Moscow Diary: Medvedev war chest

As Russia's presidential election looms, the BBC's James Rodgers wonders whether the clear favourite, Dmitry Medvedev, knows how to spend his massive war chest. His diary is published fortnightly.

IN THE BAG

You would hardly know it was going on at all.

Mr Medvedev (left) is President Putin's chosen successor

There are less than two weeks to go until the world's biggest country elects a new president.

The tension is not mounting. It is not too close to call. It could not go either way.

Because Dmitry Medvedev has it so comprehensively in the bag, he seems hardly to feel the need to run a big campaign.

True, the first deputy premier is tirelessly travelling the country talking to voters, getting himself better known to them. But that has left him so short of time that he has declined to join the other candidates in TV debates.

Presumably, his campaign team and his Kremlin backers feel that he has nothing more to gain. The opinion polls put him more than 50% ahead of his closest challenger. If that is the case, why take any risks?

LOADS OF MONEY

The most illuminating figures in this election campaign are not the opinion polls, but the funding.

Clearly taking no chances, Mr Medvedev's team have assembled a massive war chest.

An official from Russia's central election commission recently put the figure at 181m roubles ($7.3m, £3.8m). The sums seem tiny compared with the US election campaign, of course, but this is a rather different contest.

Here is the significant statistic: at the time the official was speaking, Mr Medvedev had only spent 8m of those roubles. His more modestly funded fellow candidates had actually splashed out more.

It is almost as if the Medvedev team does not know what to spend its cash on.

It is the electoral equivalent of trying to buy a present for the man who has everything.

SPIRITUAL FAST FOOD

That is a dilemma which many young Russians faced last week. St Valentine's Day is becoming increasingly popular here.

Moscow staged a kissing contest on St Valentine's Day

"It's a nightmare to get a table in a restaurant," a friend complained.

A Romir opinion poll conducted suggested that 42% of Russians planned to celebrate - that is up from something close to zero in Soviet times.

When the pollsters broke their results down into age groups, the figure rose to 75% among 18- to 24-year-olds - so maybe the festival has a big future in Russia.

The other 25% seem to include some who disapprove fairly strongly.

A youth movement of Orthodox Christian believers condemned St Valentine's Day as pagan. The Church itself was less censorious, warning only that it should not seek to replace real love with spiritual "fast food".

"Fast food", by the way, is just one of the many English phrases - transliterated but not translated - which have wormed their way into modern urban Russian over the last few years.

Defenders of Slavic culture apparently seem worried that St Valentine's Day is part of a more sinister cultural invasion. If that opinion poll is anything to go by, it seems set to become more popular with successive generations.

Restaurant tables were tougher than ever to book on 14 February. So young lovers may have ended up with fast food anyway.

PRESIDENT 'IN LOVE'

There was one St Valentine's Day event which every true Russian patriot could happily enjoy with a clear conscience: the release of a film - a love story with a KGB agent as the main, male love interest.

The new film appears to mirror President Putin's life

I was lucky enough to get a press invitation to the premiere of A Kiss - Not For The Press.

It was not an especially glamorous occasion, although some people had tried to dress up to give the evening a hint of Hollywood.

It did not really work. It still felt like many of the guests behaved as if they came not from Hollywood so much as the depths of a Russian forest, and that was just the Western press. They turned out in bigger numbers than they had for anything since alleged hit-man Andrei Lugovoi last gave a news conference.

The reason? Despite its billing as a film about life, love and politics, this was really a movie in praise of President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Putin did not come to the premiere. But he can hardly fail to have noticed it was happening.

The film-makers chose a cinema just a short step from the Kremlin - hanging a massive poster of a hero looking very like the president himself along what must be one of Mr Putin's most regular routes to work.