The withdrawal from Russia's presidential race by the former prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, has come, remarkably, at a time when cracks have begun to appear in the image of the leading candidate, acting President Putin.
The most recent opinion polls have shown a significant fall in support for Putin in the run-up to the presidential election in March. With Primakov out of the running, however, Putin's chances have been given a dramatic boost.
All the indications are that Russian voters, while increasingly wary of Putin's authoritarian tendencies and his links with the Communists, will now have no strong alternative candidate to vote for.
Primakov's withdrawal follows the poor performance of his Fatherland-All Russia party in December's parliamentary elections. Announcing his decision, he anticipated that the two main proKremlin TV channels would have combined to attack him mercilessly if he had decided to run.
But there is an important link between Primakov and Putin which should not be ignored. While Putin was a mere colonel in the KGB as a spy in Germany and later for a short time as an agent in his native St Petersburg, Primakov came up through the ranks to become head of the entire KGB organisation under Mikhail Gorbachev.
What we are seeing, in fact, is one KGB man giving another KGB man a free run at the Presidency and, despite their recent political opposition, Primakov is on record as saying that Putin would make a good president.
It now seems certain, therefore, that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will be sworn in as Boris Yeltsin's successor and given a blessing in the course of the inauguration ceremony by His Holiness Alexiy II, patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, who, it has been alleged, was once known by the less grandiose title of "Agent Drozdov", or "The Thrush", by his KGB masters.
The candidate likely to give Putin his closest run in March is Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party. He can count on the Red Belt of cities in European Russia to put him into second place. But Putin and Zyuganov may be a lot closer than their current political stance indicates.
Putin's deputies have put the Communists back in control in the Duma. The powerful speaker of the house and most of the chairmen of the parliamentary committees are Communists who have been placed in power by Putin's political associates.
A Communist has even been placed in charge of the committee on religion, and Anatoly Lukyanov, the man behind the failed coup of August 1991, has been installed as head of the Duma's committee of state construction.
This alliance with the Communists has raised suspicions that Putin's Russia may not be as open and as democratic as he would like us believe. In as much as he has referred at all to foreign policy, Senator John McCain, who won the American Republican primary in New Hampshire this week, appears very worried indeed. "Boris Yeltsin was addicted to alcohol and was significantly incapacitated," McCain told the Meet the Press TV programme.
"But we have to examine Vladimir Putin's background. He is from the KGB. He could use the military to reassemble the Soviet Union. The US President should speak far more harshly about what is happening in Chechnya,"
Not surprisingly, the ClintonGore camp is anxious to paint a more hopeful picture. The US administration's policies have, after all, played their part in creating the Russia which exists today and they have every interest in making things look good.
Russian voters are not so sanguine. A 7 per cent fall in Putin's popularity in the reasonably reliable VTsIOM opinion poll appears to have been due to his deal with the Communists rather than the protracted campaign in Chechnya. This is underlined by the fact that a large majority of Russians, according to the same poll, continue to support the Chechen campaign.
In announcing his withdrawal from the race on the state-backed RTR television channel, Primakov cited the deal between the Putin bloc and the Communists as one of his reasons.
Russia was far removed from being a true democracy, he said, referring to the ferocious Sovietstyle propaganda campaign directed against him and his supporters during the campaign for the Duma elections.
The deal with the Communists is not the only worrying indication emerging in the course of Putin's acting Presidency. Even more controlled media have been forecast. A vast corruption scandal has simply refused to go away.
The Swiss authorities recently issued an international arrest warrant for Pavel Borodin, the former head of the Kremlin administration who is now head of the secretariat for the reunification of Russia and Belarus. The accusations are gradually zeroing in on the centre of Russian power.
Borodin is accused of receiving kickbacks from a major Lugano-based construction company called Mabetex in return for state contracts in Russia. Mabetex is also accused of setting up creditcard accounts for Yeltsin and his two daughters. All three Yeltsins now appear to be covered by an immunity decree, which was the first act of Putin's acting Presidency.
Despite this it is now hard to see anything stopping Putin's run for the Kremlin. A frequently-forecast series of devastating guerrilla tactics by Chechen rebels may not materialise or may come too late to affect the election's outcome.
Zyuganov's campaign may be designed more to consolidate Communist support than to beat Putin. The liberal anti-war candidate, Grigory Yavlinsky, has been a loser in too many national elections to provide serious opposition.
There is one outsider in the race who, while having no chance of election, could cause serious trouble for Putin. Yuri Skuratov has declared himself as a runner for the Presidency. As former prosecutor general he knows a lot about leading politicians. In a menacing statement in the current issue of the Internet publication Gazeta.Ru, Skuratov says:
"The People must know for whom they are voting. I have information that I collected during my work in the Prosecutor's Office that can't be just knocked out of my head. I will reveal to the public what I know and my conclusions from the information I have access to."
It could yet be a very interesting campaign.