“We’re currently formulating a suit in this regard,” Grigory Yavlinsky told journalists on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Yavlinsky received an official notice from the commission (TsIK) that he would not be allowed to run as a presidential candidate in the upcoming March election.

According to the TsIK, about 25 percent of the signatures on Yavlinsky’s petition had been falsified, well above the 5 percent permitted by Russian law. However, the party insists that the rejection was politically motivated.

On January 24, the newspaper Vedomosti reported that a source in the presidential administration said that Yavlinsky’s rejection was a “surprise” to the Kremlin. In addition, an anonymous source in the TsIK said that the number of bad signatures collected by other presidential candidates was about the same as Yavlinsky’s – this likely due to the difficulty of collecting 2 million signatures in the one-month time limit and the inability of candidates to oversee the work of all of their signature collectors.

According to political analyst Mikhail Tulsky, only 100,000 signatures were needed to run for president in 1991. In 1996 the number rose to 1 million, but candidates were given 3 months to collect them. It rose again to 2 million in 2004, with 7 percent falsified signatures allowed. Since 2007, that number dropped to 5 percent, and the length of time to collect them dropped to a month. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who has recently successfully completed the registration process, denounced it as “dishonest” and “degrading.”

The opposition leader made the remarks during a debate on Saturday with Yabloko bureau member Aleksei Melnikov on whether oppositionists should boycott or participate in the elections.

During the debate, Kasparov accused Yabloko of cooperating with the Kremlin and not acting as a truly oppositionist party.

“Just like [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov and [LDPR leader Vladimir] Zhirinovsky, you pretend that you’re an alternative. The Kremlin has financed you for eight years. The Kremlin agrees to your candidate lists. You know all of this,” Kasparov said.

In response to the question of where Yabloko gets its funding, Melnikov insisted that the party has “one source – citizens and business. And we’ve done this work for many years. Nine percent is from business donations,” he said.

Melnikov called on Russians to go out to the polls on the December 4 election day, while Kasparov called on potential voters to go out into the streets and protest against the fact that the elections are sure to be neither free nor fair.

Kasparov was among a group of leading oppositionists to sign a declaration in early October to boycott the Duma elections. As the declaration reads: “Under the current conditions, we feel that the December 4 parliamentary elections will be illegitimate. We call on citizens to boycott these shameful ‘elections’ in any rational way.”

According to Gorbachev, “I, for example, feel that after Putin went through two terms as president and now another term as prime minister that, I think, this story of a duumvirate, while it meets constitutional requirements, nevertheless essentially discredits democratic principles.”

In the former president’s opinion, the development of democracy in Russia is impossible while the people in charge of the country are not its actual leaders and do not defend the people’s interests.

Gorbachev believes that Russia’s leader should respect the rights of the people instead of the rights of “corporations.”

He also expressed doubt that upcoming parliamentary elections would be free and fair. Gorbachev labeled the ruling regime as “authoritarian” and said that the country can expect to have “to seriously fight for the rehabilitation of democratic principles, fair elections, and independent courts.”

He also said that voters should use the forthcoming elections as an opportunity to speak out against the current regime by voting against United Russia.

As the BBC also pointed out, other world leaders are less than thrilled at the idea of Putin taking up a third term as Russian president. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Putin’s decision “makes a bit of a mockery of the electoral process” and was “unfortunate.”

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, called Rice’s remarks “disrespectful.”

“The leading party and majority expect the opposition to behave calmly and not rock the boat,” Putin said at the closing State Duma plenary session on Wednesday. “But this is a vain wish: that’s why the opposition exists, so that the leading party holds on stronger to the steering wheel.”

“We have many undefined and risky factors ahead of us, and in the midst of a storm, a tempest, a crisis, it’s very important that the whole team works in harmony, so that the boat doesn’t capsize,” he added.

Elections for representatives to the Russian State Duma are scheduled for December 4. Only seven political parties have been officially registered by the Justice Department, which allows them to field candidates. Numerous incidents of pre-election fraud have already been noted by monitors. Members of the opposition are staging a boycott of the “dishonest” elections and calling for Russians to go out into the streets and protest on December 4.

The announcement came on Saturday during the second day of a congress of Putin’s United Russia party and was received by a standing ovation by the 11,000 members present.

He added that current President Dmitri Medvedev “can create an effective management team as the head of the Russian government,” meaning that he would name Medvedev as prime minister during his own presidency.

Analysts have clashed over which member of Russia’s ruling tandem would run in the upcoming elections since the day Medvedev was elected. All but confirming the long-held belief of many Kremlin critics that Medvedev was doing little more than keeping the seat warm for Putin to return to office four years later, Putin made clear that “an agreement over what to do in the future was reached between us several years ago.”

Russian law only allows the same person to be president for two consecutive terms, but also allows that person to run again after a “hiatus” period. As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty points out:

Putin’s victory in March is a virtual certainty, given both his popularity and Russia’s tightly controlled political system. It would set the stage for him to serve two six year terms, which would keep him in the Kremlin until 2024, meaning he could end up running the country longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whose 18-year rule became synonymous with socioeconomic decay.

Analysts are also split as to whether Putin and Medvedev differ in regards to policy, as opposed to fronting mere cosmetic or other orchestrated differences to lend the regime a veneer of legitimacy. Nevertheless, Medvedev had garnered a number of loyal supporters over the years and they were none too pleased with what Gleb Pavlovsky of the Foundation for Effective Policy called “Medvedev’s political capitulation.” As the New York Times puts it:

One of Mr. Medvedev’s closest aides, Arkady V. Dvorkovich, vented via Twitter during the United Russia event, remarking, first, “there is no reason for happiness,” and then “now it is time to switch to the sports channel.” The influential political consultant Gleb O. Pavlovsky, whose longstanding contract with the Kremlin was severed this spring, gave one of the sharpest comments.

“The fact that the president, as a politician, betrayed those who believed in him — that is political self-annihilation, and he has the right to do it,” Mr. Pavlovsky said. He called the move “a blow to the prestige of the institution of the presidency in Russia.”

Several politicians and analysts gave their takes on the announcement to Gazeta.ru.

Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Foundation for Effective Policy

“This is Medvedev’s political capitulation. It’s possible that it was voluntary and possible that it wasn’t. It’s unclear what sort of pressure we’ve hit up against here. But there’s a unique fact: the post of the president of a nuclear power is being transferred by private dealings. We have no reason to believe that Medvedev was lying when he said he was ready to run for president. It’s possible that his position changed due to the influence of a certain factor.

“If he’s a real politician, he needs to explain why he made this decision and why he felt that his own presidency was unsuccessful. If not, then it’s unclear what he’s doing at the head of United Russia’s candidate list.”

Sergei Mironov, leader of A Just Russia

“All these years, we have had serious problems with the work of the government. And bigger ones with the United Russia party… We maintain our previous positions: our party will not support the candidate forwarded by United Russia. And so we’re in no rush. Let our opponents rush… in regards to the fact that Medvedev is heading the Duma list – watch the video footage of the faces of the United Russia members and see if they look happy about it or not.”

Aleksei Malashenko, member of the Carnegie Moscow Center

“When this decision was definitively made is already meaningless, but it seems to me that it happened not at all long ago, after the forum in Yaroslavl. Everything came to that, although there were still grounds for speculation. What became definitively clear was that our political life is a swamp. And the US and the European Union have already looked to Putin to gauge things for a long time. The most interesting thing now, the only intrigue, is who’s going to become prime minister. There isn’t 100% certainty that the decision for it to be Medvedev is definitive. There’s expectation of pension system reform and a high rise in taxes. And it’s the prime minister who gets the most flack.”

Boris Nemtsov, co-leader of the unregistered People’s Freedom Party

“Putin is a pure provocateur: he is provoking the Russian people to a revolt.

He is provoking the Russian people with his irremovability, provoking the Russian people to come out into the streets and begin to act like they do in countries where the institution of the turnover of government has been destroyed. After a month, the Central Bank will announce how much money has disappeared. Trust me, I am rarely mistaken: $100 billion. That’s my analysis – $100 billion and the emigration of 500-800 thousand people.

“The country is going to experience a certain amount of sluggish development, but this is very bad… Unhappy Russia: Putin is back until his death. I don’t know how long he’s going to live. Either Russia will die first or Putin will – I don’t know. I’d prefer all the same that Russia remained.

Denouncing the party he head for all of three months as “a Kremlin puppet,” Prokhorov complained that Surkov was the “puppeteer” who “long ago privatized the political system, who has been misinforming the country’s leadership for a long time, who is putting pressure on the mass media and trying to manipulate the citizens.” In this vein, he insisted, the Kremlin had orchestrated a plot to get the oligarch kicked out of the party.

Created in 2008 as a Kremlin-backed merger between the Union of Right Forces and two other parties, Right Cause has long been dismissed as a “marionette” that, despite its general loyalty to the center, garners almost no votes during elections. The introduction of Prokhorov as party leader gave rise to speculation that the billionaire’s unlimited financial resources could raise the party’s profile and give it a tint of legitimacy as an opposition movement. Unlike the vast majority of actual opposition parties, Right Cause has already been granted official registration by the Russian Justice Ministry, thus allowing it to field candidates for elections.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Kremlin may have been motivated to shut Prokhorov out of Right Cause out of fear that he was truly stepping out of line. As the Moscow Times reports:

The real reason that the Kremlin sacrificed the Right Cause party was because its former billionaire leader Mikhail Prokhorov had wanted to organize Orange Revolution-style tent camps in a faux opposition drive to win seats in the State Duma elections, a senior party official said Tuesday.

Right Cause, a pro-business party whose popularity hovers around 2 percent, needed a massive injection of support to clear the 7 percent threshold in the December vote, so Prokhorov planned for followers to camp out in the streets in tents, like during the 2004 Ukrainian protests that eventually toppled the regime of President Leonid Kuchma, the official told The Moscow Times.

Another party official confirmed his remarks. They both spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal from the Kremlin.

But the idea could not have appealed to the Kremlin, which ardently opposed the Orange Revolution and spent years ensuring that no such public protests took place in Russia.

The Right Cause official said Surkov was pleased that Prokhorov left the party last Thursday, citing him as saying during a private conversation: “It was good that we got rid of him before he was elected to the Duma.”

Surkov’s office had no immediate comment about the claim Tuesday.

Respondents had a variety of choices to define their opinion about the president’s achievements, but the most popular among those turned out to be “hard to answer” (47%) and “there were no achievements” (23%). The number of people in the latter category has fallen by 7% in the past three years.

Additionally, the number of people who don’t see any failures in Medvedev’s presidency has fallen – from 90% in 2009 to 73% now.

As for the positives, 7% of respondents said that the president’s social policies have been successful and another 6% said as much about his international policies. The rest of Medvedev’s cornerstone turned out to be considered less fruitful – 3% each of respondents named the battle against corruption or reforms of the security services, and only 1% each mentioned the battles against crime and corruption or the firing of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

As the newspaper Kommersant notes, only one out of every ten people polled by VTsIOM feels that Dmitri Medvedev, during his time in office, has “cared for the people” and asserted the idea of the revival of Russia as a global authority.

The poll was conducted from September 3-4 among 1600 people in 46 regions of Russia, with a margin of error no larger than 3.4%.

The new movement, which is called Vote Against Them All, will ask Russians to come to the polls and put a big cross over their ballots on voting day for State Duma deputies on December 4. The goal: to have at least seven percent of the total votes cast be marked in this manner, thus crossing the threshold necessary for a party to gain seats in the Duma.

At the head of Vote Against Them All is Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister and coleader of the unsuccessfully registered People’s Freedom Party. Other members include writer Dmitri Bykov, satirist Viktor Shenderovich, leading environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova, lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, and journalists Pavel Sheremet, Olga Romanova, and Vladimir Korsunsky.

As was discussed during the group’s recent three-hour meeting, the campaign will ask Russian citizens “not to sit at home, go to the voting stations, cross out their ballots and write something like ‘down with the swindlers and theives.’” Given that many oppositionists are on an unofficial black list that bars them from being shown on television, the movement is limited to distributing pamplets, posting materials on the internet, and holding demonstrations to spread their message.

Elections in Russia are notoriously corrupt. Despite its falling popularity, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party routinely sweeps regional, federal, and local elections amidst widespread accusations of fraud from both Russian and international watchdog groups. Opposition parties are routinely denied the right to officially register, thus effectively banning them from fielding candidates. Frequent rhetoric from officials about reforming the system has generally come to naught.

Executive Director Olga Kurnosova of the oppositionist United Civil Front said Nemtsov and seven other activists (including herself) were detained at an apartment complex in St. Petersburg’s Petrovsky district on August 15 while distributing anti-Matvienko flyers and calling on residents to vote against the highly unpopular governor in her bid for a local council seat that would allow her to take up the position of Federation Council Speaker.

According to Kurnosova, members of a pro-Kremlin youth group, who were “coordinated” by an aide to powerful city legislator and United Russia party member Vyacheslav Makarov, attacked the oppositionists and pelted them with eggs.

When some of the oppositionists got into a car, “unknown young people” surrounded them, began throwing produce at their vehicle, and “acted aggressively in general.” Police standing nearby did nothing in response to the situation, even helping the attackers.

“We tried to drive away but the police began to stop us and pull us out so that the Nashi members could throw stuff at us,” Kurnosova explained. “At the same time, they didn’t touch the attackers. The Nashi members broke our camera and tried to climb into the car and grab our flyers. The police didn’t react at all.”

The political news website ZakS.ru reported that pro-Kremlin activists threatened to slash the tires of one of their correspondents as well as of Representative Konstantin Yershov from the St. Petersburg branch of the People’s Freedom Party (Parnas), which is co-led by Nemtsov.

On August 14, Nemtsov was also arrested under similar circumstances while canvassing against Matvienko in St. Petersburg’s Krasnenkaya Rechka district.

Matvienko was nominated for the post of Federation Council Speaker by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev earlier this summer. In order for her to accept the post, she must be officially voted in as a representative of a particular region in Russia, which then in turn must vote for her as speaker.

According to Kasparov.ru, Matvienko plans to run on the United Russia party platform in Krasnenkaya Rechka and Petrovsky.

Representatives of the political opposition, who have been intent on providing Matvienko with some competition, have been unable to officially register as candidates. Therefore, the Solidarity opposition movement, also co-led by Nemtsov, and the Other Russia opposition party have begun campaigns calling on locals to vote against Matvienko and any other candidates associated with United Russia.

Russian sociologists have published the results of a new survey indicating that confidence in the president and prime minister are at their absolute lowest levels ever, Interfax reports.

The survey, carried out by the Public Opinion Foundation between July 23-24 in 204 places within 64 regions across Russia, shows that the level of confidence in President Dmitri Medvedev has dipped to 43 percent, as opposed to 49 percent when he was first elected in 2008.

Accordingly, the level of distrust in the president has risen from 14 percent in January 2011 to 23 percent today. Sociologists noted that, in the past, this figure has not risen past 15 percent.

Distrust in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has also risen since the beginning of the year – from 13 to 21 percent. Confidence in Putin has fallen to 50 percent, also an all-time low.

Over the same period of time, according to the survey, the number of people prepared to participate in political protests in Russia has not risen.

The previous lowest ratings for Medvedev and Putin were both recorded in April, when confidence in the prime minister was at 53 percent and at 46 percent for the president.