The television programme Kukli (Russia's answer to Spitting Image) has produced some biting satire on the current presidential election. In a recent episode a number of politicians were portrayed as prostitutes with the Duma speaker, Mr Gennady Seleznyov, as their "Madame".
The most pitiful figure without doubt was Mr Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, and the main challenger to hot favourite and acting President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Zyuganov, a perennial loser, was portrayed as a young woman who specialised in sadomasochism. His political comments were punctuated with cries of "Torture me! Torture me!"
There is every reason to believe that Mr Zyuganov has been beaten so often that he has learned to like it. Perhaps the dullest and most boring speaker in all the Russias, Mr Zyuganov's booming voice can be heard occasionally at press conferences making exciting statements such as: "We have long been a major left-wing party for all the canons of political science and European political experience."
Despite his soporific debating style, Mr Zyuganov has managed to muster more support than any candidate apart from Mr Putin. The latest poll by the All-Russia Opinion Research Centre gives him 21 per cent of the vote against 58 per cent for Mr Putin. The leader of the liberal Yabloko party, Mr Grigory Yavlinsky, is on 5 per cent, the madcap right-winger Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky on 5 per cent, and the other eight contenders nowhere.
It would appear therefore that with 10 days to go the campaign might become as boring as Mr Zyuganov himself. But to be fair to him he does come up with the odd flash of humour. Asked in the presidential election of 1996, for example, about his drinking habits he said: "I drink more than Gorbachev but less than Yeltsin."
He has also come up with the idea that the capture of maverick Chechen rebel Salman Raduyev is a hoax played on the electorate by the Putin camp. It is possible that a large number of people might believe this claim as Mr Raduyev's death was loudly proclaimed in the last Chechen war, but he reappeared some time later to cause havoc for Russian troops and Chechen rebels alike.
Today's communists in Russia originate from the middle ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Those who held the top CPSU posts are now either successful businessmen or leading politicians, who achieved remarkable conversions to liberal democracy as soon as the old systems collapsed.
Mr Yavlinsky has previously been the darling of the liberal intelligentsia and occasionally his support ran into double figures in the opinion polls. But even that constituency appears to be eroding. Ms Yevgeniya Albats, author of The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia-Past, Present and Future, for example, has moved away from Mr Yavlinsky because, she says, he is "too honest". Having spent her life excoriating the KGB, she now appears to accept Mr Putin, a former KGB spy, as an acceptable candidate for the presidency.
Some sections of the community , however, put Mr Yavlinsky at the top of the ratings. Internet polls, for example, give him the edge over Mr Putin and Mr Zyuganov, but less than 5 per cent of voters have access to the Internet and under these circumstances Mr Yavlinsky's hopes are pitifully slim.
There is an invisible candidate, by the way, who might gain many votes. In Russian ballot papers there is a box marked Protiv Vsekh (Against All). There is even a campaign being run to encourage Russians to call a plague on all the political houses. It could be reasonably successful.
