The move came a week after the Federation nominated chess grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, backed by opposition leader and longtime chess rival Garry Kasparov, as a candidate for the presidency of the World Chess Federation. The incumbent, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is the multi-millionaire president of Russia’s autonomous Republic of Kalmykia. Among other things, Ilyumzhinov is famous for declaring an “economic dictatorship” and claiming to have been visited by aliens.

What exactly the stakes are in this unlikely scandal is the topic explored in this column written for Grani.ru by Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.

The column is also available in Spanish.

Ilyumzhinov’s Game – For the Benefit of the Elites
By Stanislav Belkovsky
May 24, 2010
Grani.ru

Another striking move was made the other day in the battle for the presidency of the World Chess Federation [FIDE]. By order of Arkady Dvorkovich, an aide to the president of the Russian Federation and chairman of the Supervisory Council of the Russian Chess Federation (RCF), several men in black seized the legendary Central Chess Club on Gogolevsky Bulvar and sealed off the office of RCF Chairman Alexander Bakh and, of course, the accounting office. Such is the way that all professionals and fans that support the candidacy of 12th World Champion Anatoly Karpov for the post as the head of FIDE were given a clear signal: you can meddle about, bustle around, do whatever you want – but we (that is, Dvorkovich & Co.) will never, under any circumstances, ever give you FIDE.

What happened was unsurprising. It fits entirely into the theory and practice of contemporary Russian monetocracy (monetary power is absolute). What’s surprising in this story is something else: that the progressive community of the Russian Federation began, for some reason, to sob like a whale over the “modernizing liberal” Arkady Dvorkovich, and became terribly worried about the possibility that the presidential aide could lose his untarnished reputation. Which, obviously, is no less of a national asset than all of our chess world champions put together.

In connection with that, I want to call for a vote on the following question: on what basis was it concluded that Dvorkovich, the aide mentioned here, is a “modernizing liberal,” and not a corrupt crook, perfectly typical for the contemporary power machine of the Russian Federation? What has this civil servant done in his career that’s been modern or liberal?

By all appearances, the progressive community once counted Mr. Dvorkovich as one of their own, given his Jewish surname, nice haircut, and expensive cuff links (you would think Igor Sechin had more expensive cuff links). Following these artificially chosen criteria further, we must come to the conclusion that there are only modernizing liberals in the government of the Russian Federation. Everyone else has left. And that means that the progressive community has been victorious, although this is not yet very noticeable.

Yes, a couple of years ago, when the Medvedev Thaw had only just begun, Arkady Dvorkovich made one radically liberal pronouncement: he promised to slash the VAT; and if the bureaucracy was going to resist, then he would swap out the entire bureaucracy for a chess-playing grandmother. But here, out of our impassible taiga, the terrible roar of Finance Minister Kudrin was heard, and not once has any bleating by aides about the VAT been repeated ever since.

In general, in order not to focus on cuff links, let’s analyze an abstract civil servant and figure out what exactly his concrete motivation is.

See here, ladies and gentlemen, respected progressive community. If some civil servant arranges for a personal living room named after him in the building of a commercial bank, and his brother has a job as an officer for public relations or government relations in the country’s most scandalous construction company, then believe me, he has long ago defined the terms of his reputation. He is actually publicly announcing to all interested parties: yes, I am a thief, I am corrupt, and I’m proud of it. Because the laws of the monetocracy are the social morals of the current Russian Federation, I would say. In the Euro-Atlantic world, such a bureaucrat would be thrown out of the civil service and blacklisted. But we aren’t in the Euro-Atlantic world.

Well, and if a civil servant makes such a fuss over such internationally renowned businessmen as Ziyavudin Magomedov (one step away from the Russian Chess Federation presidency) and David Kaplan (FIDE Director for Development and FIDE representative in Moscow) – what does this say? Or do you not know what kind of businessmen these are? No, I do not wish to dwell in detail on the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater, which their company, Inteks, is carrying out in full swing. Or even on the third oil terminal in the port in Primorsk, although parts of that are interesting. Remember all the financial institutions like Diamant, VIP-Bank, etc.? That they were closed for money laundering? And the murder of Andrei Kozlov, the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, remember? It’s true that a certain Alexei Frenkel took the rap for everything. He, apparently, didn’t have the chess know-how to jump off the board in time.

If an abstract civil servant recklessly promotes the interests of such a business, then already nothing frightens him. And there’s no need to cry on his Gucci vest. Save your tears.

Still, something sometimes occurs to progressive society so that at the last moment, fearing a total loss of face and FIDE’s reputation, all these little kids, including Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, stop. And they don’t bring the matter to the finish line. And that means that Anatoly Karpov will then become president of the World Chess Federation.

No. The little kids aren’t going to stop. FIDE’s reputation interests them somewhat, but only to the extent to which they control the Federation and all of its financial commodity flows. And they’ll do anything to keep that control. The seizure of the Central Chess Club – that’s only the beginning.

Next they’ll do everything that has become customary. They’ll convene some kind of emergency session of the RCF that will wipe out any of Karpov’s followers from any and all of their posts. They’ll draw up court rulings that confirm that the candidate for the FIDE presidency from Russia can only be a man with the surname starting with the letter I. Foreign participants of the FIDE Congress who are coming to Khanty-Mansiysk to vote for Karpov will not be granted entry visas. They’ll post a video on the Internet showing Karpov copulating with a rook. Finally, under some pretense, they will expel foreign federations from FIDE that cry out the word “Karpov” too persistently. There are many ways. Now they’ll put out yet another installment – we’ll see the new results. By the way, according to ancient folklore: if former television host Solovyov begins to piss on Karpov on his blog, it means that the installment is underway.

You ask: and why are these kids so hung up in general on this FIDE that they’re ready for the sake of their victory to bring down the entire edifice of world chess? For what? In the conditions of a monetocracy there is but one response: dough. Lots of dough. They have extensive plans to reform and commercialize chess. For example, it has already been announced that the FIDE headquarters will be moved to Moscow after Ilyumzhinov’s reelection. What does this mean? It means that the little kids are going to get money from the government or from banks close to the government (VEB, VTB, whoever else) to construct the headquarters. I think it’ll be around $300 million. They don’t give out more for such a plan, and less would be pointless. How many mouths there are to feed! Then, relying on the unprecedented experience accumulated in the process of reconstructing the Bolshoi Theater, $200 million (of the $300) will be immediately sawed off. More accurately, it has already been sawed off. Now. Today. In advance. And what – as if they’d allow Karpov to come and break up their entire saw-happy joyride?

In general, they have very extensive plans to work on chess. Just recently, David Kaplan (that same FIDE director for development and FIDE representative in Moscow) gave an interview to a popular Moscow newspaper. The person who did the interview – who seems to be a grandmaster – characterized him as a “mathematician.” Since I’m not such a well-known mathematician like Kaplan, I’m afraid of distorting the trajectory of scientific thought here, and am forced to bring in a piece of the interview. Here it is.

Kaplan: This is what my know-how consists of. I thought up the so-called “principle of squares.” I’ll clarify what that is. The worst thing in chess is when you are constantly beaten and you lose all interest in the game. Why, for example, is poker so popular right now? Because any player always has the chance to stand out. This means that chess players need to join into groups where all the players who meet have equal chances amongst themselves. I call such groups squares. And if a million dollars in prize money awaits the winner of the “square,” then young people will give up absolutely everything.

Interviewer: But who is going to give them this million?

Kaplan: I am personally ready to invest 32 million dollars in this venture. And I’ll find more sponsors for a billion. Two large banks have already agreed to allocate money for this project. Moreover, chess players will be attracted by stars of a global proportion. We already have 300 famous people on our list, including, for example, Madonna… The main task is to bring about the players’ interest. It’s important that they spent time every day on the virtual chessboard, playing in their square (there are 64 overall), even if for just a few minutes – a couple of games in a blitz. And in a year they would have played a thousand games overall. There are altogether 200 thousand fans the world over who routinely play on the Internet. And to earn a million while playing with those equal to yourself you’ll find more. So for money, a minimum of 50 million people will come. Let’s think about this further. How much is a portal for that number of visitors worth? A billion dollars! There’s the trick, the stunt, an effective business idea… Believe me, we’re standing on the brink of a chess revolution.

It is entirely believable that a gigantic supercomputer, perfectly and of course absolutely necessary to manage a portal for $1 billion, would be set up in the Skolkovo Innograd [Russia's aspiration to recreate Silicon Valley near Moscow -ed]. And they’ll spend another, say, $500 million from the Russian budget on it. It would be, one could say, entirely logical.

But Ziyavudin Magomedov, who in the case of Ilyumzhinov’s reelection will probably become head of the RCF, has announced that, in the very near future, a series of chess tournaments will be held directly on the borders of conflicted countries (Azerbaijan/Armenia, North Korea/South Korea, etc.). This is a very rich topic. It wouldn’t be bad, either, to send a group of leading chess players (headed by Karpov and Kasparov, naturally) to the Gulf of Aden to hold a chess match with the Somali pirates. The promotion for chess will be ballistic. FIDE and its sponsors will split the ransom fifty-fifty. There’s the trick, the stunt, an effective business idea.

We also mustn’t forget that FIDE and the general structures of chess are almost ideally suited for money laundering in general and bribery in particular. So you’d like for your person to have, for example, a big post in whatever Ministry of Economic Development, the VEB or there in the Skolkovo Innograd – sponsor a chess tournament on the border between Sudan and Zimbabwe. And there’s no corruption!

There is no doubt that the little kids are going to think up a whole lot more to raise the level of income for chess. Why not, for example, rent out the names of chess pieces? For example, for $150 million a year the king could be named “Oleg Deripaska,” and for $200 million a year, the queen could be “Elena Baturina.” “The grandmaster has sacrificed Baturina and has bravely advanced on Deripaska.” The sort of new income that would flow right away! To economize, we could modernize speed chess. The new rules are extremely simple: two chess players meet – whoever has more money before the beginning of the game is the one who wins. Not to mention the knockout system, for which there are always blackguards who know no pity.

When Anatoly Karpov said that the polemic in the FIDE Congress in Khanty-Mansiysk could turn out to be unsafe for human life, he wasn’t at all mistaken. For the little kids, money means a great deal more than life (someone else’s, naturally).

Should the understanding be that the little kids are afraid of nothing in general? No, they’re afraid – of the FBI in the United States, of the seizure of foreign assets, and of visa problems in Euro-Atlantic countries. This is what we need to work on.

In sum, this is how we’ll live to see chess in the 21st Century.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

According to Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Sergei Tsygankov, the 53-year-old Vera Trifonova died at 12:35 pm on April 30, 2010, in the intensive care unit of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina criminal investigation detention facility (SIZO) in Moscow. Local police were called to the scene, established that there were no signs that the death has been violent, and have launched an investigation.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the rights organization Justice that his client was refused proper medical care to such an extent as to constitute an intent towards her “physical destruction.”

According to a press release from the organization, medics had diagnosed the businesswoman with severe diabetes and had determined that she had only one working kidney.

Zherebenkov explained that Trifonova’s health began to sharply declined when she was arrested in December 2009 and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. When she complained that her lungs were filling with liquid, she was brushed off and told to “sleep standing up.” After demands by her lawyer, Trifonova was eventually moved to a Moscow city hospital, where she immediately recovered. Doctors at the hospital confirmed that Trifonova required specialized treatment that included regular cleansings of her blood – a procedure not possible at the detention facility.

At that point, says the lawyer, Investigator Sergei Pysin told Trifonova that she would get different accommodations if she plead guilty to the fraud she was charged with. The woman refused, and despite doctors’ orders that Trifonova not leave the hospital even for investigative proceedings, Pysin brought her back to Matrosskaya Tishina.

Zherebenkov believes that Pysin had at that point prepared a medical document from Matrosskaya Tishina doctors declaring Trifonova’s condition to be stable and fit for investigative proceedings. On the basis of that document, he says, Odintsovsky Court judge Olga Makarova turned down Trifonova’s April 16 request to be released on bail, and instead extended her detention for another three months.

That same day, the press release goes on, a decision was made to move Trifonova to a female penal colony in Mozhaysk, seventy miles west of Moscow. Officials at the penal colony refused to admit her, however, and she was taken to the Mozhaysk city hospital. According to Zherebenkov, doctors at the hospital did not know how to help the woman because they lacked the proper equipment to cleanse her blood, a procedure that she needed two to three times a week.

In the days that followed, the investigator repeatedly promised the Zherebenkov that they would find some way to move Trifonova to a hospital outfitted for her condition. But in the meantime, the businesswoman’s condition was quickly deteriorating. On April 26, the lawyer resorted to using an ambulance rented by Trifonova’s relatives to bring her to a local medical institute to undergo treatment.

Trifonova was finally brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, and was supposed to have been brought back to the original hospital in Moscow today. As is now obvious, it was already too late.

“They purposefully destroyed her, and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” says Zherebenkov. He believes that the investigator “filled the order” of one of Trifonova’s business partners who owed her several million dollars.

According to RIA Novosti, officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service responded to the lawyer’s accusations that Trifonova was denied medical care by referring to the fact that the paperwork ordering her to undergo medical evaluation had needed to be signed by the investigator “who disappeared somewhere and we were unable to get in touch with him.”

Zherebenkov says he plans to file a criminal suit against Pysin and appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “Vera Trifonova repeated the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, because our SIZOs are instruments of torture and a means to pressure people,” he said.

The press release from Justice, the main source of information for this article, is available in Russian by clicking here.

“A modern transport infrastructure is the real road to Russia’s future,” said then-President Putin to a gathering of highway construction workers in the city of Krasnoyarsk in late 2007. And yet, not a single highway or expressway and only a smattering of smaller roads have been built in Russia over the past two decades. By comparison, China has laid more than 40,000 thousand miles of high-volume roadways over the same amount of time. “Naturally,” said Latynina, “this raises the question: Has anything been built in Russia with this money? And if yes, then what?”

It turns out that something was.

“For example, the presidential residence in the city of Yekaterinburg, which cost 1.2 billion rubles [about $40 million] to construct, and which President Medvedev has stayed in once,” said the journalist. A similar example was Konstantinovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, a crumbling historic landmark that Putin ordered be renovated in 2001 for use as a presidential residence. The official cost of renovation: $250 million.

There were more. One new presidential residence was constructed just two years ago. Another called Lunnaya Polyana is now in the works, blocked off from public view. An Olympic residence in Sochi is also planned for construction. All in all, said Latynina, Russia has built thirteen official residences for its president. Compare this, she proposed, to the number of official presidential residences in America: there are but two. And neither the White House nor Camp David is anything to rival the grandeur of Konstantinovsky Palace. “My point is that if you consider the number of residences, then Russia is a superpower and the United States just gets these two little things,” the journalist said.

On the topic of superpowers, Latynina questioned Putin’s declaration that Russia is a superpower in the raw materials market. “It’s very interesting to compare Russia with the production of natural gas in the United States,” she said, and followed to rattle off a list of figures: In 2008, Russia extracted 640 billion cubic meters of gas, 550 billion of which were from the state-owned company Gazprom – the latter figure being the more telling, as that’s what gets sold abroad. American production of gas totaled 582 billion cubic meters during the same year – less than Russia, but more than Gazprom. Then there’s the revenue: American gas sales totaled $185 billion in 2008, while Russian sales to Europe, its primary source of export, totaled only $47 billion. In addition, Russian production fell in 2009 to 575 billion cubic meters of gas, with 460 from Gazprom. America’s grew to 620 billion. “So why is Russia called a raw materials superpower?”

Russia, Latynina explained, has virtually no chemical industry. The United States, on the other hand, has the world’s most highly developed chemical industry. Thanks to its more energy-efficient facilities, she explained, the States are able to sell gas at a much higher price than Russia with its long, cold, ineffective pipelines. Meanwhile, instead of building more effective facilities, Gazprom built an exact replica of Konstantinovsky Palace for its CEO, Aleksei Miller. “I invite you to think about the philosophy of the matter,” said Latynina. “Bill Gates could not allow himself to build a Konstantinovsky Palace, because it’s a different philosophy of life… But Aleksei Miller could.”

Frivolous spending on the part of the Russian elite brought about the question of why the Russian government tells its citizens that “the West doesn’t love us.” If that were true, asks Latynina, then why would Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, Putin’s right-hand man, keep his plane in Helsinki and buy three different villas in Sardinia? Why are oligarch Roman Abromovich’s yachts registered in the West, including the $50 million one he gifted to Vladimir Putin? Why do all of the people who tell Russia’s citizens that the West doesn’t love them send their children to study in England? “Why don’t they keep their money in the banks of Iraq, North Korea, Venezuela, or the other wonderful countries that are friendly to Russia and love us a great deal?” asked Latynina.

In some cases, they do. On October 17, 2009, Prime Minister Putin announced the government’s decision to make a $500 million purchase of microprocessors with 90 nanometer process technology from the primarily government-supported French-Italian firm STMicroelectronics. Two weeks before this happened, Intel had announced that they were going to begin producing microprocessors with 32 nanometer technology. What was the point of buying something so expensive that was already out of date? According to Latynina, it was simply a way of transferring money abroad.

“In fact, for me it turns out to be a very sad story,” she went on. “It’s the story of the technical degradation of the foundation that we had from the Soviet Union.” While the STMicroelectronics purchase was sure to hinder the pace and efficiency of Russian industry and development, other instances of such degradation represented more direct threats to the safety of ordinary Russians. Poor construction and shoddy upkeep lead to the deaths of 75 people on August 17, 2009, when an old turbine in the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam spun out of control, breaking open the ceiling and flooding the facility. On the night of December 4, 2009, more than 150 people died in the Lame Horse club in the city of Perm when, having violated “every single possible fire safety regulation,” it shot up in flames. But most of the dead bodies dragged out of the club, Latynina pointed out, had no burn marks: the victims died almost instantly from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning that resulted from burning foam polystyrene insulation. A commission set up to investigate the fire released its findings on March 9, concluding that the club’s own management was to blame. “But the scariest part is that it said in this report, verbatim, that ‘we cannot establish how harmful the foam polystyrene insulation was, how chemically harmful it was for people, for the reason that there was a lack of men on whom we would have liked to conduct experiments.’”

Really? “After the fire in the Lame Horse,” Latynina went on, “the government made quite a big fuss, especially President Medvedev. He loves to stomp his feet, crying ‘I’m going to deal with it,’ he always yells in future tense. ‘We must put an end to terrorism; we must put an end to corruption.’ I still haven’t heard that we’ve put an end to it, so it’s always in future tense.” It was clear, Latynina said, that the government wanted the situation to go away, and suppliers of construction materials had paid off the commission to keep silent about the foam. “So it turns out that they don’t have any men,” she said. “The president stomps his feet.”

Thus, in a nutshell, was Latynina’s dour prognosis of Russia’s current state of affairs.

During the questions that followed, Latynina was asked who would make a worthy Russian president. Her response: “Khodorkovsky,” the former oil tycoon currently sitting in prison. And what is to become of him? “He’ll sit in prison as long as Putin is in power.”

Latynina played down the audience’s fears that her safety was at stake for criticizing the Russian government. Arguing that Russia lacks internet censorship (as opposed to China) and allows Ekho Moskvy radio to broadcast whatever it wants, Latynina linked fears that free speech was being suppressed to the legacy left over from Soviet times. Back then, she said, people were arrested or murdered for speaking out against the government. “The maximum now is that they turn off the broadcast.” When numerous members of the audience objected that Russia figures as the third most lethal country in the world for journalists, Latynina countered that Russia was a lethal country for everyone. “It’s more dangerous to be a citizen of Russia than to be a journalist,” she said. “If you drive down Leninsky Prospekt and meet Lukoil Vice President Barkov, he’s not going to ask if you’re a journalist or not.”

That said, Latynina was skeptical of the effectiveness of initiatives by the Russian opposition, including a petition calling for Putin to resign that has so far gathered more than 18,000 signatures.

Asked for her opinion on Moscow’s plan to put up posters of Josef Stalin for Victory Day celebrations in May, Latynina replied: “Every person who wants to has a right to march for Stalin, because unlike Hitler, Stalin was never sentenced for having committed any crime – there are no laws saying that he was a criminal. But when it’s state-sponsored… You know, when dealing with these situations, I always think: What would Stalin do with Putin? He would put him up against the wall!”

It became apparent during the question and answer session that Latynina’s cynicism had frightened at least some members of her audience into considering the prospect that democracy in Russia was simply not possible, leaving Putin’s regime as the only viable choice. She was quick to dispel this notion, and delivered a more hopeful version of events then one might otherwise have come to expect. “First of all, I maintain that democracy in Russia is of course possible,” the journalist said in response. “But, you know, democracy is like a refrigerator. You can’t say that a certain refrigerator doesn’t work in Russia; it’s just that in Russia the electricity flows different. No – the refrigerator works in Russia if it has the particular electrical wiring for the place where you want it to work. If it doesn’t have the wiring, then it isn’t going to work.”

Considering that Russian internet service providers have blocked access to the petition from 50 percent of the country and that hacker attacks have rendered it periodically inaccessible to anyone at all, the number of Russians who agree with that statement is likely to be much higher. Nevertheless, given the number of signatures the document has received, opposition leader Garry Kasparov says he is confident that “we can already bravely confirm that any pessimistic expectations have been entirely refuted.”

In creating such a petition, explained former Deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition is hoping to achieve a series of common and long-held goals: honest elections, political competition, a parliament that serves as a venue for discussion, and a change in the ruling elite. “It is obvious that Putin will never voluntarily relinquish power in Russia,” the petition asserts. Blaming the prime minister for brutally suppressing dissent, fostering corruption, and failing to modernize and develop the country, the authors of the petition conclude that “this is a cross that Russia can bear no longer.”

A translation of the petition’s manifesto by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is reproduced in its entirety below.

The petition in Russian can be found at Putinavotstavku.ru.

Putin Must Go
The Anti-Putin Manifesto, RFE/RL

Citizens of Russia! The recognition that the ruling elite has led our country into a historical dead end has prompted us to issue this statement.

The transfer of virtually unlimited power by the [Yeltsin-era] Family, which was trying to guarantee its own security, to a man of dubious reputation who was distinguished neither by talent nor by the requisite life or professional experience has resulted predictably in the serious degradation of all institutions of state governance.

Even a significant portion of the ruling “elite” feels that a change is necessary, as attested by the loud reaction to [President Dmitry Medvedev’s] opus “Forward, Russia!” But Medvedev’s modernization project bears a distinctly artificial character and is aimed at a single goal – to redo the decorations while maintaining the nature of an authoritatian-kleptocratic regime.

We state that the sociopolitical construction that is killing Russia and has now bound the citizens of our country has one architect, one custodian, and one guardian. His name is Vladimir Putin.

We declare that no essential reforms can be carried out in Russia today as long as Putin controls real power in the country.

We declare that the dismantling of the Putin regime and the return of Russia to the path of democratic development can only begin when Putin has been deprived of all levers of managing the state and society.

We declare that during the years of his rule, Putin has become the symbol of corrupt and unpredictable country that is pitiless in its treatment of its own citizenry. It is a country in which citizens have no rights and are for the most part in poverty. It is a country without ideals and without a future.

If, as the Kremlin propagandists love to repeat, Russia was on its knees during the Yeltsin period, then Putin and his minions have pushed its face into the filth.

In the filth of the authorities’ contempt we find not only individual rights and freedoms, but human life itself as well.

In the filth of a false and feeble imitation of political and social institutions – from the bureaucratic phantom of United Russia to the Nazi-like Putin Youth.

In the filth of soul- and mind-warping televised obscurantism that is turning one of the most educated nations in the world into a soulless, amoral mob.

In the filth of total thievery and corruption emanating from the very pinnacle of Russian power. If not for the years in which Putin roamed the galleries of the Kremlin, the billionaires of his inner circle –Abramovich, Timchenko, the Kovalchuks, Rotenberg – would not exist. Nor would the parasitical state corporations of his friends – these black holes of the Russian economy.

Having begun his rise to power with the epical statement about “wiping them out in their outhouses,” Putin over the course of nearly 11 years has used this universal “tool” of ruling the country, and it has proven particularly effective in regard to his political opponents and business competitors.

Any political, social, or economic dissent is immediately suppressed: in the best cases, by administrative restrictions, but often by the bully clubs of the riot police, by criminal prosecution, by physical violence, and even by murder. Putin has proven that he is willing to destroy his personal opponents by any means available.

During the time that Putin has been at the pinnacle of state power, everything that could be ruined has been ruined. Pension and administrative reforms have been undone. There has been no reform of the armed forces, the secret services, or the law enforcement and judicial systems. The health-care system remains in its previous, pathetic condition.

The decline of education and science, which has been farmed out to the Ozero cooperative group, has reached the point where the “titans” of Russian scientific thought must be considered people like Petrik and Gryzlov.

Ten whole years have been lost – years when a boom in hydrocarbon and metals prices could have been used to modernize the country and carry out a structural reorganization of the economy. That is why the blow of the global economic crisis hit Russia so mercilessly, and it is far from over for us.

Having been named prime minister by Yeltsin, Putin not only was unable to correct the fatal mistakes made by his predecessors and put out the flames in the Caucasus, but his policies managed to raise that conflict to a new level that is capable of destroying the integrity of the country.

The “Kursk,” the Nord-ost theater, Beslan, the tens of thousands who died in the internecine second Cacasus war, the thousands who have lost their lives in infrastructure disasters, who burned in homes for the elderly and the handicapped that were unfit for human habitation, the dozens of murdered journalists and human rights activists and political opponents of the regime, and the ordinary victims of sadistic police lawlessness – these are the gravestones of the years of Putin’s rule.

These are the unexposed secrets of the Putin regime: the [1999] entry of [Shamil] Basayev into Daghestan; the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk; the so-called training exercise in Ryazan.

People have long since stopped being surprised by Putin’s incapacity for strategic thinking. He is unable to see what the world will be like in 10-15 years and what place Russia can and must occupy in it. He is not capable of evaluating the real threats and risks facing the country, and that means he is in no position to correctly plan possible moves or identify potential allies and rivals.

A clear illustration of these short-sighted polices are the recent surrender agreements with China, in which Putin lightly erased the Russian Far East and Siberia off the map.

Further evidence of Putin’s lack of understanding of the future is his maniacal passion to build gas and oil pipelines in all thinkable and unthinkable directions; his initiation of expensive, ambitious projects (like the Sochi Olympics and the bridge to Russian Island), which are absolutely wrong for a country in which a large portion of the population lives below the poverty line.

Having temporarily moved form the presidential chair to the prime minister’s offices and having left in the Kremlin an obedient placeholder who is “of the same blood” – a modern Simeon Bekbulatovich – Putin has created an openly unconstitutional construction for governing the country for life.

It is obvious that Putin will never voluntarily relinquish power in Russia. His fierce intention to rule for life is no longer based on a thirst for power itself so much as on the fear of being held responsible for what he has done. For the Russian people, this is humiliating. But for the country it is fatally dangerous to have a ruler like Putin. This is a cross that Russia can bear no longer.

As the Putin grouping feels it the ground falling from under its feet, it could at any moment move from targeted repression to mass repression. We are warning law enforcement and security agency officers not to stand against their nation, not to carry out criminal orders from corrupt officials when they send you out to kill us for Putin, Sechin, and Deripaska.

Now the national demand at demonstrations from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad must be the call “Putin Must Go!” Ridding ourselves of Putinism is the first, obligatory step on the path to a new, free Russia.