David A. Andelman, visiting scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and director of its Red Lines Project, is a contributor to CNN and columnist for USA Today. Author of "A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today," he formerly served as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Asia and Europe. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) After the weekend's election in Russia and the expected coronation of Vladimir Putin as president yet again, some 20% of the world's population and 17% of its entire land mass will could be ruled by two individuals serving, unchallenged, for life.

For the people of China -- where Xi Jinping won such a mandate last week -- and Russia, this will mean a transition back to an era that few under the age of 40 will have known: the absolute rule of Mao and Brezhnev or Stalin.

Their victories have been possible because many of the people they rule will have never known true freedom, while others will yearn for the days when they never had to want for a job or a meal, however meager.

What Putin looks to have won in this vote, against a hand-picked selection of seven opponents he was guaranteed to overwhelm at the polls, is another six-year term -- after which, should he desire, another will no doubt be enabled by a simple vote of the Duma, which is utterly under his control.

"If you go to a restaurant and they say, 'We have no menu, we have only pizza,' then you take pizza," shrugs Mikhail Zygar, a Moscow-based journalist and author of "All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin."