Brian Whitmore has, with habitual insight, given his take on the significance of Putin’s abandonment of United Russia here on RFE/RL.  He sees Putin’s departure as part of a wider trend, currently underway, in which other political parties of the managed democracy such as the Communists and A Just Russia, are morphing and fracturing in a way which is increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to supervise.  He points to the departure of power vertical architect Vladislav Surkov as the moment when the system, formally so tightly wound, began to spin out of control:

Gleb Pavlovsky, who himself was dismissed as a Kremlin strategist in April 2011 for being too vocal in support of a second Medvedev term, told the British daily “The Guardian” in March that Surkov understood “the limits of the system” and didn’t want Putin to “experiment” with a return to the presidency.