MOSCOW — The intent of the United Russian campaign billboard was clear: By showing scores of historical figures arrayed across a map of Russia, the country's dominant party was proclaiming that it can represent everyone.
The pairing of dictator Josef Stalin and dissident Andrei Sakharov in the ad, however, failed to endear the party to human rights activists and democrats. Facing media ridicule, the party swiftly recognized that it had made a mistake and pledged to fix it.
Its solution was to remove the photo of Sakharov.
The new billboards still included Stalin, the bloodiest figure in Soviet history, as well as Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.
As Russia votes today in elections that are expected to boost President Vladimir V. Putin's power by giving him a more pliable parliament, the willingness of Putin-backed United Russia to link itself with such figures says much about where this country stands today.
Democratic ideals have been at least superficially discredited among many Russians who link them with the corrupt privatization of state assets in the 1990s and the collapse of social services, free health care, job security and decent pensions.
"The words 'democracy' and 'freedom' are first and foremost associated in the minds of the people with such things as the decrease in living standards and indigence," lamented Sergei Ivanenko, first vice chairman of Yabloko, a party that nevertheless campaigns on a human rights platform.
"The gut feeling of the people is that they do want democracy and freedom, but they don't like these words."
For many Russians, Stalin is a positive symbol of a strong state that tried to look after ordinary people.
"We denounce many of Stalin's actions, but we give him credit as a historical personality, the same as Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn," said Oleg Kovalev, a United Russia member of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. "We didn't mean to say that these people supported United Russia. We meant to say that United Russia values and respects these people."
The enormously popular Putin and an increasingly dominant hard-line Kremlin faction drawn from the Soviet-era security services are not trying to restore Stalin's totalitarian system. But they are trying to build a stronger state authority that critics say may eliminate any significant role for democratic opposition.
