"Throughout the day, it was like receiving reports from a war zone," said Communist Party deputy head Ivan Melnikov last Sunday, speaking about the thousands of calls he had received from regional offices about ballot-box stuffing and other violations in the Russian parliamentary elections.
But despite the manipulation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party got fewer than half the votes this time, down from almost two-thirds in 2007.
Mr Putin's party will still form the next government, since it can easily form a coalition with smaller pro-regime parties in the Duma, but it has lost the two-thirds majority that let it amend the constitution at will.
And Mr Putin will still return to the presidency in March's presidential elections, but the erosion in his popular support is suddenly visible for all to see.
The first clear sign that Russians were getting fed up with Mr Putin came two weeks ago, when he made an unheralded appearance at a martial-arts fight at the Olympiyskiy Stadium in Moscow. That wasn't surprising, as he makes a great public show of his own prowess in the martial arts. But when he climbed into the ring to congratulate the winner, the audience began to boo and whistle at him. They didn't stop until he left.
It was all broadcast live on Russian state television, and subsequently went viral on YouTube and the Russian social media. There is no credible rival to Mr Putin on the scene, but neither is it certain any more that he will serve out the full six years of his new presidential term. He is wearing out his welcome.
He really was welcome when the first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, handed the presidency to him in 1999. Mr Yeltsin's drunken and corrupt conduct of state affairs had discredited "democracy" in the eyes of most Russians, and Mr Putin presented himself as the new broom who would sweep all that away.
He wasn't exactly that: the price he paid for being named interim president when Mr Yeltsin finally quit was to let him and his cronies walk away untouched with their stolen wealth. But as Russians got to know him, they mostly liked what they saw.
During Mr Putin's two terms as president in 2000-08, he stabilised the ravaged economy: average salaries increased fivefold and the GDP grew by almost 8% a year. High oil prices helped, but it was an impressive performance nonetheless, and when he left the presidency three years ago he could still do no wrong in the eyes of most Russians.
He left it because Russia's constitution forbids a third consecutive term as president. It was a nice gesture, but he didn't really leave power. His close ally Dmitry Medvedev was elected to the presidency, and then Mr Medvedev appointed Mr Putin as prime minister. In practice, Mr Putin went on making the big decisions himself, including the decision to return as president next year.
But the past four years have not been as kind to Mr Putin as the first eight. The economy has stagnated, and the scale of the corruption has grown too large to ignore. (He is not personally corrupt, but everyone thinks he tolerates the massive corruption among his allies in order to maintain their loyalty.) So when he announced in September that he would run for the presidency again in March, something seems to have snapped.
There were two straws that broke the camel's back. One was his and Mr Medvedev's public admission that they had agreed on the swap long ago.
Everybody sort of knew that, but it was still galling to have Mr Putin's total ownership of the state apparatus rubbed in their faces. The other was the fact that while Mr Putin was prime minister, he amended the constitution so that the presidential term is now not four but six years.
In the past couple of months, Russians have suddenly woken up to the reality that they may face another twelve years of him as the all-powerful president (he's only 59 now), and a lot of them have realised that they don't actually like that prospect. Hence the steep fall in United Russia's share of the vote last Sunday; and, probably, in Mr Putin's share of the presidential vote next March.
He'll still win, of course, but it may be a long and miserable six years for him unless the oil price goes through the roof and Russia experiences another economic boom. Once the bloom goes off the rose, it almost never comes back. So where does Russia go from here?
Russia doesn't need another revolution. Despite the chronic abuses of power, the perversion of the courts, and the intimidation of the media, Russia could re-emerge as a real democracy quite smoothly if Mr Putin ever decided to let it.
Could he lead Russia through such a transition?
It is not to be excluded, for Mr Putin is acutely conscious of his place in history and would not want to end up being rejected at the polls or, even worse, being forced to yield power by a popular revolt.
Better to hand the country over in good condition and retire gracefully in four or five years. He is egotistical and arrogant, as are most powerful people, but he is not just a thug.
- Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
