ELECTION IN RUSSIA: THE OVERVIEW; Putin Wins Russia Vote in First Round, But His Majority Is Less Than Expected

Acting President Vladimir V. Putin won a narrow majority of the vote today in Russia's presidential election, gaining the outright victory that the Kremlin had pursued with growing desperation to avoid a runoff next month.

Although Mr. Putin's anticlimactic triumph was huge in absolute terms -- some 20 percentage points ahead of his closest rival, the Communist leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov -- it appeared likely to fall considerably short of expectations. And that further elevated doubts, which had begun to surface in the campaign's final days, about the depth of Mr. Putin's popular support.

With 92.5 percent of the ballots counted by this morning, Mr. Putin had captured 52.57 percent of the vote, compared with 29.45 percent for Mr. Zyuganov.

The head of the liberal Yabloko party, the legislator Grigory V. Yavlinsky, was in a remote third place with 5.85 percent.

The final pre-election polls, published a week before the Sunday voting, indicated then that Mr. Putin was backed by as many as 57 percent of respondents who said they intended to vote.

In a post-midnight news conference, Mr. Putin seemed to give a nod to the narrowness of his majority, noting that with a potential electorate of 108 million, ''even a half-percentage point is a huge credit from the population.''

More telling, he hinted that he might invite political rivals into government, apparently in an effort to build political support for whatever programs he proposes. Mr. Putin was especially solicitous of Mr. Zyuganov, whose support appeared almost one-fifth greater than pollsters had estimated. In his news conference, Mr. Putin stated with surprising bluntness that Mr. Zyuganov's showing, especially in the face of a relentlessly hostile government and private press, was a warning that the Kremlin was not adequately addressing the problems of the working class and the poor.

He also offered tributes to his bitter rivals, former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and Moscow's mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, saying they had helped hold Russia together by supporting the war against separatist rebels in Chechnya.

Whether they or any other outsiders will be brought to the Kremlin ''is subject matter for negotiations,'' Mr. Putin said. But he added, in an allusion to a classic Russian fairy tale, that he would not allow his team to resemble ''the notorious troika, where one is pulling into the water, another one backward and the third one to the clouds.''

Mr. Putin's intentions may well depend on how bare the majority he won turns out to be after the counting of the final ballots. Yet with a victory in the first round he can accurately claim a mandate from Russian voters, paper-thin though it might be, to carry out new policies.

Had he not garnered more than 50 percent, the law required that he face the second-place finisher, Mr. Zyuganov, in a runoff scheduled for April 16.

Virtually no one doubted that Mr. Putin would have won such a contest handily; Mr. Zyuganov, also the Communist candidate in the 1996 presidential election, could muster only 40 percent of the vote in a runoff that year against Mr. Yeltsin.

But it also seems clear that Mr. Putin could emerge from winning a thin majority as a diminished leader, with a tarnishing of the image of infallibility and inevitability that has cloaked him almost since Mr. Yeltsin appointed him prime minister last August.

Mr. Putin, the spare, dour 47-year-old former chief of domestic intelligence, has captivated the public and utterly confounded political sages since his vault from near-total obscurity.

No one expected a man unschooled in politics and so bland in personality and appearance to seize the Russians' imagination. Most predicted that Mr. Putin's first and only action of profound importance -- the starting of an all-out war on secessionist rebels in the province of Chechnya -- would be an act of political suicide. Mr. Yeltsin's decision in 1994 to conduct a Chechen war that went disastrously awry for the Russian Army helped almost cost him the 1996 election and was one cause of the move to impeach him in 1999.

But in both cases Mr. Putin confounded the political pundits. His calm decisiveness, apolitical manner and comparative youth contrasted favorably with the bombast, Kremlin maneuvering and indecision of the final years of an increasingly infirm Mr. Yeltsin.

And the second Chechen war turned out to galvanize ordinary citizens, stung by the loss of Soviet empire and industrial might, who were looking for some evidence of Russian heft to raise their self-esteem.

At times this winter polls indicated that close to three in four Russians supported Mr. Putin's conduct as prime minister and, after Mr. Yeltsin abruptly quit on New Year's Eve, as acting president. His support was so robust that Mr. Primakov, once seen as a formidable opponent for the presidency, quit the race.

But in the last month, some of that support began to fade. Why is not completely clear: in part, Mr. Putin may simply have drifted out of the honeymoon phase granted new leaders; in part, voters may have begun to focus on the election and discovered other candidates they liked.

''The decline is among those people who like Putin, but do not vote for him,'' said Leonid Sedov, who directs the Public Opinion Foundation, a major Moscow polling organization. ''They have nothing against him; they think his policies are quite all right. But they were going to vote for other persons anyway.''

In the last week of the campaign, during which it was forbidden to publish opinion polls, Mr. Putin's backers began a furious effort to recapture some of that support, in part by promoting negative attacks on those politicians who were perceived as siphoning it away.

For the most part, the focus was on Mr. Yavlinsky. In the final days of the race, as Mr. Putin garnered much media attention by flying a combat fighter to Chechnya on an ostensibly official visit, Mr. Yavlinsky was investigated by the government on suspicion of illegally campaigning on a military base. On Thursday, the state television network ORT, controlled in part by the financier Boris Berezovsky, who is close to the Kremlin, broadcast a series of news reports identifying Jews, homosexuals and foreigners as principal Yavlinsky supporters.

On Sunday night, Mr. Putin's chief campaign strategist denied any role in those reports, which were clearly intended to stir smoldering Russian biases against minorities to Mr. Yavlinsky's disadvantage.

''Many mysterious and silly things happen during the campaign,'' the strategist Gleb Pavlovsky said in an interview on the privately owned NTV network. ''I know nothing about Mr. Yavlinsky's sexual orientation, and I know nothing about events that take place in the gay community. If it was staged, it did Putin nothing but harm.''

Mr. Yavlinsky, long regarded as a leader of Russia's Western-style democrats, said on Sunday night that his campaign ''achieved what we wanted: we have demonstrated that there are millions of people behind us who support what we are talking about.'' He indicated he hoped to form a broader coalition of right-wing critics of the Putin government.

But it is not clear what that coalition might be. Many of Mr. Yavlinsky's ideological allies, like the Yeltsin government veterans who make up the new Union of Right Forces, have cast their lot with Mr. Putin.

In geographic terms, Mr. Putin swept every region of the nation. But he avoided a runoff apparently by piling up votes in European Russia to offset a comparatively disappointing showing in Siberia and on the Pacific coast.

In vast parts of the less populous east -- in the enormous central Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk, and far eastern regions like Chukotka and Primoriye -- Mr. Putin failed to reach the 50 percent mark. He also fell well short in the city of Moscow, which gave him about 46 percent of the vote and Mr. Yavlinsky 18 percent.

But in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, Mr. Putin collected more than 6 in every 10 votes. And in northwestern provinces like Kaliningrad and Karelia he did almost as well.

The election commission stated that some 67 percent of voters had cast ballots, slightly below the turnout in the nation's first post-Soviet presidential election in 1996.

That eased one of the Kremlin's secondary concerns: that unanimous predictions of Mr. Putin's victory would depress turnout below the legally binding level of 50 percent.

Had turnout fallen below that floor, a new election would have been required in four months. Since it did not, Mr. Putin will be sworn in for a full four-year term as president in May.