Give Russians this: They certainly know how to dig faster when they’re already in a hole.

The country went the polls in regional elections on Monday, and completed results showed gains for opposing parties. The results weakened the ruling United Russia party’s position. UR is the political party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Putin’s opponents? Sounds like a step up! After all, Putin is a statist bastard and former member of the Soviet Union’s KGB. His opponents must be better.

Not so much:

MOSCOW—Voters protesting rising utility bills and transportation costs gave opposition parties a boost in Russia’s regional elections, weakening the ruling United Russia party’s legislative majorities and electing a Communist-backed candidate mayor of the Siberian city of Irkutsk, complete returns showed Monday.

A statist former member of the Soviet KGB got you down? Vote Ivan Smirnov, Communist for mayor!

It’s like amputating your foot because your broke a nail.

United Russia remained dominant in all eight regional parliaments being elected, but fell short of its goal of 50% of the vote in four of the regions. Russia has a total of 83 regions.

Compared with national parliamentary elections in 2007, the party’s share of ballots fell in seven of the eight regions that elected lawmakers Sunday. Its biggest slump was in Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains, where its share of the vote slipped by 25 percentage points.

Of course, whether popular opinion will actually change the country’s political reality is a different story entirely. Believe it or not, election pledges in Russia still include “If elected, I promise to let your vote actually count.”

This time, opposition monitors were given slightly better access to the vote count, but reported election-day violations “at the same level as in October,” said Lilia Shibanova, head of Golos, a leading independent watchdog group. Violations included abuse of absentee ballots and participation of unidentified officials during counting, she said.

The liberal opposition Yabloko party, a sharp critic of the Kremlin, was stricken from Sunday’s ballots in two regions after officials ruled it had failed to collect the required number of voter signatures. Yabloko was on the ballot elsewhere, but failed to win any parliamentary seats.

The three opposition parties represented in the federal parliament—the Communists, the Liberal Democrats and the Just Russia party—gained ground in Sunday’s voting, winning seats in the eight regional legislatures. They offered restrained criticism of alleged fraud. The three parties, while presenting themselves as alternatives to United Russia, rarely criticize the Kremlin.

In other words, criticize the Kremlin too harshly and you’ll be removed from the ballot, or the election will be rigged against you. Think ACORN on steroids.

In Irkutsk, voters rebelled against a Kremlin-backed move that had the city’s popular mayor, Vladimir Yakubovsky, reassigned to the upper house of parliament in Moscow last year. Sergei Serebrennikov was brought in from Bratsk, another city in the region, to run Irkutsk as deputy mayor. As the United Russia mayoral candidate in Sunday’s vote, he trailed badly in pre-election polls, behind an independent local contender, Anton Romanov.

A court disqualified Mr. Romanov’s candidacy less than two weeks before the election, setting off demonstrations. Public sentiment then shifted behind Viktor Kondrashov, a local businessman running on the Communist ticket. He won 62% of the vote to Mr. Serebrennikov’s 27%.

You know how they say history repeats itself? In Russia, it’s also drunk. So it repeats itself in the gutter.