Vladimir Putin's Honeymoon

"Thank you for Chechnya."

Those words of support from factory workers in Moscow last week to Russia's acting President Vladimir Putin sum up in a nutshell why the former KGB agent was seen as likely to win the presidential election.

Putin, who leads a pack of 11 other candidates by a wide margin, owes much of his popularity to his tough handling of the war in Chechnya and his image as a man-of-action.

Opinion polls showed support for Putin at around 60 percent late in the week, while his nearest rival, Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov, trailed far behind with some 20 percent. Other candidates measured their popularity in single digits.

Support for Putin was especially strong among servicemen, who hope he will deliver on his promises to boost financing for the beleaguered military.

Harley Balzer, Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, says "there are no surprises possible" for the outcome of this election.

"The Russians understand that if you want to be a civilized country you have to have an elected leader. So, on that level, they sort of feel that they are carrying out the formal trappings of democracy," Balzer told CBSNews.com producer Justine Blau.

"Putin wasn't really on anybody's scope six months before he became Yeltsin's designated successor," Balzer says. Yet, "virtually all the significant political figures in the country have lined up behind him."

"It looks way more like a coronation than an election."

Balzer thinks if the majority of Russians aren't scared of Putin, they should be.

"This is not a step toward democracy. And it helps no one either here or in Russia for us to pretend that it is. Everything Putin has been saying suggests he is going to do more damage to Russia's nascent political institutions rather than consolidate them. I would love to be wrong about this. I would love some sanity to prevail, but I'm not particularly optimistic."

According to The New York Times, Elena Bonner, the widow of human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, signed a letter accusing Putin's regime of introducing "modernized Stalinism."

And while the majority of Russians may favor Putin, Russia's one million internet users are afraid of him.

"He's threatening to crack down on them. He wants the secret police to be able to monitor their communications," explains Balzer.

Yet most Russians don't fear Putin because "he has them far more scared of terrorists, bandits and criminals," says Balzer. "He's trying to present himself as the strong men who is going to protect them. That might get him elected on March 26, but it's not a program that's going to run the country for the next five years."

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, thinks new people on the scene enjoy a "honeymoon" period in Russia.

"H's a fresh face, he's a huge contrast to Yeltsin. He shows up for work every day. He's not drunk. He's apparently very healthy and he's young. People like that a lot," Stoner-Weiss says.

With unemployment in Russia at 14%, and the 35% of the people living below the poverty line, the Russians want to see an effective administration. Putin is promising to pay employees in the state sector and "catch up with pension payments. If oil prices stay high it's not impossible that he could deliver that," says Stoner-Weiss.

"He's also promised to fight corruption. These are big problems. He has a KGB background and people think he knows how to do this kind of stuff," she says.

"You might see a little bit of a clean up in terms of corruption," says Stoner-Weiss, "but I don't think there's going to be a dramatic change."

"You can't just snap your fingers no matter who you are, and have pensions paid off and feed the bureaucrats. You actually have to have a viable administration…people who are loyal to you outside of Moscow. And it's not clear that that is the case," she says.

The Communist Party used to perform the task of keeping Russia's 120 ethnicities in its 89 provinces and 11 time zones in line, but it's gone.

"You constantly have to buy off regional governors by promising things at a time when you have no money to offer anyone. Or you can threaten them with force and that's what we're all afraid of," says Stoner-Weiss.

"He's doing pretty well for a guy who's said nothing about the economy, consider the country is in. He has to do something to stimulate Russian industry and he has revealed no plan for that. Nor do we have any sense that he understands the depth of the problem," she says.

According to Balzer, Putin has said that a strong centralized state is in the Russian genetic code.

"I think he's wrong," says Balzer. "But unfortunately, the desire for that state seems to be in the genetic code of a lot of Russian leaders."