Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Apart from this massive fraud committed during the elections, there was also the fraud committed before them. Parties outside the “official opposition,” such as, for instance, Drugaya Rossiya (the Other Russia—a coalition headed by former chess champion Garry Kasparov), could not participate. According to Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst with the Moscow-based Mercator research group, “they are on the periphery, marginalized. . . . They have no access to the media. They are not allowed to register as candidates or even as parties, as players in the electoral process. They exist outside the system that is called politics.”^[26]

Putin’s goal, to create two pro-Kremlin parties and in this way to maintain a pluralistic political façade, began to run the risk of being drowned in the “electoral successes” of United Russia, which—helped by the careerism of the regional leaders, the manipulated media, excessive financial funding, and, last but not least, massive, nationwide, organized fraud—might become “the only show in town.” United Russia was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, undermining the very democratic façade the leadership had been so carefully trying to construct over the years. That the Kremlin was really worried about the turn of events became clear after the regional elections, which took place on March 14, 2010. Despite widespread fraud,^[27] this time United Russia did not repeat its success. It lost about 20 percentage points across the board. In Sverdlovsk the party got only 39 percent, and Irkutsk elected a Communist mayor with over 62 percent. One would have expected grim faces in the Kremlin, but the opposite was the case. “A happy defeat for the Kremlin,” wrote Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy.^[28] According to another Western observer it was a “Victory in defeat.”^[29] The fact that the three “opposition parties” together had gotten more votes than United Russia seemed to be extremely good news for the Kremlin: the democratic façade had been saved without in any way jeopardizing United Russia’s power monopoly. Due to the fact that the biggest party gets extra seats in the regional legislatures, “loser” United Russia could quietly continue to rule the regions in tandem with the Kremlin-appointed governors.

Mikhail Prokhorov’s Revolt against

the Kremlin “Puppeteers”