Pro-Kremlin parties win Russia region vote-exit poll
(Adds end of voting in most regions, exit poll)
By Oleg Shchedrov
MOSCOW, March 11 (Reuters) - Russians voted on Sunday in regional elections seen as a dress rehearsal for parliamentary elections in December and an exit poll suggested two big pro-Kremlin parties were likely to win by a large margin.
Opponents of President Vladimir Putin, ignored by state-controlled media and trailing in opinion polls, were reduced to mounting isolated protests after officials struck them off the ballot in four regions for alleged electoral misdeeds.
Some 31 million voters in 14 regions were eligible to cast ballots on Sunday, just under a third of the total electorate.
The last polling stations closed at 1800 GMT in the Samara region on the Volga River.
According to exit polls published by VTsIOM pollster for 10 regions the two big pro-Kremlin parties -- United Russia and Fair Russia -- were likely to win a combined total of between 55 and 71 percent of vote, depending on the region.
The Communist Party was projected to take between 11 percent and 25 percent while the ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party scored between 10 and 14 percent.
VTsIOM did not release a national average share of the vote for each party.
Official results were expected to start coming out later on Sunday evening and continue through the night.
Putin's high personal popularity, the Kremlin's tight control of the media and Russia's strong economic growth meant the opposition stood no serious chance of winning, even before the ballot exclusions.
The VTsIOM exit poll suggested that the liberal Union of the Right Wing Forces could scrape past the 7 percent minimum vote needed to win seats in local legislatures in three regions.
ISOLATED PROTESTS
In Russia's second city St. Petersburg, the small Yabloko opposition party urged supporters to spoil their ballot papers to protest at the party's exclusion from the election. Officials claimed some of the signatures on Yabloko's registration documents were forged, a charge the party has denied.
"We will not recognise this election, which we believe is not legitimate," Maxim Reznik, head of Yabloko's St. Petersburg branch, told Reuters.
In the absence of genuine competition, political analysts say the main interest in the vote will be to see how the established party of power, United Russia, stacks up against Fair Russia, its new pro-government rival.
Fair Russia, created last year from the merger of three smaller groups and headed by a Putin loyalist, is fighting its first big election with generous campaign funding.
In most regions United Russia heavily outweighed Fair Russia. But in at least three areas, Fair Russia won over 20 percent.
Political analysts say this carefully managed contest is intended to create an illusion of choice while cementing the Kremlin's dominance over political life before presidential elections in March 2008.
In the last regional elections, United Russia won close to half of the votes cast.
Sunday's voting was generally calm. But police arrested several protesters from a fringe group who threw a smoke grenade into a polling station in Moscow's western suburb of Odintsovo.
The National Bolshevik Party protesters resisted arrest and shouted "This election is a farce!" and "We do not want elections without choice" as they were dragged away.
Police also detained three photographers, including a Reuters cameraman, who were filming the arrests. After 6 hours in the police station they were freed without charge.
One vote in Sunday's polls was cast from space.
Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station, voted by telling a colleague at mission control of his choice. A ballot was then cast on his behalf, election officials told the Interfax news agency. (Additional reporting by Denis Pinchuk in St. Petersburg)
