IF I recover from a bout of stomach illness by Sunday, I will cast my ballot in Russia ’s presidential election. But there’s no need to rush to get well, because my vote will make no difference.

There was a day when it did seem that my vote mattered. In 1996, I found myself in Ireland on Election Day and made a huge effort to go to the embassy in Dublin and vote for Boris N. Yeltsin , because I feared that the Communists could return to power under his opponent, Gennadi A. Zyuganov , and I would again have serious problems. Mr. Zyuganov is running for president again this year, but I no longer fear him. He will lose.

This not only reassures me, but also leads me to think about how President Vladimir V. Putin , in his eight years in power, managed to destroy Communism. He finished it off so brutally that it’s silly to even think about the possibility of its return. Yet some people outside Russia believe that Mr. Putin did away with only the democrats, the liberal parties and the independent news media. No, he also threw out power-seeking oligarchs, who are very unpopular with the Russian people, and he rid the country of chaos and instability, which, he tells us, were rampant in the 1990s.

No matter how you look at it, President Putin also brought order to Chechnya: at least they’re no longer flying young Russian soldiers back in body bags every day. And if television is offering more humorous programs and songs from around the world instead of political discussions, people only welcome this. As for opposition parties, the real ones, they quarreled among themselves and became so indistinguishable in their radical demands that the people, with President Putin’s help, stopped taking note of them.

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For the majority of Russians, Mr. Putin will enter history as a positive figure. That during his rule he actively relied on his K.G.B. colleagues doesn’t bother a lot of people. Whom else should he lean on in his struggle to impose order? He worked with the human material that came to him from the depth of Russian history, people who to this day drink, steal and consider politics a source of personal power and enrichment. If Mr. Putin preferred not to be trusting, it was because he clearly sensed the rot in the national gene pool.

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