Tens of thousands of people have demonstrated to express their anger at alleged rigging in Russia’s parliamentary elections, as a human rights group set up by the Russian president has recommended that a snap election be held. Opposition activists staged their second set of nationwide rallies on Saturday to protest against what they say were rigged elections on December 4.
Is this the start of the downfall of the Putin regime?
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Every Wednesday evening, an artsy Moscow café bursts with middle-aged women who look like accountants or mid-level managers. At least that is what they would do if they were not spending all their time working to get their husbands out of prison.
Wednesday is the night that Rus Sidyashchaya (Russia Behind Bars) meets. The organisation was founded by Olga Romanova, a journalist-turned-prisoners’ rights activist. “I’ve told the men,” another of the group’s leaders says to me, “If you don’t make a monument to Romanova out of solid gold, then you are worthless.”
Romanova’s husband, Alexei Kozlov, was jailed in 2008 and sentenced the following year to eight years in prison for fraud. Romanova tried everything to get him out. The usual route, bribery, did not work, so she launched her own investigation, turning up evidence that her husband’s conviction was based on forged documents. She got the case to the Russian supreme court, which overturned Kozlov’s sentence twice (the first time did not work), and, a few months ago, she travelled to a distant prison colony to pick up her husband. The video of their reunion went viral in Russia.
Romanova, 45, heavy-set and with dyed-red hair, walks over to a bespectacled woman. “What are you here for?” she asks. The woman’s answer is inaudible. “159! Fraud!” Romanova booms. “We are all here because of Article 159. Come join in!”
Human rights activists estimate that 15 per cent of Russian inmates are entrepreneurs jailed as a result of business disputes. Article 159 is the most common vehicle, and most cases are initiated by a partner seeking to take over another’s shares in a business. Then it is a matter of forging documents and bribing and pressuring judges. In the bespectacled woman’s case, though, it’s a Moscow apartment that was at stake: Yelena says her husband was recently sentenced to four years in prison on charges stemming from the purchase of the couple’s property. “The investigator told me he’d drop the charges if we just signed the apartment over,” she says.
A group forms in the centre of the room. Their relatives are in jail under Article 228: drugs. At first glance this seems a different story, but the narrative is chillingly similar: forged documents, disregard for judicial procedure. A woman tells of her son, sentenced to six years for possession of 13g of hashish with intent to distribute. She says she has found dozens of other families whose trials mirrored her son’s: the same buyer, the same two witnesses and identical wording in the verdict. The people gathered around her nod vigorously. The alleged crimes may be different, but a single truth unites these people: once your loved one is snatched by the Russian criminal-justice system, you have little hope.
A striking blonde in her mid-thirties is lecturing a slight, pale woman. “Don’t tell him he’ll get out soon,” she says. “Don’t tell him it will be all right, because it probably won’t be.” The younger woman nods, tears in her eyes.
Her 22-year-old boyfriend, a Russian-nationalist activist, is facing two years’ imprisonment for throwing water in a prosecutor’s face following the trial of two of his friends.“I feel guilty,” Ira, the younger woman, says, “because some days I don’t think about him at all.”
“Ha!” the blonde woman will have none of this. “I used to feel guilty. For a year and a half, I couldn’t eat, because what did he have to eat in prison? I got anorexic. What use am I to my three kids, or to him, if I’m starving myself to death? Be human. In the end, either you’ll wait for him, or you won’t.”
The blonde’s name is Yulia Roshchina, and her husband’s story is the classic business-partner-against-business-partner. The 36-year-old importer was arrested three years ago and sentenced to 18 years in maximum security prison for contraband and money laundering. An appeal court later knocked 10 years off his sentence, ruling the money-laundering charges unfounded. On December 7, the same day as this meeting, President Dmitry Medvedev signed penal-code reform into law that decriminalised what used to be called contraband. “I was driving and I heard on the radio that he signed this, and I cried,” Roshchina tells me.
“And I thought, ‘Why am I crying? It’s just a piece of paper.’” There is no guarantee that her husband will now be released.
“There are so many of us,” Roshchina continues. “A million people behind bars in Russia, and at least 700,000 of them are innocent – I’m judging by all the people my husband has shared cells with. That’s a revolution!”
A revolution is brewing just outside the door as we talk. Over the first two days of protests more than 500 people have been jailed – with all sorts of procedural and legal violations. Any way you look at it, the new Russian revolution will turn on those who are behind bars.
There has been a lot of discussion about the flawed elections in Russia. Guido reckons their democracy can’t be that bad if they will elect a Playboy playmate has been elected as one of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia MPs in the Duma. Guido has no idea what her manifesto was but he’d vote for Maria Kozhevnikova, 27.
She was a member of the youth wing of Putin’s political party United Russia, which is currently facing allegations of vote-rigging after this month winning a narrow overall majority in parliament. There have been suggestions that she is romantically linked to Putin. C’mon he’s no Berlusconi… is he?
MOSCOW — When Lyubov Volkova, 63, woke up on Sunday, it was a few moments before she remembered what had happened.
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On Sunday she awoke to the reality that Vladimir V. Putin had, in effect, appointed himself president, and she knew that the aspirations of the Mikhail S. Gorbachev era had been snuffed out.
She compared it to a science fiction story by Ray Bradbury in which the death of a butterfly sets off a cascade of events that change history. At some point in their 20-year path, she said, Russians lost interest in democratic reform.
“Sometime — maybe not 20 years ago, but maybe 17 years ago — the butterfly was crushed, and the consciousness of the Russian citizens traveled along a different path,” Ms. Volkova said. “Something happened, maybe in 1994, or maybe in 1996. Different people began to grow up here. They will accept anything.”
Russia’s liberals, a small but influential slice of the population, have faced lacerating truths this month.
Mr. Putin, who dominates politics here, is popular with members of the overall public in Russia, who have seen steady gains in their living standards over the last decade. And though he is an unapologetic advocate of centralized power, his government has offered political vehicles for the educated elites who disagree. Chief among these vehicles was Mr. Medvedev, Mr. Putin’s successor as president, who as a candidate promised to fight “legal nihilism” and “limitless corruption.” Another was Right Cause, a hastily created opposition party whose leader vowed to introduce genuine competition to Parliament.
Now those vehicles appear hollow. On Saturday, Mr. Putin announced that he and Mr. Medvedev had agreed “several years ago” that the younger man would cede the presidency to him in 2012, suggesting that Mr. Medvedev had served as merely a convenient placeholder all along. Two weeks ago, the leader of Right Cause quit in a scandal, complaining of oppressive Kremlin control. The political fog has cleared to reveal certainties: Mr. Putin never had any intention of leaving power, and he has maneuvered so that he can remain until 2024.
Liberal-minded Muscovites poured out their despair on the Internet on Sunday, passing around a portrait of Mr. Putin superimposed on Leonid Brezhnev, whose 18-year rule became known as the “era of stagnation.” The political scientist Sergei M. Markedonov said the news put him in mind of Charles Talleyrand’s description of Napoleon’s army as it crossed into Russia, toward a catastrophic defeat.
“ ‘The beginning of the end’ — you cannot think of a better diagnosis,” he wrote in a posting on his Facebook page. “Putin as president — that is the beginning of the end. I don’t give a damn who of them is on top, and who is on the bottom. But the institutionalization of Putin as president — that is total stagnation. It is the victory of a corrupt oligarchy. It is the failure of modernization.”
Others turned their anger on Mr. Medvedev, who, during his three and a half years in office, has put forward an ambitious modernization agenda and critiqued some of his predecessor’s policies.
“Doesn’t he wish to explain to his fellow citizens, those who trusted him to be the guarantor of their rights and freedoms, to be their commander in chief, why he suddenly decided to voluntarily leave his post?” wrote Vladimir Varfolomeyev, a journalist for the radio station Ekho Moskvy, on his blog.
“At the convention he only spoke in generalities about his readiness to engage in ‘the practical work of the government’ and about a ‘party’ career,” Mr. Varfolomeyev wrote. “This will not be enough. At this point it looks like an extremely disrespectful attitude to the citizens of Russia.”
As for Ms. Volkova, she listened to the broadcast of Saturday’s party convention alone in her apartment, which she said was too modest to show to a reporter.
Senior Russian government figures have rebelled against a deal between President Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, to switch jobs next year.
The rebellion indicates that the handover arrangement will not be as smooth as the two leaders had anticipated.
After Saturday’s announcement that Mr Medvedev would take over as prime minister, while backing Mr Putin to return to the presidency in March 2012 elections, Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, announced during a meeting in Washington that he would “definitely refuse” to work with Mr Medvedev in the cabinet.
“I don’t see myself in the new government. Nobody has offered me a position, but I think that the disagreements I have will not allow me to be a part of the new government,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings.
