MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia woke up to a new political landscape after liberal parties were all but shut out of the nation's parliament for the first time in the post-Soviet era.

"The democrats no longer exist," said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a respected researcher who is a specialist on Russia's political system.

"The democratic movement has been enfeebled, decapitated, destroyed," she said.

With 91 percent of Sunday's vote counted, both of the nation's top liberal parties, Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, failed to scrape by the crucial five-percent barrier needed to win seats by proportional representation in the State Duma.

The results meant that liberal parties would not be a significant presence in Russia's law-making body for the first time since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Half of the Duma's 450 seats are decided by proportional voting and half in single-mandate constituencies.

Thus even if SPS and Yabloko manage to pick up a few single-mandate seats, their voices will be drowned out in the new parliament, where pro-Kremlin parties may get a two-thirds majority.

And their priorities -- Western-style reform of the economy, civil liberties, an independent press and criticism of the war in Chechnya (news - web sites) -- will melt away from parliamentary debate.

"A Duma without Yabloko and SPS is an absolute catastrophe," said Sergey Grigoriants of the Glasnost Foundation.

"Even though they were few in number, the Yabloko and SPS deputies made themselves heard," he said.

"Those who defend people's choice, independent press, independent courts, a separation of powers, who have always spoken out for cooperation with Europe... they will be a minority in the State Duma," said Boris Nemtsov, an SPS leader.

"The majority of the State Duma will be those who speak out for a police state, for limiting civil rights, for limiting independent courts... for a confrontation with the West," he said.

Although similar, SPS and Yabloko have been unable to forge a formal alliance despite years of negotiations as its leaders bickered among themselves.

"There are 10 million people in Russia who share the values of the liberal right but will not have representatives in the Duma," said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst.

"The leaders of the liberal parties carry the full responsibility" for this, he said.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that SPS was made up of pro-business economic reformers from the administration of Boris Yeltsin, who were responsible for Russia's post-Soviet economic reforms, including the shadowy privatizations.

Yabloko's leader Grigory Yavlinksy, twice a presidential candidate, distanced himself from the privatizations, which created a handful of super-rich oligarchs while most Russians toiled in poverty. Yabloko was also the only party to come out against the second war in Chechnya in 1999.

SPS leaders were set to meet Monday to consider the resignation of leaders Boris Nemtsov, Irina Khakamada and Anatoly Chubays, Nemtsov told the Interfax news agency late Monday.

The three leaders, as well as all SPS candidates in Sunday's parliamentary elections, had asked to resign even before the poll in the event that their party failed to scrape past the five percent barrier, Nemtsov said.

"Each of us, long before the poll, wrote in our (candidate's) statements that we would resign if our party did not make it past the five percent barrier in the parliamentary elections," he said.

Analysts' forecasts for the two parties and others like them were bleak. "The experience of post-Soviet Russia shows that parties can't survive outside parliament," said Kryshtanovskaya: "No party has survived four years outside the Duma. They die."

The Kremlin was even more frank. "A new political era is beginning," said Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration responsible for overseeing elections: "Parties who did not make it into the Duma should take it calmly, and understand that their historic mission is finished." CAPTION

Russians read newspapers as they wait for a train at a railway station in Moscow. International observers said Russia's parliamentary elections failed to meet many democratic criteria and questioned Moscow's commitment to Western standards of democracy.