Russia's Parliamentary Elections - a Referendum on Putin

President Putin pictured, hand on heart, in free weekly government newspaper "Moscow Centre" under a headline reading "Time for Real Business"


Saturday December 1st 2007 Moscow

Snow-bound Moscow frosty and quiet on eve of parliamentary elections the Kremlin has cast as a referendum on President Vladimir Putin’s rule…

The Russian capital is all snow-dusted frosty calm and quiet tonight on the eve of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections.

If you didn’t listen to the radio, watch television or read newspapers here you could be forgiven for thinking that tomorrow was nothing more than a normal Sunday, with half population of Moscow apparently gone to their dachas (weekend cottages).

Under Russian electoral rules no last minute electioneering is allowed and apart from the red, white and blue striped national flags fluttering from flagpoles on apartment blocks and buildings in the centre of town, alongside those of Moscow’s patron saint, St George against a red background, there’s precious little sign that the country is on the eve of a potentially historic turning point.

The massive and ubiquitous United Russia billboards that had dominated street advertising until recently declaring ‘Putin’s Plan – Russia’s Victory’ were taken down more than a week ago, leaving only isolated posters for the Communists or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist Liberal Democrat Party of Russia.

By this evening even those have gone.

Russia’s last independent radio station, Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) just reported (10pm Moscow time) on the official ‘den politicheskoi tishini’ – day of political silence - when all campaigning is forbidden before tomorrow’s elections. The news then went straight into a report about the mass arrests across Russia of opposition activists who intended to act as electoral observers tomorrow.

Since opposition coalition The Other Russia failed to be officially registered as a party for the election – it could not get the necessary 50,000 signatures in time – its activists, as group leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov told me last night, have been signing up to work alongside opposition parties that include the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Communists who are on the ballot.

Their aim is to guard against anticipated widespread vote rigging that they fear the Kremlin is engaged in to boost the vote for President Putin’s power vehicle, United Russia.

The arrests across the country last night and today – in Samara, Tula, Irkutsk and other cities - will have come as no surprise.

Talking by phone to Kasparov last night here in Moscow, he said that an Interior Ministry order had gone out warning police in the provinces that “under SPS disguise extremists will try to squeeze into polling stations” on Sunday.

As The Other Russia said in a press release tonight, “it is obvious to us that the scale of falsifications in the forthcoming elections will be unprecedented,” calling into question the legitimacy of the future State Duma.

It all chimes with what other Russian observers have been saying about these elections: that given that “the end of the political cycle in Russia is always dangerous” elections that are seen by the current power elite as a litmus test of their ability to hang onto power after Putin steps down as president next March – as is he is constitutionally bound to – are inevitably a time for desperate measures.

The Kremlin and its chosen electoral vector, United Russia, are desperate to get a huge turnout and massive landslide tomorrow. Only with at least 66% of the seats in the Duma will United Russia be able to push ahead its next apparent project: changing the constitution to either allow Putin a third term, or appointing him to a new role as national leader and weakening the practically autocratic powers that are vested in the presidency now.

A change as massive as that would be problematic in any country.

In one with Russia’s turbulent political history that sort of change could be dangerous.

As one political observer told me this afternoon in a reference to President Boris Yeltsin’s violent stand off with an unruly parliament that ended with tanks shelling the Moscow White House: “The last time something similar happened was in 1993 – and we all know how that ended.”

Today’s winter quietude could be the calm before the storm.

More tomorrow, when I’ll post a link to the London Sunday Telegraph story on which I was working the past few days.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=TV3YLHNROI4HLQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/02/wrussia102.xml