On Monday, voting closed in the Russian opposition’s online election. 170,000 had signed up for the process, but only 98,000 actually took the trouble to document their identity. Of the registered voters, only 82,000 actually went to the polls to cast their votes.
The spinning began immediately.
Once again, the craven denizens of Russia have shown that they are by far the greatest threat to the survival of their country. They make Hitler look like Peter I.
I could have said this was another election stolen from the people, but I won’t. The people have stolen this election from themselves. Such a turnout is a disgrace and an incredible help to fraudsters.
So wrote Russian blogger Viktor Troinov of the recent spate of local elections held in Putin’s Russia.
Only one in twenty eligible voters went to the polls to support Yevgenia Chirikova’s bid for Mayor of Khimiki, despite a massive avalanche of publicity from the glitterati of the Russian opposition. Nationwide, two thirds or more of the electorate stayed home and ignored elections which the opposition had claimed were their new focus. United Russia brutally crushed the opposition virtually everywhere, winning massive landslides in all regional and gubernatorial polls.
In the time of Stalin, Russians turned a blind eye or informed on their neighbors. They did not resist, they did not fight for their country’s future. The result was that the USSR collapsed into rubble. And now Russians have learned nothing, and they repeat the same ghastly error.
Once again, the leadership of the opposition has been proved totally fraudulent. Yet another promise has been broken. First we were told they would force new Duma elections. It did not happen. Then they would force Putin into a runoff. Nope. Then they would vastly increase their street demonstrations. They did the opposite. And now, when they claimed that they would make up for all that failure by succeeding at the local level, once again they have utterly collapsed. And through it all, there is not the slightest hint of introspection, of a change in leadership, of reform.
It is the beginning of the end for Russia. As Leonid Bershidsky has written: “The October 14 polls sent an unmistakable message: Electoral democracy as we know it is dying a slow, painful death under President Vladimir Putin.” And make no mistake: It is the people of Russia who are killing it, along with their children’s hope for a better, different life from the disastrous failure of the USSR.
Russia’s opposition movement turned to violence on Sunday, after it was embarrassed by yet another puny turnout. It bloodied police officers and pro-Kremlin journalists and it vandalized property. It became a mob, and a small one at that. Once again, Russia sunk to a new low. Its only accomplishment was that finally it forced the Kremlin to escalate the violence used against it, but that came at the cost of losing its own credibility and being led by a throng of neo-Nazis (Udaltsov), crypto-fascists (Navalny), Communists and hopelessly confused, leaderless, agendaless followers.
Yevgenia Khvoshchinskaya, a 30-year-old education specialist who was carrying a poster referencing Russia’s Decembrist revolutionaries of the 19th century, told the New York Times: “I don’t know why I came. The last protests did not achieve anything. There is no program. The people are tired.”
Photos after the jump.
Georgy Bovt, writing in the Moscow Times, explains how the Kremlin has utterly obliterated the last vestiges of democracy in Russia and rendered the country a nation of helpless, bleating sheep, just as in Soviet times. Welcome back to the USSR!
In the wake of protests in December and February, the authorities made concessions to the opposition by announcing a host of political reforms before the March presidential election. The law to ease the registration of new political parties, intended to liberalize the political process, was passed quickly. But every other amendment proposed by the opposition was ignored, including the two most important: the ability for parties to form coalitions prior to elections and the demand to lower the barrier for parties to gain seats in the State Duma. At present, that barrier stands at 5 percent, and voters who support the smaller parties risk not only having no representation in parliament, but also seeing their votes effectively awarded to the winning party. The result will be a major “Balkanization” process in which dozens of new parties are formed but are rendered useless.
Then there is the bill to return direct gubernatorial elections.
Instead of being a force to galvanize a new round of opposition enthusiasm, the efforts to protest the recent mayoral election in Astrakhan have served only to emphasize the weakness and indeed dissolution being experienced by the opposition forces.
The Just Russia party promised that every single one of its deputies in Moscow would travel to Astrakhan to rally in support of Oleg Shein, their defeated candidate for Astrakhan mayor who claims fraud denied him the office. But in the event, less than a third of the deputies (Russian-language link) actually made the trip.
Just Russia, of course, is hardly a focal point of the opposition. Though it had a place on the ballot last December, none of the opposition leaders endorsed it much less participated in its operations, and it has always been thought of as a Kremlin patsy.
The focus on Astrakhan resulted in major reporting in the Washington Post and the New York Times about the city and its political leanings. But what the reporters found when they looked was disheartening: Little access to the Internet, and even less interest in the criticism of Putin to be found there. The people of Astrakhan simply don’t care about democracy or about Shein’s fate, and the arrival of the glitterati from Moscow (like Aleksei Navalny and Ksenia Sobchak) came with a resounding thud.
An absurdly small number of people turned out for the Moscow-led protest demonstrations, and many of them had been brought in from outside the city — a practice that was condemned by the opposition leaders when Putin tried it in Moscow. Putin scoffed at the protests and defied them. Larger demonstrations were organized in support of the status quo. Soon, local elections officials were turning the tables and accusing Shein himself of fraud.
So all the protests in Astrakhan managed to accomplish was to remind the world how confused, disorganized and isolated the opposition movement is now. When the opposition leaders say that it doesn’t matter that protest activity has dissolved in Moscow because they are seeking real political power in the remote regions, their claims ring hollow. There is no groundswell of support in the regions for opposition reform, the regions are where Putin is strongest.
According to Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Udaltsov, the first week in May 2012 is going to be one of the most earth-shaking weeks in all of Russian history.
If they are right, on May 6, the day before Putin is inaugurated, we will see a “March of Millions” in which several million people will throng the streets across Russia to protest election fraud by the Kremlin. This despite a new poll that shows over 90% of respondents believe the demonstration sizes won’t increase from the past, where they maxed out at 100,000 or so.
And then on May 7, Inauguration Day, Putin will do the next-best thing to resigning: He will pardon and release both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and maybe some other “political prisoners” as well.
Are these the bold predictions of heroic warriors who have Putin right where they want him? Or are they the insane ravings of utterly failed pretenders tilting and windmills, and about to lose every last vestige of credibility?
Either way, the first week in May is certainly shaping up to be an exciting one.
An interesting new poll from Levada (Russian-language link) reports that 63% of Russian citizens trust the news they hear on Kremlin-controlled broadcast television, while just 28% distrust it.
That figure, 63%, is exactly the share of the vote gathered by Vladimir Putin in the 2012 presidential elections.
Just 55% of Russians ever use the Internet, and only 43% of Russians trust the news they get from the Internet, according to Levada. An even smaller number than that, a puny 24%, actually use the Internet to get the news.
So one could reasonably suggest that the more Russians use the Internet, the less they trust their government and the less likely they are to vote for Putin. Little wonder, then, that Putin expresses so much animosity and suspicion for the Internet, saying he never uses it himself and thinks it mostly pornography.
One can also suggest plausibly that of the 55% of Russians who ever use the Internet, many use it very rarely due to its expense and the challenges of Russian technology. One can also suppose that a disproportionate number of Russians using the Internet to get the news, and for other political purposes, are located in the more wealthy areas of the country, particularly Moscow. That would explain why opposition politicians were able to generate much bigger crowds in Moscow than anyplace else.
These statistics show the increasing divide between wealthy Moscow and the impoverished remainder of Russia. They imply that nothing will really change in Russia until rich Muscovites decide to share their wealth with the nation. Will they be willing to do so, or will class warfare again rise in Russia just as it did in pre-Soviet times, leading to radical upheaval and national collapse?
Remember when the Russian opposition was telling you that their inability to get crowds on the streets in cities outside Moscow didn’t matter, because the capital city was where power changed hands and it was fine to focus on Moscow?
That was then.
Now, the Russian opposition is telling you that Moscow doesn’t matter at all, because they can win mayoral races in obscure minor cities like Yaroslavl, in the frozen north above Moscow, and thereby seize power from Putin. How exactly this will happen when (a) they’ve never yet won even one such race and (b) mayors have no power whatsoever is not something the opposition cares to discuss.
The opposition also apparently thinks it can bring down Putin by convincing the world not to buy Pringles, Pampers and Tide from Procter & Gamble. But the opposition has no network of relationships with forces outside Russia which could generate international support for such an effort, and these days they can’t even get 1,000 people on the street for a protest demonstration so it hardly likely they can dent P&G’s revenues inside Russia. Even if they could, the point of the boycott is to punish NTV for its brutal documentary smearing their protest efforts, and being controlled by the Kremlin NTV can easily replace such revenues from a myriad of sources.
It seems like was only weeks ago that he opposition was talking about forcing a new Duma election, pressing Putin into a runoff election, and bringing hundreds of thousands of supporters onto Moscow’s streets.
That’s because it was only weeks ago.
Now, they are talking about mayors and soap.
Vera Kichanova
Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported last week that 71 of 1,560 seats on Moscow’s district councils went to independent candidates, a small fraction of whom were members of the opposition protest movement. If you are counting, that’s 4.5% of the total. There are 125 of the councils spread across Moscow with an average of a dozen members each, and the opposition didn’t even come close to placing one member on each of them. The net result is that there is one “independent” vote on about half the total councils in Moscow, one vote out of twelve.
Both papers chose to focus on Vera Kichanova, who is just 20 years old, studies journalism, and is one of the opposition members. She tweets and blogs on ZheZhe. She professes to be a libertarian and a supporter of bringing Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” to Russia. Her ZheZhe blog refers to herself as: “Radical, liberal, fanatical, criminal.” In English, yet.
It is all much ado about nothing. Not only is the size of the independent contingent microscopic and irrelevant, as the WSJ explained the councils have no power:
The 1,560 deputies elected in Moscow on Sunday serve one level below the city legislature, in the capital’s neighborhoods, and have little formal mandate beyond organizing sport and social activity. They can challenge, but not block, rulings by the district’s appointed executive bosses, who control land use, construction tenders and spending, and are often criticized as mini-autocrats, answerable to only to the mayor.
The NYT added: “Most major decisions in Moscow are made by unelected bureaucrats at agencies beholden to the city’s unelected mayor. The district councils, which are made up of elected volunteers, barely have enough authority to decide on the location of a park bench or the planting of a tree.”
Given this, one has to wonder why this story is worth writing about.
The answer is clear: Because it’s all that’s left. The street protests led by Aleksei Navalny have fizzled just as we said they would, and have achieved nothing. But the MSM is desperate to keep its pulse-pounding story of “revolution” in Russia alive by any means possible.
Does Vera Kichanova really have the energy and dedication necessary to spend decades toiling in thankless obscurity in order to teach Russians some civil lessons in the vague hope that one day some of them may do her one better? And if she does, can Russia preserve itself long enough for that to make any difference? If it could, will someone like her, who used to work for Voice of America, be allowed to take and hold any kind of real power, any more than was Mikhail Khodorkovsky?
Well, game over.
First Aleksei Navalny told us he would force Putin to hold a new round of parliamentary elections.
It did not happen.
Then he forgot about promise #1, and replaced it with a promise that his “meetings” would grow dramatically in size, first to 200,000 and then to one million.
That did not happen either. To the contrary, the turnout got smaller.
The he forgot about promise #2, and replaced it with a promise that Putin would be forced into a humiliating runoff election in his bid to return as president.
Once again, no such thing occurred. To the contrary, Putin won in a landslide.
Now, there won’t be another election in Russia for five long years. Does anyone in their right mind believe Navalny can sustain his momentum for even five weeks, much less five years? Will anyone in their right mind pay any heed to any more of his ludicrous lies?
They will not.
