Democratic Facebook is celebrating a victory: in the municipal elections in Moscow, candidates from Dmitry Gudkov's bloc and the Yabloko party took second place. In several districts, sensible citizens with progressive beliefs will finally be in charge. The opposition lacks the votes to pass their candidates through the municipal filter, but emotions are running high nonetheless: activists, including many stars of journalism and well-known public figures, consider this their first victory.

No one wants to admit that this victory will also be the last, that the dragon cannot be voted out, and that the transparency and conditional honesty of the elections at this microbiological level were allowed by the great scholars from the Presidential Administration solely for their scientific observations. Like Alexei Navalny's participation in the mayoral elections of 2013, the current triumph of the liberal opposition is a sanctioned experiment: no one doubts for a moment that any candidate could have been removed from the race in a thousand ways at any stage, if desired.

No, having turned the presidential elections into a tribal ritual of leader sacralization, having canceled gubernatorial elections, hollowed out parliamentary elections, tamed and neutered opposition parties, gutted democracy and installed its trophy carcass on Red Square, the authorities have graciously allowed non-systemic oppositionists to scurry around at the municipal level (What’s next? Elections for the head of a stairwell?).

And even if the opposition believes they have snatched victory from the dragon's clawed paws in an honest fight, the dragon had its own logic: to lure the noisy intelligentsia into a space controlled by the authorities and engage them in the well-known game of "small deeds," feeding them the illusion of future growth. The authorities have done this with the opposition before, though not at such an insultingly microscopic level: Dmitry Rogozin, for example, sold his soul for the post of Deputy Prime Minister, Sergey Glazyev for the position of presidential advisor, while others were given a platform and an unlimited credit line.

Our dragon is not a dragon at all: it is a hydra, and it won't even notice if a knight chops off one of its heads to take its place. Moreover, some knights fought the hydra precisely to sell it their own head instead of the one they had just severed.

For the great scholars, the purpose of the wriggling in the municipal Petri dish is singular: to take another close look at this micro-life so that the vaccine for the flu season of 2018 will be more reliable. And the municipal deputies cannot escape the confines of the Petri dish: even the game of imitation seems too risky to the authorities.

Because despite the totalitarian 86 percent support repeatedly reported by VTsIOM, despite the constant real opinion polls conducted by the FSO, despite the total control over the media space and the propaganda that completely replaces the frame of reference, leaving "voters" unable to navigate the real political landscape, despite the million bayonets of the Rosgvardia at the President's personal disposal and all the pro-Kremlin loyalist formations, from "Nashi" to the "Night Wolves" and from "SERB" to the Cossacks, our authorities are monstrously afraid of their people and are in no way ready to entrust them with their fate, even by a jot and even for a second. It is from this complete paranoid insecurity that their desire to triple, quadruple insure themselves arises. It is from this that the panicked fear of street politics, uncontrolled civil protest, and color revolutions stems. The elite, starting with the President, are fully aware that there are no elections in the country and there will not be, that no one elected them. They essentially understand that they are impostors.

This is why the Ukrainian Maidan each time causes such a swelling of the Mantoux test in our leadership. The annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass, our response to Maidan, would have been unnecessary if Russia were led by a popularly elected government that did not need to prove its legitimacy to itself and others by destroying the legitimacy of Ukrainian "street" politicians. There would have been no need to brainwash the population. There would have been no need to allow a million internal troops to shoot at civilians in case of riots in Russian cities. And there would have been no need to behave with such ostentatious self-confidence, in a tsar-like manner, showing that the authorities owe nothing to the people and have no intention of being accountable to them.

Simple electoral choice and at least conditional (as in Germany or Japan) alternation of parliamentary and presidential power would allow the legitimacy problem to be solved far more elegantly, while slightly loosening the lid of the pressure cooker and allowing society to release negativity, including conducting painful reforms. However, all the elite are willing to do is imitate democracy at the lowest, municipal level—and only to finally solve the problem of uncontrollable street politics.

The non-systemic opposition, seemingly without noticing, becomes systemic in these puppet elections, moving from the streets to the courtyards; the authorities neutralize the loud intellectual Facebook with issues of swings and sandboxes, securing a calm 2018—and restless 2020s. Everything is clear with them. One question remains: what does the government know about the people that makes it so afraid to trust them?