When overseeing military exercises from aboard a nuclear submarine near Scandinavia, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had developed a new missile system, the finest in the world. It was not his most convincing moment. Three older missiles, launched in his presence, failed to reach their targets on Kamchatka. The submarine that Putin was on resembled the Kursk, which exploded during a similar military exercise in 2000, killing 118 sailors.

After the Kursk catastrophe, Putin was asked what really happened. "It sank," he replied, with a somewhat macabre smile. In a recent joke, an interviewer asks Putin what happened to his favorite dog's puppies, whose birth he proudly announced during last December's parliamentary elections. "They sank," he answers.

Russian democracy is almost as young and blind as Putin's puppies - but much poorer. Low-income countries can develop democracy, but they have a tough time maintaining it. India, which is both poor and democratic, is a happy exception to this rule. Will Russia, whose political legacy is not British but Soviet, be another? Countries with per capita incomes close to the current Russian level sustain democracy for 15-20 years on average. Russian democracy, born in 1991, may be nearing its expiration date.

Putin's first term in office proved to be an economic success and a political failure. High oil prices kept Russia's economy - and common people's income ­- growing rapidly. (Europeans need not be envious: growth is quicker when it begins low; think again about puppies.) Russia is a rich country with a poor population, and redistribution schemes work well in such conditions.

But they will not work for long. Putin promises to double Russia's GDP by 2010 - an ambitious aim, and success would improve democracy's prospects. But few of Putin's promises have been fulfilled.

The Chechen war drags on, bringing new victims every month. Foreign students are killed because of growing racism. The population is declining, but immigration is blocked for ideological reasons. Military reform has yet to begin. Independent media are practically extinct. Russia's international position is worse than ever. Turkey and Ukraine aspire to join the European Union; Russia does not.

Putin counts on economic growth as the basis for his personal popularity. But this is a bad bet. Private companies, not the state, generate Russian growth. Practically everything that a Russian citizen can find in a supermarket, including the supermarket itself, is produced or imported by private firms.

Oil, the main engine of growth, is privately controlled. In the late 1980's, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that Russian oil was practically exhausted. Now Putin claims credit for making Russia the world's leading producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia.

This is indeed a success. The hydrocarbons sector secures Russian growth, undermines the power of Arab producers and OPEC, and thus promises a decrease in oil prices. The problem for Putin is that this success was achieved not by the Russian state, but by private enterprises.

By creating independent courts, securing property rights, and collecting fair taxes, the state is crucial for making the environment favorable for business. But to attribute the performance of Russian business to the efforts of the state is the same as attributing a writer's work to his editor, or even to his censor. Many Russian industrialists, such as the founders of Yukos Oil, oversaw their businesses' stunning growth. Now some of them are in jail, in exile, or frightened out of the industry.

In the meantime, economic growth, which is vital for an impoverished but ambitious population, was the central issue of the presidential campaign. You cannot deceive people about growth; they feel the weight of their pockets better than anyone else. But you can manipulate their understanding of it: who are the authors of growth, the Khodorkovskys or the Putins? Growth, it seems, is attributed here not to those who produce it, but to those who punish it.

The business of Putin and his coterie is politics. Trained as lawyers or even as philologists, but with their formative experience in the security services, these people introduced a concept they call "political technology." These "technologies" range from producing decoy political parties and legally persecuting opponents to publishing fake polls and falsifying elections.

Of course, electorates have been cheated, bribed, and blackmailed for as long as there have been elections. What is fairly new, at least for Russians, is that these "technologies" are efficiently coordinated from the top of the presidential administration.

The most successful recent example was the invention of the political party "Motherland," which took protest votes away from the liberal parties as well as from the Communists. Created by the presidential administration two months before the December parliamentary elections, "Motherland" split and practically collapsed two months after its amazing victory.

Russian political experts, pollsters, and consultants ascribe every success or failure in Russian politics to "political technologies." Their profession has become so important in recent years that there is now a special "Day of the Political Consultant" in Russia every February 25. This year's day saw Putin sack the then Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasyanov - an architect of Russia's pro-business reforms - as if to celebrate the overriding power of "political technology."

This manner of governance bodes well neither for economic growth nor democracy in the long term. For when you drown puppies, they sink.