“The results of most campaigns were predetermined by the incumbents and electoral commissions at the stages of candidate registration and campaigning,” Golos, an independent electoral monitoring group, said in a statement after the voting. A certain controlled competition was allowed, but only among candidates of the so-called pocket opposition, which includes Communists and left- and right-wing populists who do not even pretend to be independent.

The word “election” is a misnomer for what has just happened in Russia, but the voting does serve a purpose. “The election is a moment for the regional authorities to demonstrate their loyalty to the federal government,” says Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and a shrewd analyst of Russian politics. “The top political management uses elections to confirm its own ability to keep both the center and the regions under control.”

Mr. Putin and his associates like to emphasize Russia’s political differences with the West. After much trial and error, which included some flirting with real competitiveness during a Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013 — they settled on a system that is completely divorced from Russia’s Western-inspired Constitution but still uses Western terms like “political party” and “parliament.” Still, the country’s evolving political system has made a significant step away from pretense and toward an openly authoritarian model. It’s a system that goes well with the way the Kremlin understands accountability.

Public officials are not accountable to voters or society in general, only to their superiors. Ultimately it is the president, not the people, who determines whether to bestow office, or take it away. The exposure of abuses, however damning, almost never leads to dismissal. Muckraking by journalists or political activists rarely inspires resignations, or even an official apology. Though the Kremlin has quietly fired some of the more odious white-collar criminals, this usually happens a year or two after exposure so it can’t be said that they were dismissed as a result of popular indignation. The Kremlin doesn’t want ordinary citizens to develop a sense of being able to influence political decisions.