“It was a test,” he said. “We showed that our people are really capable of differentiating the desire for something new from political provocations that have only one goal — to destroy Russian sovereignty and usurp power.”

His voice shook and a tear streamed from his eye. He was so overcome that he even stuttered. “I call for everyone to unite for the interests of our people and our homeland.”

“We won,” Putin said, stabbing the air with his index finger. “Glory to Russia!”

The crowd, made up of mostly men, cheered, waving flags and banners.

Putin received 64.7 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results, allowing him to win outright and avoid a runoff election.

Getting the necessary 50 percent to avoid a runoff would have been impossible without rigging the elections, experts said.

About 20 percent of the vote came from what is known as the “administrative resource,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights.

Those are either votes from employees of government-funded institutions whose supervisors report to Putin or his subordinates, or assistance with voter fraud, such as stuffing ballots, Oreshkin said.

State employees aren’t required by law to vote for Putin. However, some analysts say there was tacit, and sometimes explicit, pressure on government employees to vote for Putin to show their loyalty to the administration.

Some schools pressured teachers to vote for Putin, threatening to fire them if they didn’t, according to media reports.

Ivan Grachev, a deputy of the state Duma, or parliament, who is also a member of A Just Russia party, an opposition group that fielded a candidate in the election, said about 15 percent of Putin’s votes come from the “administrative resource,” the Kommersant newspaper reports.

“It would be good for the country to have a runoff, but it won’t happen,” Grachev told Kommersant Sunday.

Last month, Putin said he would be ready for a runoff election, but that it might destabilize the country.

The victory can be seen as a blow to the budding opposition movement, which brought thousands of Russians to the streets in recent months demanding reform.

Putin has already served two terms as president, before stepping aside in 2008, in accordance with the constitution. For the past four years he has been prime minister to President Dmitry Medvedev.

Pro-Putin rallies were held in several locations in central Moscow. Nearly 400,000 police, many brought in from neighboring regions, descended on the city streets.

Putin’s victory came as no surprise to most. The prime minister is still popular, but a December parliamentary election, which observers said was riddled with fraud, led many to worry about vote-tampering Sunday.

Several Russians leaving polling stations in Moscow said they expected Putin to win, even if they didn’t vote for him.

Lyubov Gorozhanina, 52, voted for Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire challenger, because she said Russia needs something new.

But she did not think he had a chance against Putin.

“Putin will win,” Gorozhanina said. “I heard that it’s [voting] all a procedure, empty. But I am still hoping that it will mean something.”

The presidential election was the most observed in Russia’s history. Video cameras had been installed in nearly 100,000 polling locations throughout the country, and the elections attracted an army of tens of thousands monitors.

After the parliamentary elections, Sergei Porkopov, 27, signed up to oversee the presidential elections at a polling station in Northeast Moscow.

“I wanted to see for myself whether the elections are fair,” Porkopov said. He said he did not notice any violations in his district by early Sunday afternoon.

An initiative to keep an eye on the election monitors came from the government, said Andrei Buzin, head election monitor of independent election watchdog Golos, which is based in Moscow.

Voronezh-native Petr Savropov, 26, said after the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections he wanted to see who was telling the truth. “Was it all faked to destabilize the country?” Savropov said. He signed up Friday to monitor the observers at his polling station in Voronezh, a city in southwestern Russia.

Despite the increased monitoring, or perhaps because of it, reports of vote-rigging were widespread.

Golos reported about 5,000 election fraud complaints nationwide. The biggest incidence of alleged fraud came from “voting carousels,” or when voters are bussed from polling station to polling station to vote repeatedly with absentee ballots.

Four election monitors said they were beaten by police in the municipal building of Zheleznodorzhny, a hard-bitten Moscow suburb with a history of election fraud.

Golos monitor Elizaveta Klepikova said a group of men hit her and the other three observers inside the lobby of the government building after they came to complain about being asked to leave the polling place they were watching. She suspected they were plainclothes policemen because they were let into the building by police, who shut the door after them.

She had a bruised neck and her glasses were cracked in half. She said the men took her camera.

Anton Ivashchenko and Eldar Dadin, two volunteers who monitored the election on behalf of Prokhorov’s election committee said the men beat them, then forced them in a car and drove them around before letting them out. Their belongings were confiscated, including a laptop.

Golos plans to file a complaint about the alleged beatings with the police.

Police said they are not aware of any beatings, news agency Interfax reported.

“Police did not receive any complaints from monitors or members of social organizations, that were allegedly beaten on one of the polling places in Zheleznodorozhny,” Moscow region police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev told Interfax Sunday.

The monitors left the Zheleznodorozhny polling station after staff asked them to leave for inappropriate filming and taking photographs, Gildeyev said.

Liliya Shibanova, who heads Golos, said she received reports of arrests of observers in Tula, Tver and Nizhny Novgorod.

After the polls closed, throngs of men carried Russian tri-color flags through the night streets leading to the Kremlin. They were making their way to Putin’s victory rally in the Manezh Square.

Official estimates clock the number of attendees at over 100,000. Many of those at the rally were bussed in from neighboring and faraway regions, media reports said.

A manager from a Moscow suburb, who only gave his name as Andrei, stood in the crowd in Manezh Square. Soft snow fell in the bright lights.

Early preliminary election results blared over the loudspeakers — 61 percent for Putin, 18 for Zyuganov, 8 percent for both Prokhorov and Zhirinovsky, and 4 percent for Sergei Mironov, the leader of A Just Russia, an offshoot of Putin’s United Russia.

Andrei said he voted for Putin. “We won,” Andrei said in a flat voice, his light blue eyes staring straight ahead. “I’m in a good mood,” he said, barely cracking a smile.

Kozyrev wasn’t the only one to question whether the assassination announcement was staged to raise the prime minister’s popularity before the presidential election slated for Sunday, March 4.

“Every presidential candidate loves a foiled assassination attempt,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser dismissed last year for supposedly supporting Dmitry Medvedev. “We’re dealing with propaganda here.”

Pavlovsky pointed to the amateurish nature of the plot, which unraveled after the alleged terrorists blew themselves up in early January with home-made explosives in a rented Odessa apartment, according to a Monday broadcast on the state-run Channel One television station.

The terrorists had only vague plans and little chance of access to Putin, Pavlovsky said.

News reports from Ukraine earlier this year did not connect the explosion in the Odessa apartment to a Putin assassination plot.

Instead, there is speculation that the terrorists were after a local businessman. Monday was the first time the Odessa explosion was linked to an attempt on Putin’s life.

After the explosion, during which one of the alleged plotters died, police apprehended Kazakhstan-native Ilya Pyanzin.

The ringleader, Chechen Adam Osmayev, fled, but was arrested in early February, Channel One reported. Pyanzin and Osmayev were apparently acting on direct orders from Chechen terrorist Doku Umarov.

Umarov, dubbed “Russia’s Osama Bin Laden,” claimed responsibility for most terrorist attacks in Russia, including the Moscow Metro bombing in March 2010 and last year’s Domodedovo airport bombing.

“They said to come to Odessa to learn to make bombs, then in Moscow you will make diversions on economic targets. Later, an assassination attempt on Putin,” Pyanzin said, Channel One reported.

Osmayev, who was an economics student at the University of Buckingham in London before allegedly agreeing to assassinate Putin, said he was asked to teach two people to participate in terrorist acts.

They didn’t have to necessarily be suicide bombers, he said. There was no clear explanation why Osmayev agreed to participate in the plot.

“Our deadline was after the elections of the president of Russia,” Osmayev said in a Channel One interview, his eyes downcast, his face covered in scratches.

Police evidence included explosives hidden near Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospect, a frequent route that Putin takes, and videos of the prime minister getting into his car.

Putin’s spokesman Sergei Peskov confirmed the attempted murder. He called speculation on whether the announcement is a pre-election publicity stunt “sacrilegious,” the Interfax news agency reported.

The announcement came on Monday because the investigation was conducted not just in Russia, but also in Ukraine, Peskov said.

A much-hyped episode of Channel One news program Vremya aired on Monday night, revealing the exclusive scoop that there had been three attempts on Putin’s life since 2001.

The news came on the same day that Putin published his seventh campaign program in Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper.

The program, as did his speech at his rally last week, focused on the need to defend Russia from external enemies.

“Safety in the world can only be achieved with Russia, and not by trying to shove her, weaken her geopolitical positions, or damage her defense abilities,” the program said.

The assassination attempt, especially by someone who has ties to the West — Osmayev has lived in London — re-enforces the message of enemies from abroad, Moscow’s Carnegie Center political analyst Nikolai Petrov said.

However, the message was lost on many Russians.

“Again this old song: the country is surrounded by enemies, the leader is under threat, let’s gather around him,” one commenter named evgdem wrote in the comments section of the Kommersant newspaper. “I’m sick of it! I don’t believe it! Putin must go.”

“Pre-election nonsense!” wrote commenter volglu on Gazeta.ru, a newspaper site. “I wouldn’t be surprised if all the news outlets will report tomorrow about Putin’s friendly breakfast with extraterrestrials.”

Petrov, the political analyst, also said he wasn’t convinced by the Channel One report.

“It all looks so absurd and fake,” Petrov said. “There is a campaign. Putin used it in his favor.”

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

“Wow,” I thought after I collected my jaw off the floor and said goodbye. “He’s got the Thing. He’s got it bad.”

I should know. I’ve had the Thing most of my life. The Soviet Thing: an addictive mixture of wonder and disgust evoked by all aspects of that communist empire.

The Thing used to rule whole sectors of our military, academia and media. Of course, it suffered a pretty bad blow 20 years ago this month, when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost. But it’s still powerful, maybe now more than ever, as an unacknowledged absence in American life. We live in a country with a USSR-size hole in its soul.

Like Ronnie Dunn, I come from Texas, a place where people used to run for city council on their anti-commie credentials. Better Dead Than Red could have been our state slogan. The summer of 1984, after making his possibly-not-accidental gaffe that he’d begin bombing Russia “in five minutes,” President Ronald Reagan descended on my hometown for his joyful renomination. The Dallas RNC was a festival of Cold War hard-assery.

In that atmosphere, rebellion was easy: just pop open a textbook and learn the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s what I’d been doing at the only high school in Dallas to offer Russian. I figured I’d become a foreign correspondent like the guys whose names graced the USSR sections in bookstores: Harrison Salisbury, David Satter, Hedrick Smith. Go to the Soviet Union, decode mysteries, publish fat tome. Easy!

And then I actually went there. Inspired by the Юs and Яs I was tossing off, my grandparents booked us on a five-city group tour of the USSR. The summer of 1985, we boarded a plane for Leningrad.

I found everything I wanted — a world apart, bleak but exotic. Our first hotel room overlooked an unfinished construction pit filled with dirty water. Television showed factories, Mikhail Gorbachev and ballet. Outside the windows of our tour bus, the grim signage flattered my primitive Russian: a book store was called BOOK STORE; the restaurants, RESTAURANT. We were the wards of Intourist, the state (and only) tourism agency, and our guide was chirpy and sweet in English. But I could spark apparatchik contempt in her face whenever I mangled her native tongue, which was often.

The Soviets paid their flat-footed American tourists (code name, “Dear Guests!”) way more attention than we deserved. Every meal was an alcohol-laden banquet, in between which Intourist arranged endless cultural displays and/or “exchanges” with wincing local journalists. Away from our minders, people swarmed us. In Yerevan, friendly Armenians invited us to parties, wheedled us out of Eurythmics cassettes, and — in the case of the young ladies — tried to get into our pants. In Kiev, a sad college student approached me to practice English. I was obsessed with finding propaganda souvenirs, so he took me to a lonely shop, sighing as I snatched up GLORY TO THE WORKER posters.

When I got back to Dallas, I missed all that Soviet attention horribly. Then I realized that it was still all around me, if fainter. After all, the Soviets had missiles dedicated to my hometown, a place that, if you asked me, had nothing better going for it than some new parking ramps downtown. Our parking ramps could be the start of Armageddon! They were special. Yet they also remained unexploded.

The Soviets engaged us on our favorite terms, ideological. In the shining light of their competitive fixation, anything we did right was a moral victory. Just watch this archival footage of Richard Nixon debating Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Nixon is bragging about color TV cameras. And he’s having the time of his life.

Middle Eastern terrorists are disorganized; the Chinese have an annoying habit of making all our stuff. The Soviets stood apart but hated us like pros. How can you ever get over an enemy like that?

The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence on Dec. 26, 1991. I don’t recall caring any more than the rest of America. We won. Not only was the USSR a has-been, but it had also devolved into 15  countries whose names I wouldn’t have recognized except that I’d been to some of them. I’d stopped studying Russian years before — the trip had the perverse effect of making me realize the language was actually hard. But then immigrants from former Soviet lands started showing up. They were Afghanistan War veterans, artists, just ordinary guys overstaying their visas. They told me little scraps of jokes in Russian that I could understand. They introduced me to underground Soviet rock I could’ve heard in 1985 if I’d had a clue.

And so I started studying Russian again. In 1998, I made the first of many trips back to the former Soviet Union, to Yerevan. The party town I remembered had been replaced by a dark maze of casinos and starving dogs. In Kiev, Nike — or was it Adidas? — emblazoned the window of the old propaganda shop. I was finally a correspondent, not of static mysteries, but of breathless, murky, heart-rending change. But my bosses didn’t know exactly where I was. “What did you learn in the USSR?” the CEO of a major-market public broadcaster asked when I returned.

What better sign that we miss the USSR than our total refusal to learn what that mess of nations is called now? Sometimes I’ll meet smart, usually trilingual kids in a former Soviet republic — say, Moldova — who’ll ask what story about their country interests Americans. How can I tell them the truth, “None”? If Moldova wants half a nanosecond of our attention, it might pick a better name, such as that of its biggest shopping center, Malldova. Then get back in the news-from-confusing-places line behind its 14 siblings.

What we crave is menace, and only Russia occasionally fits the bill. (Bonus — still easy to find on a map!). True, its citizens just seem to want ordinary things like matching towels, fair elections and the rule of law. But fortunately, Russia’s leaders don’t (they prefer matching jet décor). If anyone misses the Cold War more than we do these days, it’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. When he goes head-to-head with Sen. John McCain, it’s just like old times.

Yeah, old times. Dangerous. Surreal. And all the more so because we can’t even remember what it was originally about. We only know that at some point, something bad made us feel good about our place in the world, and now it’s gone.

By the end of my interview with Ronnie Dunn about Soviet art, he was openly regretting it. “I kinda don’t want the secret out, to be honest with you,” he said when I asked if he could share his passion with the country music world.  Oddly, though, he keeps talking about it. He just doesn’t link to any of these stories on his website or fan pages. I don’t blame him. Many of his fans are as politically conservative as he is, and I imagine he has a healthy respect for the limits of what they can absorb. Collecting art might be sissy. Collecting Soviet art? There’s still room for something traitorous in that vintage hobby.

In his latest New Yorker piece, David Remnick writes, “This month, Russians will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union with almost universal silence.” Remnick has an A-league case of the Soviet Thing, but for once, he’s wrong. Whether they’re singing old protest songs or penning obscene new ones, Russians have been talking about today’s anniversary constantly. How could they not? They lived through the bizarre nightmare of the USSR. We’re the ones who haven’t woken up yet.

We never learn much about Georgy (Viktor Nemets), who picks up a load of flour one morning in an unnamed city and sets off into the vast Russian interior. He seems a decent enough guy, actually — he leaves some money and a note for his wife, and picks up a teenage hooker largely to get her off the road (which she bitterly resents). Whether Georgy is a good guy or a bad guy, he couldn’t possibly deserve what’s coming. From the moment he stops at a checkpoint run by a pair of lecherous, sadistic, beyond-corrupt cops, he seems to have wandered into an episode of “The Twilight Zone” authored by Gogol. Loznitsa’s portrait of Russian existence is one of perpetual gloom punctuated with occasional outbursts of violence, and after Georgy leaves the highway for a “shortcut” — hey, the mean teenage hooker warned him it was haunted! — you will never labor under the delusion that we’re headed for a happy ending. Loznitsa is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker (this is his first narrative feature) who left Russia in 2001, and he clearly has a social and historical agenda of sorts. “My Joy” appears to suggest that all the tyranny and brutality of the 20th century have left Russia, in the era of Putin and the plutocrats, stupefied and morally denuded.

Still, there’s something larger than despair beneath the impressively somber landscapes of “My Joy.” (The film was shot by Oleg Mutu, the Romanian cinematographer of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”) Loznitsa can’t resist the fatalistic, seriocomic storytelling tradition that’s such a big part of Russian life: When an aged passenger tells Georgy a tale of his fateful encounter with a fellow Soviet officer on the way home from World War II, we travel back to 1946 and witness the whole thing. Later, more mysteriously, we see another terrible incident, probably from World War I, which happened in the house where Georgy ends up living with a Gypsy woman who seems to have claimed him as her sex toy.

That’s the closest thing to tenderness Georgy finds in this land of endless stupidity and evil, where any human impulses seem to have been overrun by the most ruthless and Darwinian kind of struggle. He is beaten and left for dead; his truck and cargo are sold off. At last, the old man who told him the World War II story becomes his final refuge. And he hasn’t seen the last of those terrible cops. Believe me, Russian readers, I don’t assume that this dark fantasy bears much relationship to Russian reality — or at least, no more than “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” depicts real life in 1970s central Texas. Like all horror movies, this is a grossly exaggerated fable, one that arrives by way of its impressive cinematography and interpolated tales at a startling, violent, tragic and inevitable conclusion.

“My Joy” is now playing at the Cinema Village in New York and the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah. It also opens Nov. 4 in Spokane, Wash., with more cities and dates to be announced. Home video release will follow.