Russians go to the polls in a sham election for their president

AT THE END of this week millions of Russians will take part in the re-election of President , the country’s longest-serving dictator since Stalin. In a land where opposition politicians are dead, in prison or in exile, where speaking truth to power is a criminal offence and where a paranoid autocrat is happy to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people and his neighbours in order to assert and maintain his power, an election seems entirely unnecessary, a strange charade or a quaint anachronism.The three-day voting exercise that will begin on March 15th is not an election in the way most people in the Western world understand one. Had Russia been a democracy, Mr Putin would have left power in 2008, when his second and constitutionally last term in office expired. But where war is peace, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery, the essence of this election is the absence of choice.