The king has abdicated, long live the king:
Dmitry Medvedev has promised to extend Russia's civil and economic freedoms after being sworn in as new president.
"Human rights and freedoms... are deemed of the highest value for our society," he said at a lavish inauguration ceremony in the Kremlin.
Mr Medvedev took over from Vladimir Putin, becoming Russia's third leader since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Within hours, Mr Medvedev, 42, nominated Mr Putin, his mentor, as prime minister.
"Medvedev has put forward Putin's candidacy for prime minister to parliament," a Kremlin spokesman said.
Time will tell if the cynics are right that Medvedev is a mere puppet for eight more years of Putin.
We'll also see if Medvedev is serious about civil rights. The democracy in Russia is in a rather questionable state, including serious accusations that his election was secured through some very unnecessary electoral fraud.
Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) reported that 69.7 percent of Russian voters turned out for the March 2 presidential elections, and Mr. Medvedev won overwhelmingly over his three rivals with 70.3 percent of the votes.
But a recent study of the official results by mathematician Sergei Shpilkin, a popular blogger, found statistical anomalies that bolster critics' claims that the elections were unfair. His analysis suggests that up to a third of the votes may have been rigged as part of an attempt to inflate Medvedev's margin of victory.
"It's a combination of fraud and administrative resources [official intervention] and it is difficult to distinguish between them," Mr. Shpilkin told a press conference at the Carnegie Center in Moscow last month. "One vote in three cannot be explained" by normal statistical models, he added.
Shpilkin found that an extremely improbable number of Russian polling stations reported turnout and voting results that ended in a round number, either a five or a zero.
"Figures ending in fives and zeros are best for falsification," says Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the independent Panorama think tank in Moscow. "It's a sign that votes have been stolen, then folded into round numbers."
Shpilkin also noted that Medvedev's support as reported by the CEC follows a normal pattern, which can be represented as a bell curve, only until it reaches 60 percent. Instead of sloping downward, as expected, the curve then becomes a series of statistically unlikely spikes.
And there is little doubt that Medvedev would have won anyway, thanks in part to near-total control of the media by the Kremlin. So why cheat?
I guess a lot of people in the west wonder why Russians, who are about as educated and politically savvy as anyone, vote for Putin and his protege in such overwhelming numbers. The answer is, I think, they lived through the Jeltsin chaos. They do remember, or at least know about, the horrors of the Soviet era. Putin has certainly improved their lives. They obviously think better civil rights and an open democracy would be fine, but compared to bread on the table, that is a luxury. Better the devil you know.
As concerned as I am about Putin's hardline policies, I am not sure I can really fault them. Maybe I would have thought the same if it was the quality of my life that was on the line, and the potential rivals included the communists and Zhirinovsky's party.
8:25:24 PM 
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