While election fever continues to grip the United States, an election less than week away is stirring little interest in Russia. The streets are lined with posters attempting to stir up enthusiasm for the elections. Slogans like “March 2nd — the vital choice of the country” adorn pictures of families playing in the snow, flanked by the red, white and blue of the Russian flag and the double eagle crest.

Amid the mud, biting wind and damp snow of St. Petersburg, Russia’s cultural nest, citizens are accepting the inevitable. Numerous media outlets are now circulating recent polls suggesting that 71 percent of Russians will vote for Dmitry Medvedev in the presidential elections on March 2. Sixteen and a half years after the last whimper of the Soviet Union, Russians recognize that while the economy has drastically changed, the nature of power relations is a familiar story.

Lyudmilla Ivanova has lived in St. Petersburg for 70 years. “Even we Russians do not understand the contradictions of our culture, our country,” she laments. “What we have now is not good, nor will it change soon.”

Medvedev, 42, is a baby-faced bureaucrat who became known to most Russians in December, when Vladimir Putin hand-picked him as a successor to the presidency. If and when elected, Medvedev, deputy prime minister since 2005 and chairman of Gazprom since 2000, will owe most of his power to Putin. According to the Russian constitution, a president can only hold office for two consecutive terms, though before December, many considered that Putin might discard the law to retain power. The level of influence Putin will wield remains to be seen.

Whether or not they are disturbed by Putin’s hand-picked replacement, few Russians expect any surprises in the upcoming election. While opposition candidates such as ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky may draw some votes, none of them unites opposition parties in any significant way. Gennady Zyuganov, a former Communist Party secretary, and Andrey Bogdanov are the other candidates.

Pyotr Kurnygin, a researcher in cross-cultural psychology at the St. Petersburg State University, was 19 years old when the August putsch failed. Now, 16 years later, he views the political scene with little suspense. “They may as well start calling Medvedev ‘President Number Two,’” he says. “What’s the point of worrying — Medvedev will be president.” His plans for the weekend of March 2nd? “I’m going to leave town.”

Dima Naida, a Ukrainian-born painter living in St. Petersburg, shares this disgust. “We have a government that does not want its people to be educated and informed,” he says. “As long we rely on oil wealth, this will continue.” He is hopeful for the future, but already accepts the inevitable result of the upcoming elections. “Of course it will be Medvedev. I just hope he will be different. Probably not, but there’s always a chance.”

Tofik Shakhverdiyev, an Azerbaijani filmmaker discussing Stalinist nostalgia in the 1980s, observed the phenomena as part of a greater psychological trait that perhaps persists in Russia today. “The number of people who openly defend Stalin is limited,” he said in an interview. “But if you talk about people whose first instinct is a passion for order, then I think you are talking about not less than half the people in the Soviet Union. You see, we use fashionable words like ‘democracy’ and ‘pluralism’ now, but so few people can really live without the security of complete order and control.”