However, it was not City Hall officials who played the key role in forming this new ideology, but rather the theoreticians from the opposition newspaper Zavtra and the Communist Party leaders imbued with their ideas. It was they who proclaimed the "red-white union." Orthodox fundamentalists, who lobbied for the canonization of Tsar Nicholas II, were supposed to unite with the political descendants of the red commissars who had executed the tsar and his family. Differences were to be brushed aside in the name of "statehood." The main thing was to have a strong state -- irrespective of the political complexion or the interests it represented. The state had to be strong and instill fear in people.

Thus, the homespun postmodernism of the "red-white union" does not lack a unifying idea. Both were authoritarian and ultimately formed a bureaucracy that became their mainstay. Those aspects of the Soviet past that are shared with tsarism are played up, while all the rest are discarded.

You end up with Soviet traditions, stripped of communist ideals, the slogans of class struggle and the democratic principles of the early years of the Revolution.

Such an ideology is inevitably conservative, anti-democratic and anti-communist. United Russia is a party of former Soviet bureaucrats turned ardent supporters of capitalism, and therefore the most complete embodiment of the "red-white union."

The reformers of the early 1990s all came from families of the old Soviet elite. While destroying all that had been created in the previous decades, they remained proud of their forebears who had executed tsarist generals or taken part in the Stalinist repressions. And there is no contradiction in this.

Although it was the opposition that formulated the principles of the "red-white union," those principles are in fact unsuited to the opposition. On the other hand, they are ideal for the "party of power."

The red-white ideology only really worked for a brief period in the early 1990s when the opposition was conservative and those in power looked "radical." Now that a new order has emerged, the authorities are interested in stability and are happy to borrow the formulas, ideas and images that the opposition has so kindly prepared for them. And the current crop of bureaucrats are lucky to have the opposition's assistance, as they are incapable of generating original ideas of their own.

United Russia's victory is logical and deserved, just as the Communist opposition will have earned its crushing defeat. The Communists have prepared the ground for the new party of power's triumph. They sweated over the creation of a new "national" ideology, which would reconcile Russia with capitalism (and with corruption, police proizvol, the oppression of national minorities and other "homegrown traditions").

Now that the job has been done, the Communists are doomed to depart the stage.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.