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By Steven Lee Myers

Summary prepared by Hayk Sargsyan of CDI

The prospects for Russian democracy when President Putin's term ends three years from now are already shaping up as the country's greatest test yet of the most basic democratic principle: that power changes hands periodically in free and fair elections. The signs so far are not promising. Mr. Putin has repeatedly said he would not change the Constitution to allow himself to stay in office past 2008, but the idea refuses to die.

The "problem" is that many Russians - 60 percent of them, according to a poll this month - would rather not see him go. But perhaps he doesn't have to stay in office to retain power. Mr. Putin has so neutralized the opposition in Parliament, so stifled the news media, so consolidated political power, that the matter of deciding who succeeds him probably will rest entirely in his own hands. He has already suggested he would anoint a successor - repeating, and probably enshrining, the process by which he took office. When Boris N. Yeltsin resigned in 1999, he made Mr. Putin acting president and then threw the entire weight of the government's resources into assuring Mr. Putin's election.

Now, no one who wants to continue working with Mr. Putin has dared declare an intention to run, effectively paralyzing any public debate over who the best candidates might be. It has been left to two critics with little apparent public support - the former chess champion Garry Kasparov and a former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, who declared his intention to run for president last week - to stand up and get a taste of what they might face in a campaign. It hasn't been easy for either man.

Since he began criticizing Mr. Putin this summer, Mr. Kasyanov has faced a criminal investigation into accusations that he improperly acquired a government-owned summer cottage at a steep discount.

And Mr. Kasparov, who has been barnstorming around the country for much of the year but has not declared a formal intention to run, has been harassed by regional authorities, pelted with scrambled eggs and assaulted with a chessboard. "I am lucky," Mr. Kasparov said at the time of the last attack, "that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball." Mr. Kasparov, who retired from professional chess this year to devote himself to opposing Mr. Putin, appears as fearless as he was as a player.

In small gatherings, meeting with skeptical business people and local politicians, he has relentlessly attacked Mr. Putin as an autocrat and denounced his policies as a threat not only to democratic values, but also to the economic and social well-being of the country. "It is pointless to discuss today who will run and how," Mr. Kasparov told a small gathering in Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin. "In my view, how we vote is not the principal thing," he said. "The principal thing is our readiness to defend our votes."