In 2012 we invited our friends from the post-Soviet countries to speak at a number of mass rallies in Moscow alongside with the leading Russian politicians and prominent public figures. On December 23 Umarali Kuvvatov, leader of the Tajik pro-democracy alliance Group-24, was detained in Dubai airport and has been held in custody at Dubai Police C.I.D. for over a month now. Mr Kuvvatov was detained at the request of the Tajikistani authorities demanding his extradition. In case of a positive decision by the UAE authorities, Mr Kuvvatov will be imprisoned and tortured in an attempt to force him to make a public confession.

Although Mr Kuvvatov openly spoke against President Rahmon just a few months ago, he has already gained some publicity in Russia as well as in Tajikistan. According to the estimates, some 1 to 2 million Tajik currently live in Russia, and part of them already have Russian citizenship. Since more than half of all Tajik working-age men have to look for a job abroad, abuse cases and human tragedies are not infrequent in Tajikistan. This is one of the main reasons for an avalanche of criticism against President Rahmon, including on the part of the Tajik community in Russia. Meanwhile, the Russian government continues to support President Rahmon as before, just as many other oppressive regimes, despite a train of diplomatic failures caused by that support.

Officials and government agencies charged with Russian foreign policy are either unwilling to see the real challenges of the changing world or are unable to do so. The countries that have overthrown erstwhile dictators look at Russia with suspicion if not animosity, whereas our so-called allies keep on impudently demanding from Russia dividends for their loyalty. Yet, they are keen to turn their back on Russia whenever they have a chance, to the point that they conduct raids in the Russian territory. In January last year there was an assassination attempt on Dododjon Atovulloyev, a Tajik dissident; a few weeks ago at the very centre of Moscow in full view of dozens of people a trade-union leader from Kazakhstan Ainur Kurmanov narrowly escaped abduction.

Alliances between oppressive authoritarian regimes can be of no benefit even to themselves. International cooperation among various civil society organisations of our countries, on the other hand, is a good way for common advancement and a key to solving the existing issues. For Russian civil society Umarali Kuvvatov is one of dialogue partners. The predicament he finds himself in now requires a public expression of solidarity.

We would like to draw the attention of the UAE authorities and international human rights organizations to the fact that this is clearly a case of persecution on political grounds and that Mr Kuvvatov’s extradition would effectively mean his surrender for a brutal reprisal. Therefore, there is a clear threat to his health and life. We call upon all those who are to decide on Umarali Kuvvatov’s lot not to make a fatal mistake.

Alexander Belov, “The Russians” ethno-political union, Chairman of Supervisory Board

Denis Bilunov, 5 December Party, Member of Federal Council

Garry Kasparov, United Civil Front, Chairman

Ilya Ponomarev, Member of Parliament (the Russian State Duma)

Sergey Udaltsov, Left Front, Coordinator

Results of the Year: Fatalists in the Kremlin
By Aleksandr Golts
January 2, 2013
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

The foreign policy of the first year of the third term of President Vladimir Putin was characterized by several common tendencies. First: a belief in realpolitik. But this is not the civilized realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. It is the simple – if not primitive – realpolitik of the 19th century. Different states, those egotistical animals, barter back and forth in an effort to further their own national interests. To that end, they create unions aimed at weakening the other main players. This bartering takes place during secret diplomatic conferences, when secret agreements are developed. Holding talks on democracy and human rights during such conferences is simply a joke. Putin sees these talks as propagandistic tools to weaken Russia. He is certain that he understands the rules of the game.

If one had to define the most important tendency within Russian politics on the international stage in 2012, it would be increased alienation from the outside world and less of a connection to reality. In the 21st century, there is less and less realism in the Kremlin’s professed 19th-century realpolitik. Putin’s single foreign policy goal is to prevent Russia from having a “colored revolution.” Our head of state genuinely believes that protests are the result of conspiracies between other powers, particularly the US, whose goal is to weaken our Fatherland, strenuously rising up from its knees.

Therefore, the main blow has to be against our enemies. And the State Duma, intoxicated by its own impunity, has stamped one monstrous law after another. Non-governmental organizations that risk telling the truth about the state of political freedoms, human rights, and corruption are synonymous with “foreign agents.” And if someone with American citizenship works at an NGO, that organization will be closed. And any citizen who talks to a foreigner can be charged with treason – here, it is enough for the security services to suspect a foreigner of belonging to an organization that wishes to harm Russian security. God knows how this chimes with the professed need for intellectual exchange with the surrounding world. Most likely, it does not chime at all. It is obvious that the essence of Putin’s international policy is maximally isolating the country from its insidious external surroundings.

The further it goes, the more this policy is going to harm Russian citizens instead of any cursed foreigners. The most striking example is the response to the Magnitsky Act, the American law banning corrupt Russian officials (most of all, the ones from the so-called law enforcement agencies) from indulging in the joys of the American state. More precisely: from going to the States, keeping money there, or buying property there. The response was definitely asymmetrical: for attempting to punish corrupt Russian officials, Russian children are going to foot the bill.

Our national diplomacy also works according to this same logic in discussions of one of the main conflicts of this past year – the one in Syria. It was announced a hundred times that Moscow is not holding out for Assad – and indeed, why hold out for a regime that will inevitably fall within the next few months (or even weeks). However, Russia has spoken out “decisively” against foreign meddling in its domestic affairs. And Russia has provided Assad with “entirely legal” services, giving weapons to a regime in the throes of death. If Moscow actually followed realpolitik, it could have just built up a relationship with the Syrian rebels in order to save its military contrasts and base in Tartus. Instead, Moscow has supported Assad in his insane war against his own people. Because, in reality, countering colored revolutions actually means countering the will of people who are sick to death of leaders who have taken it upon themselves to rule forever.

As a result, Russia today is the main international warrior not for the people, but for authoritarian and totalitarian rulers – in Syria, North Korea, and Iran. Russian diplomats scared to death at the prospect of winding up on the Magnitsky Act list threaten the US with a break in diplomatic relations. And Putin’s year-end press conference, full of absurd anti-American rhetoric, demonstrated that our national leader is entirely full of genuine indignation towards the United States. Washington, for some reason, is not playing by the rules. At least, not by the rules that Vladimir Putin thought up for himself. And that, I suppose, is the main problem in Russian foreign policy – its strategy exists in a separate world. A separate one from that of their partners. To put it bluntly, they are playing chess, but they think they are playing checkers.

And it is precisely here, I suppose, that the new trait of Putin’s foreign policy manifests itself: fatalism. Two years ago during his annual television show, Putin agreed that he was lucky. It appears that he indeed believes in his own incredible luck, helping him slip out of any situation.

Just like the Politburo elders in the Kremlin at the end of the 1970s, Putin is certain that oil prices are never going to fall. All leading states will be doomed to purchase oil and gas from Russia, regardless of how good their relations are with the Kremlin. If the market climate is good, these tools will allow Putin to implement his grand idea to reintegrate the former Soviet republics. I would like to note that these plans also fit nicely into the creation of unions as part of the realpolitik of the century before last. That is the case even if these projects, such as the Customs Union, for example, have an obviously harmful effect on Russia’s economy. Under these circumstances, the country’s leadership falls under the illusion that it can act on the international stage without any boundaries. The future is unpredictable, says the Kremlin. We cannot rule out that, as a result of forthcoming cataclysms, Russia’s place on the international stage could fundamentally improve. Moreover, the economic crisis engendered the illusion among Kremlin strategists that some kind of “new world order” could allow Russia to start from a blank slate and become a superpower once again. This is exactly what the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was talking about in his speech before the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy: “A majority of factors testify to the fact that a new historical milestone is beginning… Given such a radical ‘do-over,’ there’s a lot, probably, that can start from a clean slate, and far from all of the rules that define the international hierarchy today are going to apply in the future. There’s no ruling out that what’s going to be significant is not the place where this or that technology is created, but the ability to use it best. In this sense, Russia, with her intelligent and audacious population and vast resources enjoys obvious advantages.” The logic is stunning: because of forthcoming changes, Russia will be able to use the achievements of others on account of “audacity.” At the same time, there is no hint of how the country will mystically be able to solve its demographic problems or what these vast resources are that can be harnessed. This is not the logic of an analyst – it is the logic of a gambler in a casino.

In effect, the Russian government is admitting that it has no rational plan on how to “raise the country up.” All its bets are hedged on the idea that, when people standing in a line turn around 180 degrees, the last person becomes the first. These policies, obviously, will lead to nowhere. Which is to say: to international isolation.

On Wednesday, the Russian State Duma passed a bill to counter the Magnitsky Act in its second reading. This version of the bill contains amendments that ban American citizens from adopting Russian children and expands measures against any country – not just the United States – that violates the rights of Russian citizens. In addition, it would ban NGOs financed by the U.S. that deal with political issues or present a “threat” to Russian interests from operating in Russia. The bill needed 226 votes to pass, and received 400 for, four against, and two abstentions.

In this blog post for Ekho Moskvy, journalist Anton Orekh questions whether this bill is not itself a threat to Russian interests.

Kind Putin Will Save the Children
By Anton Orekh
December 19, 2012
Ekho Moskvy

The story of the anti-Magnitsky law and its anti-child amendment has revealed not only the true faces of these deputies, but their real purposes as well. It is not as if we ever had any illusions about this collection of mandated citizens. It is just that these scoundrels really showed the full extent of their foolishness when they started retaliating against America by harassing our orphans and the disabled. But it is precisely because of their foolishness that we keep them.

What a clever move for our top leaders. America passes a law to protect itself from our swindlers and killers. We have nothing to respond to this law with! We are going to hide our swindlers and killers to the very end, and we have nothing to present to the Americans. But we really want to. You cannot just brush yourself off and move on. And then four hundred clowns burst into the arena and scoff, throwing about all manner of drivel and demonstrating the outrage of the state. This is how we declare the awesome position of our state, its unanimous patriotism and other crap.

But if the anti-Magnitsky law really is passed as it reads now, then the rest of the world is going to think that our country has turned into a wild territory filled with crazy humanoids with balalaikas. But we are not entirely apathetic about global public opinion. We love giving foreigners a good impression. And right at the moment that this parliamentary rapture reaches its climax, it is time for completely different people to come to the fore. Ones who say something like: we share your sense of worry and dismay; we understand your emotions and indignation. But let us not react to this so harshly; let us smooth out our language. We can give the Americans and our other enemies and enviers one more chance to redeem themselves. Putin, Medvedev, Matvienko and whichever other big fish can softly temper our position. They play good cop.

And on one hand, we show our people that our deputies do supposedly care about our children and the future of our country; we show the world how the representatives of our people practically unanimously express their ire and readiness to tear to shreds these treacherous Yanks, and on the other hand, we make a conciliatory gesture. They will say: look, we are holding this national anger in check, but this is not easy to do, because national anger is great and all-encompassing.

That is the role of our deputies. When we need them to turn into silent punch card machines that stamp documents without looking at any actual laws. When we need to display them as wild monkeys, jumping high in the air. Regardless, they will to be displayed as morons who only do what their leaders tell them. And that is why they are deputies. The question is: how did they wind up in our Duma?

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had these harsh words for President Vladimir Putin on the day of his annual address to the Russian Federation Council:

Approaching the President’s Address
December 12, 2012
Boris Nemtsov

The fact that Putin is going to give his address on Constitution Day is conspicuous and cynical. This man, who has persistently and purposefully destroyed our constitutional rights with remarkable diligence over the past twelve years, has now decided, in truly hypocritical fashion, to time his speech to coincide with this holiday.

He swore on the constitution – thrice – that he will fight for our rights, but really he was mercilessly trampling over it all that time.

Putin’s oprichniki continue to do this with growing intensity every single day. Take, for instance, December 11. Raids were carried out on the apartments of our fellow oppositionists Taisiya Aleksandrova, Anna Kornilova, and Yury Nabutovsky. The main reason for the raids was their participation in seminars on electoral monitoring. The seminars were in Latvia, which gave the Investigative Committee reason to see the event as preparation for a “colored revolution,” as General Markin, unblinking, announced in a measured tone.

Another thing happened as well – the release of all the figures in the so-called “gambling case,” including all the judges, investigators, and police officers who covered up illegal gambling businesses in outer Moscow, were declared to be “socially close” to the regime and sent home.

But do you remember theft of 5.4 billion rubles from the state budget that Sergei Magnitsky uncovered, instead of throwing the butchers who tortured Sergei in jail, these defenders of thieves and murderers are trying to scare Americans with asset freezes in the Russian Agricultural Bank and their property in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

A tough symmetrical response to the Magnitsky law would have been to immediately remove their children from American universities, immediately close their accounts in American banks, and immediately sell the property they own in the West.

Only then would I believe in the sincerity of the theatrical rage among these Zuganovites, Mironovites and Zhirinovskyists. The end of the day was marked by the absolutely prevocational, one hundred percent anti-constitutional decision by the government not to allow the Freedom March.

The provocateurs from the Kremlin and Moscow City Hall want clashes, they want arrests, they want to frighten free citizens. We have been through this many times before, on the 31st of the month and on other dates. They will not break us. On December 15 at 15:00, I will be on Lubyanka Square. The weather will be bright. Exactly for us free people.

A Good Judge
By Anton Orekh
November 27, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

“…We have many more of them – remember them” – these are lyrics from a song about good people. And it seems these days there actually is reason to remember such good people.

It was Natalia Pereverzeva who unexpectedly uttered these words about our home country at a recent and utterly banal beauty pageant. As it turned out, the words were her own; composed without the advice of any talent agent. And indeed, what young talent agent would advise a beautiful pageant hopeful to write about poor, pillaged Russia? You do not build a career with lyrics like that. But while Natalia did not win the competition, she instead left with something much more valuable than a prop-room tiara.

In St. Petersburg, we find among our ranks another such good person – local Judge Vitaly Barkovsky, who was chosen to preside over a truly idiotic, comical and by all accounts shameful lawsuit. I am, of course, referring to the suit brought by the “gentlemen” of the so-called Union of Russian Citizens against pop-music star Madonna. While one might accuse the union representatives of “intellectual deficiencies,” they nonetheless filed quite a brazen lawsuit, all the more relevant since it dealt with the so-called “struggle against homosexuals.” In St. Petersburg, this struggle is indeed mainstream; it is the official ideology in the house of the “governor-goon.”

The hearing was scheduled and rescheduled numerous times, due to the explainable truancy of the “defendant.” In the pop-star’s absence, the plaintiffs maintained their arrogance and smugness as best they could, and though only one of the ten present had actually attended the concert in question, they priced their incomprehensible moral outrage and collective suffering at 333 million rubles ($10.7 million). After the investigation began, the union even expanded their charges of “propagandizing homosexual love” to also include “undermining the Russian demographic” and “compromising Russia’s defense capacity.”

Judge Barkovsky could easily have encouraged this kind of nonsense. He could have requested a whole new set of hearings or further examinations. He could have called witnesses, giving the stage and a circus spotlight to a whole new group of contemptible idiots. In this way, Judge Barkovsky could have easily shown the powers that be what a helpful and diligent defender he was of the rubbish passing for Petersburg law.

But Barkovsky unexpectedly turned out to be a different kind of judge. Oddly enough, he turned out to be a judge of the levelheaded variety. He turned out to be the type of judge who would dare make the only truly logical ruling, even within the confines of illogical laws. The court was adjourned after only a single hearing, but due process was not constrained by the rigid truism that “rubbish is always rubbish.” Barkovsky’s well-developed sense of humor shined through and he did not deny himself the pleasure of mocking the “citizens” from the Union filing the lawsuit.

Thanks to Judge Barkovsky, the case hearing turned out to be a thrilling, captivating, and brilliantly hilarious affair. Highlighting that many see phallic symbols even in everyday kielbasa, that the embrace and passionate kiss shared by sailors in Petersburg on Navy Day each year did not seem to bother any of the plaintiffs, and that none among the union representatives could produce any chart that defined moral suffering by level of intensity, Barkovsky not only denied the plaintiffs the satisfaction of a victory, he actually fined them! And what a fantastic sum – 22 thousand, 22 rubbles and 22 kopeks ($710.39), and 16 thousand rubbles and 16 kopeks ($51.62)! A great judge! Well done!

Of course, this was not some heroic deed. And the case in question is not equal in scope to, say, the Yukos affair. But it would have been so much easier for Judge Barkovsky to rule in the style of thousands of his peers across the country, handing down a ridiculous sentence that contradicted all common sense, logic, factual evidence, and legal norms. These judges, Barkovsky’s peers, are not afraid to be spat upon and cursed. They do not fear mockery. In order to please their superiors, they are prepared to do almost anything. Barkovsky, however, was not prepared to follow suit. What is more, and I must reiterate this, Barkovsky did not simply quietly throw out the case. He took pleasure in making the hearing a spectacle to the greatest degree possible, and for Petersburg, this is an especially notable demonstration.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

While nearly half of the active American electorate voted for a Mormon for president earlier this week, the Church of Latter Day Saints has not enjoyed such a warm reception in Russia as of late. Activists from the ruling party’s youth group held a protest on November 1 accusing Mormons of pursuing “anti-Russian interests” and told them to fly back “home” to Washington. In this column for Gazeta.ru, religious historian Boris Falikov talks about how this sudden burst of ire has far more to do with the Russian Orthodox Church’s own political problems than any actual threat.

Surrounded by Mormons
By Boris Falikov
November 6, 2012
Gazeta.ru

Not long ago, Vladimir Putin dropped a few words about the need to perfect control over totalitarian sects. This happened at a meeting with representatives from the Samarskaya region. One of those present complained to the president that these sects have broken loose entirely and that something needed to be done about them. Putin agreed that it was a problem and promised to deal with it on the federal level – stipulating, incidentally, that it was a subtle matter, since it dealt with freedom of religion.

The Public Chamber took up the president’s remarks. A list had to be drawn up immediately of the ringleaders of these sects and turned over to the security services. At the same time, dubious religious organizations needed to be checked for signs of totalitarianism.

And Young Guard, which brings together all of United Russia’s young supporters, decided not to waste any time and went straight to work. And now in Moscow and other Russian cities we already have pickets against Mormons, telling them to go back to their historical homeland in the US. Especially since they’re not only a totalitarian sect, but also CIA agents. What is it that’s behind this surge in the war on the “sectarian threat?”

This war didn’t start yesterday. After the demise of the atheistic regime in Russia, missionaries and evangelicals of every imaginable persuasion poured in from all over the world. The Russian Orthodox Church, which has always insisted on its special position in the country, did not like this. Neither did this boundless pluralism suit the state, which wanted to bring order to the religious sphere in one fell swoop. As a result, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism were officially declared to be traditional religions, and the rest were asked to stand aside.

That might’ve been all, but the Russian Orthodox Church thought that was too little. To try and win over people’s souls by strictly religious means is a long, laborious process. It’s much easier just to declare your competitors to be enemies of society and call on the government for help. So now we have this concept of “totalitarian sects.” This has turned out to be quite a boon. For believers, a sect is a mob of heretics; for secularists, it’s a group of intolerable fanatics. It’s true that the word also has a scientific meaning used by religious sociologists. But this meaning is entirely destroyed with the added epithet of “totalitarian.” As a result, it has become a label that can be thrown at competitors to accuse them of antisocial behavior.

This label is used widely by the anti-sect battle squads formed in the depths of the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s easy to slap onto practically any religion or confession, since it was never scientifically specific.

As far as I can recall, the only things have been declared totalitarian sects are new religious movements and Protestant denominations that had success with their missionary efforts and formed competition for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Of all non-titular faiths, Catholics have managed to avoid this fate. But who knows – it if wasn’t for the warm relationship between the Russian patriarch and the Vatican, maybe the Pope would also turn out to be the leader of a totalitarian sect.

This state of affairs suits the security agencies quite well. They don’t need to break their skulls over who’s a threat to society and who’s not. They’ll always have the list of “usual suspects” drawn up by the Orthodox anti-sect fighters. Among all those distinguished is also the well-staffed expert council on the Judicial Ministry. But what good does all this do for society?

We all know well that religion is not always a blessing. Sometimes it’s a risky entity, and not only because religious radicalism is on the rise all over the world, Russia no exception. What are totalitarian sects most commonly accused of? That their charismatic leaders subjugate their disciples and twist them into knots. That is to say, they don’t so much help them find God as draw them into a blind faith in the leaders themselves. But there’s no reason to believe that misuse of spiritual authority and turning it into cruel authoritarianism is a problem that only comes from new religions. It’s a common misfortune that not even the most respectable religions can guarantee against.

But when eloquent preachers pontificate about the coming end of the world and frighten the public, then it’s not remotely important which religion is spreading the panic. The damage is the same.

Or take child-rearing. Sectarians, as a rule, are accused of crippling children, robbing them of joys of youth. But if we remember the orphanages of several certain Orthodox monasteries, such as Bogolyubsky, then it becomes clear that these foster children don’t exactly have it any better. The children of devout believers run into identical problems, and they have nothing to do with what exactly their parents believe in. Neither are there confessional boundaries when it comes to the abuse of property. Those victims can be from any religion. What needs to be determined is whether they gave their property to a religious organization voluntarily or were forced into it by dishonest tricksters.

Law enforcement agencies should address these problems by relying on our civil and criminal codes. Making lists of leaders of nontraditional religious organizations and checking them for secret signs of totalitarianism isn’t going to help. More likely, it’s going to be a hindrance, since it replaces a concrete war against violations of the law with a war on ideologies. Aside from the fact that they’d be undercutting the principle of citizen equality before the law, regardless of religious conviction. However, this is the path that the authorities prefer to take. Sure, there isn’t much benefit to society from any of this, but there is to the government, and it’s not insignificant.

The fact of the matter is that a timely witch hunt is a tried and true method of drawing public attention away from urgent political and economic problems that the Kremlin doesn’t have the strength to fix. A few words tossed around by the president at a meeting in Novo-Ogaryovo elicited an immediate response from the Public Chamber. And the loyal Young Guards are already striking against a totalitarian sect whose roots extend across the ocean. The fact that a Mormon has a decent chance of becoming president of the United States underlines the significance of the threat. The enemy is great and terrible – it’s obvious why nothing in this country works out.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

Gennady Gudkov
Former State Duma Deputy, A Just Russia party
Votes: 26,973
Rank: 14

About 170 thousand people said they were prepared to choose the leaders of the opposition, and more than 80 thousand took part in the election. That’s a lot. It speaks to the fact that there’s a mood for protest in Russia, and that protest movement supporters number in the tens of thousands. I even think that it’s in the hundreds of thousands. For its first time, the election was entirely successful, although, of course, it wasn’t free of mistakes.

Our main task is to express the will of the people, who right now want real, not decorative, changes in our country, who don’t want to live in an atmosphere of lies and falsifications, who don’t want Russia to have an illegitimate government, and who don’t want the country to be imbued with an atmosphere of double standards and hypocrisy.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be difficult for the members of the Council to agree with each other. But I think that we can resolve this issue.

Boris Nemtsov
Co-representative, RPR-PARNAS
Votes: 24,623
Rank: 16

The elections went well; they were good, and honest. I feel that this is a unique experience. It’s the first instance of electronic voting in Russian history, where the most active, non-apathetic people, with a sense of personal dignity, took part. Naturally, I’ll be glad to work on the Coordination Council, and I’m going to do what’s necessary for the resolutions from Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect to become real-life documents. I feel totally comfortable in my rank between Navalny and Udaltsov. We need to understand that our ranks on this list are our places in line behind bars. I’m sixteenth. This also makes me glad. It doesn’t entail access to the budget, property, or a television set. It’s more like a ticket to repression. I should mention that I’m the only person on the Coordination Council with experience working in provincial government, the only governor, the only vice prime minister, the only deputy chairman of the State Duma, the only head of a faction. It seems to me that there were all sorts of moments while I was in those posts where my experience can be helpful.

The main task now is to put a stop to the repression. I don’t see any other tasks. We need to begin our session not with organizational questions, but precisely with questions having to do with freeing political prisoners, including some who have been jailed very recently, such as Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev. I fear that we’re going to have to work on this for the course of the entire year, and work very hard.

Difficulties that the Council might face include repression against its members. This is already happening. Of those who were voted onto the Council, Razvozzhayev and Daniil Konstantinov are behind bars. We need to do everything so that the members of the Council can move about, work, and remain free. The rest are resolvable issues; they’re nothing compared to freedom and repression. So far, in, for example, the Organizational Committee for the protest movement, we’ve managed to come to agreement with each other one way or the other, although it wasn’t simple. Now there are many people who took part in organizing the protests who’ve been voted onto the Council. There are new people as well. It seems to me that the responsibility we have before the people who voted for us, plus the tasks that we are obligated to resolve, should evoke feeling in even the most mettlesome people. We have to be reserved, stubborn, persistent, and calm if we’re going to achieve anything. Of course, there are very many people who want to make us quarrel and split us apart, but there’s always going to be a lot of people like that. Nevertheless, over the course of the year, all attempts to do that have failed. I hope that this is always going to be the case.

If we divide the Coordination Council into factions, I think that the liberal-democratic one would be the largest. Kasparov, Yashin, and I, along with our whole liberal wing – Vladimir Kara-Murza, Piontkovsky, Parkhomenko, Bykov, and Gelfand, of course, have liberal-democratic views. I think that more than half of the Council consists of people with these views. Some of them don’t advertise it much, but still, if you look at their “political compasses,” you can understand – it’s clear from their attitudes towards private property, privatization, and so on.

PARNAS made an official decision not to participate in the Coordination Council elections, and so we, the members of PARNAS, took part in them in a private capacity. But since our representation on the Council is rather significant – at the very least, it’s Yashin, Kara-Murza, and I – I think that cooperation is inevitable. This might not be laid out in any official documents, but it’ll just become the fact of the matter. PARNAS Co-representative Vladimir Ryzhkov is one of the authors of the Bolotnaya and Sakharov Prospect resolutions, which are a main task for the Coordination Council, and he will bring them to life. To be honest, I don’t know how we couldn’t cooperate.

The editors at Yezhednevny Zhurnal sat down with some of the freshly-elected representatives to the Russian opposition’s new Coordination Council to ask what they thought about the election results, the Council’s initial tasks, and what difficulties they might have to face. Theotherrussia.org will continue to bring you several of these responses over the next several days, so stay tuned for more.

Ilya Yashin
Member, Solidarity movement
Total votes: 32,478
Rank: 5th

We had prepared for the difficulties that might come up during the election. The government organized a massive DDoS attack, which, despite the problems we had on the first day, was successfully taken care of and the site worked quite well after that. In Chelyabinsk, the FSB attacked our activists on the regional electoral committee, confiscated computers, frightened people, and the committee simply couldn’t function. There were provocations – prosecutors filed criminal cases about supposed embezzlement of funds. I’m glad that we were able to overcome these difficulties, and in the end, tens of thousands of people took part in the election – this is probably the single largest civil project in years, and shows that the opposition has maintained significant capacity to mobilize civil activity. This is probably the most important result.

The difficulties that await the Council in the future are obvious. They have to do with the fact that the people elected are very different. Although, yesterday, after the election, the elected members of the Coordination Council gathered on the Dozhd channel and had a rather emotional discussion that proved that it’s not going to be very hard to work or to find common ground. We foresaw these difficulties: since there were people of different viewpoints among the candidates, we formed congregations that would guarantee that the entire political spectrum would be represented; we knew that it was going to be rather complicated to find compromise on a whole set of issues. But everyone is generally prepared for this. In fact, one of the tasks of the Coordination Council is to create a dialogue between representatives of various opposition groups and find the common ground that unites us.

It seems to me that there should be several directions our work should take. One of our key tasks is to form a substantive agenda for the protest movement, a structural project that we have long been criticized for lacking, although not entirely fairly, in my view, since the opposition has generated a not insubstantial number of constructive ideas. Now there’s going to be a united platform that will promote our projects in the name of the united opposition. These projects, of course, are going to have, it seems to me, a much larger resonance. One of our main tasks is to formulate within the course of a year our main proposals concerning political reforms that, as we hope, the government will be ready to discuss at some point. Even if it’s not, we should still offer this to society.

The second direction is to support regional politicians, both in elections and within the framework of anti-corruption projects. I think we’re going to offer organizational, political, and sometimes even financial help to people who are forced to battle with local swindlers and thieves and need our help, in small towns and in the regions.

The third direction is education, which has to do with the dissemination of various types of anti-corruption reports and reports dedicated to the results of Putin’s rule. In addition, a background theme will be the defense of political prisoners. I think that right now we should mobilize all the resources we have to give the maximum amount of help possible to people who are currently sitting behind bars because of their dissent.

The liberal wing is represented in the Coordination Council rather heavily. This has to do with the fact that the protests on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt were represented to a significant degree by people of liberal-democratic views, which has been established by nearly all sociological surveys, and voting during the election for the Council confirmed that the basic part, the nucleus of the protest movement, is, like before, people who hold liberal-democratic views. The social portrait of the protest area, it seems to me, is very clearly reflected in the election results.

An Alternative Agenda
October 24, 2012
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

Garry Kasparov
Leader, United Civil Front
Total votes: 33,849
Rank: 3rd

We managed to hold the election, despite extremely unfavorable external conditions. The Democracy-2 system, which Yekaterinburg programmers, led by Leonid Volkov, released this past year, proved its efficacy. There were some conflicts, of course, but on the whole the election was free and fair, because all of the decisions by the Central Electoral Committee were completely open. This stands in direct contrast to [Federal Central Electoral Commission Chairman Vladimir] Churov’s elections – it’s totally clear how and why various decisions were made. Of course, someone might want to challenge them if they don’t like them, but the entire procedure was fully transparent.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens went through the verification process in the online voting system (which involves agreeing to enter their passport and phone numbers) shows a growth of protest sentiment and of people’s desire to participate more actively in shaping the protest agenda. You could say that the result of this campaign, albeit a short (but still striking) one, is the emergence of a totally legitimate opposition body. The number of people who took part in this transparent process created a body that has legitimacy to speak in the name of the entire protest movement.

The obvious difficulty that the Opposition Council is going to face is that it consists of very different people with different ideologies, and that it will have, let’s say, many political newcomers. I, along with several of my colleagues – Andrei Illarionov, Andrei Piontkovsky, Boris Nemtsov, and especially the others who were also in the Other Russia movement and the National Assembly – have experience in this type of cooperation. But such people are now a minority in the Coordination Council – that’s an objective fact. It’s very important that the Council is able to overcome these dangerous problems and form a constructive agenda.

From my point of view, the most important task, besides writing regulations and organizing normal functioning for the Coordination Council, is to build up our electoral base – not just the people who vote, but and who participate in the entire process; people who want to follow the Council’s work continuously, to make remarks and proposals. They should have that opportunity. This is what we’d like to build and call the Free Russia Forum. All of these people are registered, and they should be as full participants of this process as the members of the Coordination Council are. In my opinion, the Council should hold referendums on important issues as often as possible. Tens of thousands of people, if they want, should have the opportunity to vote on some type of key issue. In the same vein, the next issue is expanding the Council beyond the Garden Ring. Of course, we do already have quite a wide regional base – only 35% of those who voted in the Council election were Muscovites, just more than a third. But it’s very important that activeness increases, so that people in the regions, where there are many potential voters, create their own coordination councils, meaning that they build up a local infrastructure.

Yevgenia Chirikova
Leader, Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest
Votes: 32,221
Rank: 7th

It seems to me that the most important thing right now is to establish a system to provide people with information. In Khimki, I was confronted with the fact that the propaganda that currently flows from Channel One, NTV, and local television is effective, and has an absolutely corrosive effect on people. Our task is to make it so that they know the truth. We absolutely need to support local media in places where we plan to participate in municipal elections.

It seems to me that, because [the local media] had been destroyed in Khimki, we had low turnout, people were disappointed in everything and didn’t believe that it’d be possible to change anything. We need our own media system, since we need to be able to have an impact on people. In places where you can impact people, everything else is possible: defending human rights, defending nature, defending the rights of prisoners. If the citizens trust us, if we can get through to their hearts and minds, then we won’t have a problem calling them, for example, to come to a picket in defense of prisoners or a rally in defense of a forest.

The biggest difficulty of our time is to remain free. But whether or not it’ll be possible to negotiate is going to depend on external factors – the harder they push, they easier it’ll be to negotiate. The way things are going now, we will have a wonderful time negotiating!

As hundreds of people rallied in Moscow in support of elections for a united council for Russia’s non-systemic opposition, electronic voting for the council was extended for another day due to powerful hacker attacks. In light of the difficulties that have been faced by the council-to-be thus far, opposition leader and Coordination Council candidate Garry Kasparov explains in this op-ed how the government’s attempts to brush off any responsibility are verifiably false.

Center of Crystallization
By Garry Kasparov
October 20, 2012
Kasparov.ru

The Orwellian semantics of the Ministry of Truth have already become an established element of our Kafkaesque reality. In this system, as everybody knows, peace means war. And when Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, responds to a question about elections to the opposition’s Coordination Council by saying: “To be honest, we aren’t paying much attention to this, since we are on a very tight schedule,” then this is a direct confirmation that the president is personally in control of a special operation to disrupt the opposition elections. The government, as opposed to the smug, shiny political scientists that it feeds, is perfectly aware of the danger of the crystallization of a center for the non-systemic opposition at a time when the System itself is in a state of heightened instability.

It was on October 20-21, 1990 that the Democratic Russia party held its founding congress, and the Chekists who built the new power vertical under Putin’s leadership remember well what the Soviet Communist Party’s inability to prevent the creation of active, independent, parallel political structures led to. The Kremlin also remembers that 150 thousand registered voters is actually quite a lot, because it refers to the mobilization of the part of society that’s politically active. The number of Russian citizens who have publicly expressed their desire to vote in the elections for Coordination Council clearly surpasses the total number of real members of all the official registered parties, including United Russia. The idea of the two million person army of United Russia and the All-Russia People’s Front, with their hundreds and thousands of Nashisti and other Putinjugend, exists only on paper, which the Putin regime de-facto admitted by ordering Sergei Mavrodi to use his neat columns of MMM members for spoiler voting.

Incidentally, by their logic, this actually makes sense. The power vertical, which has become the basic mode of operation for these crooks and thieves, can only rely on a pyramid scheme. Authoritarian regimes that only place their bets on the inertial development of social processes inevitably resort to the clumsiest possible methods of supporting the status quo. Lacking any meaningful support among active Russian citizens, the Kremlin is carrying out its traditional mobilization of power and propaganda resources. Barefaced “black humor” on state television, assaults by police and the judiciary on opposition activists, protected FSB hackers – this is the arsenal that this agonized regime is trying to use to delay its inevitable collapse.

The unprecedented efforts by Putin’s henchmen to disrupt the elections to the Russian opposition’s Coordination Council are the best possible confirmation that the idea is a good one. A legitimate body for the non-systemic opposition formed according to the results of free and fair voting can and must become the catalyst for the creation of a new political system in Russia.