An example, in 2014 100% of state senators (they have two houses in their parliament, duma is another one) approved Putin’s request to invade Ukraine. I think that level of conformity would be impossible with opposition parties there.
> 2020 Levada poll gave him a 65% approval rating
In modern Russia, saying you don’t support Putin or his party is risky. It’s not yet as bad as in USSR (the risk was almost 100% then, people were executed, imprisoned, or later forcibly treated in psychiatric hospitals), but it’s slowly getting there.
We don’t know how these same people would have responded if they would be free to express any opinion on the subject.
> it doesn't look like any fraud actually changed the outcome
In the first paragraph of that article there’s a statement “Statistical analysis of poll data have shown massive abnormalities that most researchers explain by mass-scale electoral fraud”, which has 6 external links.
Contemporary Russia has far more of the form of an electoral democracy than the USSR had. 25% of the Duma is controlled by opposition parties. How much of the Supreme Soviet was controlled by opposition parties?
If we distinguish form from substance, contemporary Russia has a lot of the form, but the substance is impaired. By contrast, the Soviet Union was lacking in both.
> We don’t quite know that.
The Nov 2020 Levada poll gave him a 65% approval rating – https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/ – that seems to support what I said
> That already happened in 2011 and in all the later ones
Looking at that article about the 2011 election, United Russia was polling in the 50s to 60s, and won about 49% of the vote, suggesting they underperformed their polls. There may well have been some fraud, but unless the opinion polls are rigged too (which might be true, but where is the evidence?), it doesn't look like any fraud actually changed the outcome.
> Apparently, land grab of Crimea boosted his popularity by a lot back in 2014
Which seems to support what I said earlier, about him being "genuinely popular with a majority of Russians"