When the news broke – together with the lesser news that the incumbent, Dmitri Medvedev, will step down to become Putin’s prime minister – I wanted to scream, I told you so.I have always been puzzled by the naïveté of analysts, in Russia and abroad, who believed that Putin would never be so bold as to make a mockery of Russia’s electoral system by reclaiming the presidency. But contempt for democracy has been Putin’s stock-in-trade ever since he arrived in the Kremlin from Saint Petersburg two decades ago.