As is sometimes the case when covering complex foreign events, most of the international news media have missed the real story in Russia. Instead they concentrated on the superficial aspects of the legislative election and overlooked a contest for power that is taking place behind the scenes.

The story in the headlines was that the election amounted to a massive vote of approval for President Vladimir Putin, even though he was not running for office. In fact, media commentators were asking why the Kremlin bothered to rig the vote for Putin's party. Having presided over a period of unprecedented prosperity in which the average Russian's income has more than doubled, Putin is genuinely popular in his country. And though he swears he will leave office as required by the constitution when his second term ends in March, most Russians would like him to remain in charge.

There is widespread speculation inside and outside Russia that he will either swap jobs and become prime minister, or will continue to pull the strings of power in some other capacity. The general assumption is that Putin will remain the most powerful politician in the land.

The real story, as seen by some of the smartest experts on Russian affairs, is somewhat different. It is, quite simply, that Putin is losing his grip on power.

The evidence for this conclusion, as seen by these experts, is the recent arrests of several high officials close to Putin. As The Economist put it this week, the Kremlin's heavy-handed tactics in the election “betray the nervousness linked to the transition of power in any authoritarian system.” The British weekly believes “a power struggle is clearly taking place within the Kremlin.”

A French expert, Alexander Adler, explains that “authoritarian nationalists” in the Russian establishment are waging an offensive against the “liberal wing” of the Kremlin, and that Putin “no longer has the power to arbitrate between the different camps.” For example, three key officials of the Finance Ministry were recently thrown in jail on charges of embezzlement, apparently without Putin being informed in advance. They were apparently pawns in the power struggle. The players on both sides include some of Putin's right hand men - bosses of big state enterprises and officials of his own government.
Adler also believes that there is an intense battle inside the state security apparatus, and that the high profile assassinations last year of former KGB exile Alexander Litvinenko in London and crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow were attempts by hardliners in the FSB (successor to the KGB) to weaken Putin's position internationally

Another expert, writing for the web-based news service Stratfor, reports that two of Putin's closest confidants and enforcers – Igor Sechin, chairman of the board of the state oil firm Rosneft, and Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff to the president, despise each other and have been maneuvering to grab more political power at the other's expense. All of this is undermining the power structure that supports Putin.

The glimpses of this murky conflict that can be seen in the government-controlled Russian press are certainly only the tip of the iceberg. Kremlinologists are dusting off the art of reading between the lines to determine the state of play.

If all of this sounds like the old days of the Soviet Union, that is not surprising. Old habits die hard, especially in a country with such a long tradition of authoritarian rule in which the imperial Tsars were replaced by Soviet dictators, and after a brief period of slapdash democracy under Boris Yeltsin, by President Putin. What comes next is not certain.