “opposition” parties finally oppose the ruling regime?

A distinguishing feature of the State Duma election campaign is that it was held against a backdrop of voters' plummeting confidence in the party of power for the first time since 1999. In another first, voters will cast ballots Sunday amid a slide in support for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the authoritarian political system he built.

On Dec. 4, Russia will hold the dirtiest, most fraudulent and dishonest "elections" of its entire post-Soviet history. For the first time in the past decade, State Duma elections will be held against a backdrop of widespread discontent and frustration with the authorities — especially in the country's large cities, where voters are best informed about the abuses and corrupt practices of the regime.

Russia's first chief of the secret police, Alexander Benkendorf, served two centuries ago under Tsar Nicholas I, and it is his portrait that should be hanging in every office at the Federal Security Service and Interior Ministry.

When President Dmitry Medvedev assumed office four years ago, it didn't take long for a deep split between Russia's main liberals to develop. As a result, two new camps formed: liberal modernizers and a liberal opposition.

Millions of Russians are again faced with a difficult decision — should they participate in or boycott the Dec. 4 State Duma elections?

Despite President Dmitry Medvedev's appeal to political parties to avoid whipping up dangerous nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments in their campaign slogans or political platforms, it is already clear that some parties have begun doing exactly that.

The scandal about how Mikhail Prokhorov was first recruited and then cast out of the Right Cause party calls into question whether there is a place for political parties in an authoritarian political system. If there is, can those parties be the initiators and leaders of peaceful or revolutionary democratic change?

It was really pointless for observers to have spent the last three years asking the question: "Who is better, Medvedev or Putin?" and to have worked themselves up over the conundrum even more during the run-up to elections each autumn. Make no mistake: Dmitry Medvedev is not an alternative to Vladimir Putin, and vice versa. In practical terms, they are just flip sides of the same coin.

Most Russians still have negative feelings about the liberal reforms of the 1990s and are more positively disposed toward the 2000s. But at the same time, acts of aggression and nationalistic sentiment are growing throughout society. There has been a significant increase in the number of people wanting to work abroad temporarily or to leave Russia altogether.

The liberal opposition is often called upon to repent for the "sins" of the 1990s, a period strongly associated in the public mind with liberal reforms. We are told that as soon as liberals and democrats repent for our mistakes, the public will believe us, vote for us and offer us various forms of support.

Any discussion of who controls Russia typically focuses on the ruling tandem and the differences between the two leaders' public statements and political positions. But this discussion does not fully answer the question of how the elite are perceived by Russians and how stable the social order in the country is.

On Friday, the Party of People's Freedom, or Parnas, filed a lawsuit in Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky District Court challenging the Justice Ministry decision on June 22 to not register the party. Unfortunately, the outcome of our appeal is a foregone conclusion.

Russian authorities have declared a short summer time-out in their conflict with the Council of Europe and its European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The Justice Ministry on Wednesday refused to register the opposition Party of People's Freedom, thus denying my party its constitutional right to participate in the December State Duma elections. The ministry also denied the constitutional rights of millions of the party's supporters across the country to choose their representatives in parliament.

In a recent report for the Center for Strategic Studies, economists Mikhail Dmitriyev and Sergei Belanovsky concluded that "serious political changes are brewing in Russia," and that "a political crisis in Russia is already in full swing."

There is something sinister in the way ballot boxes were purportedly stuffed during the March 13 Tambov regional elections to boost United Russia's results. It was pulled off under the cover of a blood drive.

Relations between Cold War-era foes Moscow and Washington have long been distrustful, hypocritical, peppered with mutual insinuations and patched together with the most tenuous of threads. But now, on the eve of State Duma and presidential elections, an inevitable crisis is nearing that threatens to tear them apart at the seams.

At the latest United Russia conference, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin formally launched his party's State Duma election campaign and, to a large degree, his own 2012 presidential bid. Putin’s political strategy is becoming increasingly clear now.

At the beginning of the second decade in control of the country, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is becoming more and more like former Soviet leaders — not so much like Stalin, but more like Leonid Brezhnev.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin paid his respects last year to the victims of the Soviet massacre of Poles at Katyn, but the Russian state is in no hurry to honor the memory of the millions of its own citizens who were killed and tortured and whose family members were permanently crippled by Soviet repression.

The results of the recent March 13 elections demonstrate that the Tambov region has not lost its touch in "organizing" elections, with United Russia reporting 65 percent of the vote there — one of its highest results in the March vote.

While President Dmitry Medvedev drivels on about "freedom being better than no freedom" and the world tries to understand why long-standing Arab dictatorships collapsed overnight, Russia's corrupt autocracy continues to do what it does best: manipulating and falsifying elections.

Russia's greatest curse is not its natural resources, as many believe, but its weak and ineffective institutions. According to the 2010-11 Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, Russia ranks 63rd among the 139 countries listed, primarily because of the low quality of its state institutions.

The Education and Science Ministry headed by Andrei Fursenko has a good shot at winning the dubious title of Least-Loved Federal Agency, an honor once incontestably held by the Health and Social Development Ministry when it was headed by Mikhail Zurabov.

The Kremlin continues to be panic-stricken over the prospect of a Russian “Orange” or “Brown” revolution, failing to see that the real threat facing Russia’s future is something else entirely: the deepening apathy, alienation, cultural degradation and disintegration of society and the state.