Special Russian correspondent Simon Marks reports on the Russian parlimentary elections. Then, Ray Suarez leads a discussion on the election's political ramifications.

SIMON MARKS: As the votes were counted across Russia's 11 time zones, it quickly became apparent that the results were going to be very good news for the Kremlin. In a political achievement astonishing by any measure, Unity, a party that didn't even exist three months ago, captured around 25 percent of the vote. The result is a personal triumph for the party's leader, Sergei Shoigu, the 45-year-old action man who heads Russia's emergency situations ministry, and who has offered to mediate a settlement to the war in the breakaway region of Chechnya.

It is also an enormous victory for the man who has prosecuted that war and gained popularity as a result, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who endorsed Unity in order to crush other players on the political scene here, players who were threatening Mr. Putin's presidential prospects. Those men-- the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and the former prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov-- were elected to parliament, but their plan to lead a major opposition group crumbled, derailed both by Unity's creation and a devastating media campaign launched against them. Today they were left crying foul.

YEVGENY PRIMAKOV: (speaking through interpreter) What's going to happen now? Will the media war continue? Are people going to continue to be fooled? Will there be more lawlessness? Russia is tired of that. What's happened to the truth?

SIMON MARKS: The Kremlin meantime was celebrating, a spokesman for President Boris Yeltsin describing events here as a "Velvet Revolution." And that assessment didn't just revolve around Unity's performance. The Union of Right Forces also performed well. Led by men like Anatoly Chubais, once considered the leading pro- market reformer in President Yeltsin's government, it won around 9 percent of the vote and remains broadly loyal to the Kremlin. There, a spokesman wasted no time in further advancing Mr. Putin's presidential campaign.

IGOR SHABDURASULOV: (speaking through interpreter) These parties are oriented to support Putin in his election campaign. I think the results in the parliamentary elections prove who is the favorite in the presidential election campaign. We made our choice, and everything will now be all right.

SIMON MARKS: All right, too, because the Kremlin believes the power of the Communist Party has been sharply reduced as a result of this election. Even though Communist Leader Gennady Zyuganov did win 25 percent of the vote, many of his hard-line coalition partners in parliament lost their seats. As a result, hope is being expressed here that the four largest centrist parties will work together and work with President Yeltsin's government. But Russia's reformers have never managed to establish effective coalitions in the past, and it's not even clear that it's accurate to describe Unity as a reformist party. Its hastily developed platform contains several contradictory elements. The party says it supports private ownership of land and will allow uneconomic businesses to go bankrupt, but it also says it wants to strengthen state regulation of the economy, improve pensions, and offer free medical treatment to everyone. And the mystery doesn't end there. Unity's leader, Sergei Shoigu, is a recognizable face, having won considerable publicity for his role in the Chechen conflict. Its deputy leader, Alexander Karelin, is a former wrestler who, Jesse Ventura-style, entered politics. But even long-term analysts say the party's other representatives are utter unknowns.

MICHAEL McFAUL, Carnegie Endowment: I'm very concerned, because they don't stand for anything, because they are a virtual party, because these are people, we have no idea who they are. We know a little bit about the top three, but everybody else on the party list, we can't even recognize their names. That's a bad sign. It's a bad sign in two respects: One, what they might do in terms of policy; but two, it's a bad sign for party development. That such an amorphous, virtual kind of thing could just come out of the blue, that's not a good thing for the long-term development of parliamentary democracy here in Russia.

SIMON MARKS: The last time Russians voted in parliamentary elections, in 1995, the result was similarly surprising. Then, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin led a hastily organized political party called "Our Home is Russia" to victory. Last night, Our Home is Russia took just 1 percent of the vote as Unity, the latest party of power, romped past the finish line. Through media manipulation, the hasty construction of a populist political movement, and the prosecution of a momentarily popular war, the Kremlin has again achieved precisely the result it sought in an election, but now the gloves are off in Russia's presidential race, and from here the Kremlin may find the forces it has unleashed far harder to control.