Anti-Putin movement marks end of an era

Russia’s street protest movement, which has shaken not only the Kremlin’s autocrats but global financial markets, is the largest for two decades, and is the end of an era.

The pro-capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s has turned into disenchantment, not just with the sham democracy which voters experienced earlier this month, but with the corruption of a mafia-style capitalism.

The demands for a fair election are part of a much bigger movement of discontent which is sweeping Russia under conditions of the global economic crisis.

On Saturday, up to a 100,000 Russians from Vladivostok in the east, to Moscow and St Petersburg, right through to central London, demonstrated against the rigged parliamentary elections.

A map on Spandex, Russia’s largest search engine, showed the protests scheduled for Saturday in around 100 cities around the country, with links to details for each event on a Russian social networking site.

Placards denounced "False elections, false laws, false authorities” and protesters shouted “rogues and thieves give us back our elections”, and called for a “Russia without Putin”. Up to 50,000 came to a rally held on an island in Moscow.

Their five-point demands are:

• Freedom for political prisoners
• Annulment of the election results
• The resignation of Vladimir Churov, head of the election commission, and an official investigation of vote fraud
• Registration of the opposition parties and new democratic legislation on parties and elections
• New democratic and open elections.

The demonstrators defied pre-emptive strikes by the regime, which saw the arrest last week of opposition leaders like blogger Alexei Navalny, Solidarnost leader Ilya Nashin, Eduard Limonov of the unregistered Other Russia party and Oleg Orlov of the Memorial human rights group. In Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, all the protest leaders were arrested, but the protests went ahead nonetheless.

Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by Putin’s “cyber-warriors” also focused on preventing Russia’s 51 million internet users from accessing anti-regime media websites.

President Medvedev has announced an inquiry into voting procedures on his Facebook page, while rejecting a re-run of the election, the central demand of the protests. He was met with an immediate and often mocking response by people saying they did not believe him.

The protests are the largest since the turmoil in August 1990 when thousands took to the streets of Moscow to thwart a putsch aimed at removing the then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since replacing Boris Yeltsin, ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin has reversed the democratic gains promoted by Gorbachev to enable an oligarchy to establish capitalism in Russia. When Putin was barred from standing for election for a third term in 2008, he was appointed as prime minister. He insists he will run for president again in March.

From a massive majority in earlier elections, support for Putin and his United Russia party has fallen to an all-time low, especially as the global economy has swung into a downturn. On Friday, shares in Russian companies saw massive drops as investors fear continuing political instability, as well as lower demands for oil.

One school of thought claims the Russian democratic movement is funded and inspired from Washington, pointing to financial backing from the National Endowment for Democracy for bloggers like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov’s People’s Freedom Party and the election watchdog Golos.

But to denounce those angry with the Russian political system as pawns of the West is ludicrous and insulting. As one demonstrator said: “I don't think any citizen of the country can say he is very happy with anything. We don't have an independent judiciary, there is no freedom of expression – all this combined creates a situation where people are forced to protest.”

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Russians revolt against fraud elections

The dramatic slump in United Russia’s share of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections shows that voters defied a massive campaign of intimidation aimed at bolstering support for the ruling party.

President Medvedev and prime minister Putin’s party saw its share fall from around 64% to just under half after a campaign in which the Kremlin tried to bully the electorate.

In the run-up to the election, Russia experienced a ferocious crackdown by the authorities to muzzle the media, control the Internet and arrest opposition politicians. On polling day, eyewitnesses talked of ballot boxes being stuffed while “voters” were bussed around polling stations to cast multiple ballots for United Russia.

Videos posted to YouTube showed election workers opening ballot boxes with pre-marked ballots for United Russia. One poll worker told NK TV that ballot boxes were filled with checked-off ballots while she and others were in a meeting. At one polling station pens with disappearing ink were discovered, a video reported.

Members of the right wing youth group, Nashi, were brought in to Moscow as key squares were blocked off by police. Triumph Square – a popular place for oppositionists – has been fenced off since 2010. A Twitter user (@agoodtreaty) spotted a mocking sign on the fence surrounding the square saying: “Dear Muscovites! This fence has been erected in the event of popular unrest due to massively fraudulent elections. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Countless blatant acts of repression – varying from brutal to comical – included the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front and Eduard Limonov, leader of the opposition The Other Russia movement. Limonov supporters were also detained while Udaltsov was hustled into an unmarked car by unidentified men and then sentenced to five days’ arrest by a district court for “disobedience”.

Campaign ads by opposition parties were banned on state television by order of the Central Elections Commission. Intimidation and censorship by federal and local authorities included attacks on journalists, with a Moscow Times reporter ejected from a polling station in Oktyabrsky.

The ruling United Russia party was clearly behind denial of service attacks on a host of independent, business and liberal websites and media including Live Journal, a popular blogging platform, Ekho Mosvky, the New Times, the independent election monitor Golos, Bolshoi Gorod, Kommersant and the Slon.ru business news portal. Election commission officials confiscated the media accreditation of Radio Liberty reporters.

The authorities’ clampdown was easier in rural areas, where fewer people have internet connections. But Putin’s brutal state, which has overseen massive corruption and scores of journalists beaten and murdered in recent years, has not succeeded in preventing Russians – 51 million of whom have access to the Internet - from denouncing electoral manipulation.

Attempts to subvert the electoral process – shown on YouTube and social media - have increased voter scepticism about what one Muscovite derided as a “jackass democracy”.

Editor Grigory Okhotin resigned from an offshoot of the Ria Novosti news agency , after receiving an internal email asking employees “not to post any article hostile to Putin and United Russia on the site” during the week before the elections.

Ekho Moskvy’s editor-in-chief wrote on Twitter that the cyber attacks were an attempt to stop evidence of election violations from leaking out. The radio station fought back with a screenshot of its site full of Bad Gateway messages, which it jokingly called the “new site design”, on its Facebook page.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the restoration of capitalism, Russia is run by oligarchs and a brutal, one-party state. Yesterday’s elections show a rising tide of anger against the regime throughout the country. Replacing the Putin’s “jackass democracy” with a Russia under the control of its people with true economic and democratic rights is surely the order of the day.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Useful links

http://journalists-in-russia.org/

http://www.rightsinrussia.info/

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/Pashentsev.html

Tolstoy still an 'enemy of the state'

You would think that the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy, widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists, would be celebrated in the country of his birth. You would be wrong, however. He is actually considered an embarrassment. That’s how bad things are in Russia today.

When Dmitry Medvedev came to power as president in 2008, he was painted as a less authoritarian leader than his predecessor Vladimir Putin who is now prime minister. But increasingly it is clear that on his watch, state-sponsored terrorism against those who challenge government appointees and the rule of the super-rich is continuing with a vengeance.

We are not talking only about contract killings against journalists and human rights activists and the continuing military occupation of Chechnya, but the atmosphere of repression against anyone considered “unpatriotic”. The tyranny of the state goes hand in hand with the unfettered influence of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church and a largely corrupt legal system.

Writers and film-makers who depict the country and its history from an anything others than a glorifying point of view are frowned upon. A recent movie – a new feature film by Aleksander Buravsky about the famous 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II – was denounced because it showed Stalin’s secret police tracking down a dissident policewoman while the city starved.

As for Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he is persona non grata in official circles. Tolstoy, whose last years are depicted in the Oscar-nominated The Last Station starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, died 100 years ago. His centenary is being marked around the world but not officially in Russia.

This is because Tolstoy was excommunicated by the orthodox church in 1901 due to his anti-state views. He was an aristocratic Christian anarchist who championed the poor peasantry. He was opposed to war and believed in non-violent resistance. Tolstoy defied the Tsarist state in circulating anarchist writings in the later years of his life.

The Russian church still runs a vendetta against him in a ferocious defence of its terrain. Last September, a court in the southern Russian district of Rostov, quoted Tolstoy’s denunciation of the church as “extremist material” in a case against a group of Jehovah’s witnesses. Clearly Tolstoy still remains an enemy of the state and church.

Those who try to expose the police and the security services risk being silenced by thugs. When a detective called Major Alexei Dymovsky went public on YouTube to denounced police corruption in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, he was sacked and jailed. A human rights campaigner who tried to defend him was attacked brutally.

British international human rights lawyer Bill Bowring maintains that the legal system in Russia is subservient to those at the top of the political tree. A recent report commissioned by a body overseen by Medvedev himself revealed that cases decided in accordance with the law, but not in the interests of officials, will be overturned on appeal and returned for further consideration. Judges whose decisions are overturned too frequently are soon dismissed.

Convictions predominate and there is a fear of acquitting, according to the report. The rate of acquittal in non-jury cases is 1%. The report says that “the most important factor in the work of the judges is fear and dependence on the chairman of the court”. A former Deputy chair of the Constitutional Court, Tamara Morshchakova, has pointed out that if a judge seeks to oppose other state powers, she is simply “eaten up”.

Tolstoy’s opposition to such a judiciary and such a state is as relevant today as it was in the years running up to the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. He could have been writing about 2010 when he remarked that “there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions”.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary