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.''