“The school initiative was announced by Secretary of the Presidium of the General Council Sergei Neverov and it is to be carried out by presidium members Andrei Isayev and Aleksei Chesnakov,” a party source told the paper.

Neverov himself told Vedomosti that the party held its first meeting on the issue on May 31. In his words, the goal of the school would be to exert influence on promising young people throughout Russia’s regions and help them become true leaders.

“The first thing that will happen is the regions will be asked to nominate one promising party member, and the group of candidates to become students in the party school will hold a party primary, competing for the right to be supported by United Russia in the fall elections,” Vedomosti explained.

Courses taught at the party school will include economics, party structure, ideology, electoral campaign technology and primary procedures, psychology, public speaking skills, and skills on how to cooperate with state agencies and civil society.

Neverov added that Medvedev would possibly appear before the students personally. The prime minister was elected head of United Russia in a suspiciously unanimous vote on May 26.

A source in the Kremlin said that the presidential administration had no issue with the party initiative.

Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and now co-leader of the People’s Freedom Party (Parnas), used Monday’s unprecedented meeting to read Medvedev a list of resolutions made at a series of massive anti-government protests that have swept through Moscow in the past few months. The resolutions call for various reforms to Russia’s political system.

The oppositionist also gave Medvedev a list of 37 political prisoners and asked for them to be pardoned, particularly noting Taisiya Osipova, Sergei Mokhnatkin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.

Perhaps surprisingly, Medvedev indicated that he was at least somewhat aware of Osipova’s case.

“If anybody is pardoned, then I’ll consider the meeting with Medvedev not to have been in vain,” Nemtsov said afterwards.

Throughout the meeting, he along with Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov and Parnas co-leader Vladimir Ryzhkov stressed the importance of free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections.

The oppositionists also made it clear that they were not looking to foment revolution in Russia. In their estimation, Russia has already had more than its fair share of revolutions, but the current government itself is provoking a revolutionary mood within Russian society because of its insistence in remaining in power.

When Nemtsov asked Medvedev to introduce an amendment banning one person from holding presidential office in Russia more than two times, the president answered that he had previously considered this and still may before the end of his term.

Besides Nemtsov, Udaltsov, and Ryzhkov, the meeting was also attended by Konstantin Babkin of the Party of Action, Russian All-National Union representative Sergei Baburin, For Our Homeland co-leader Mikhail Lermontov, Green Party leader Anatoly Panfilov, National Women’s Party leader Galina Khavraeva, and several others prominent oppositionists.

While condolences have poured into the Czech Republic from dozens of world leaders, neither Russian President Dmitri Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have extended any such sympathies.

On Sunday, US President Barak Obama praised Havel’s role in helping create a united Europe. French President Nikolai Sarkozy said that “Europe has lost one of its wise men,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Havel’s “dedication to freedom and democracy is as unforgotten as his great humanity.”

December 19 was designated a national day of mourning in the Czech Republic.

President Havel passed away on December 18 following a long battle with respiratory illness. Known for leading Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and helping democratize the former Soviet republic, he has criticized the Russian government as “a specific combination of old stereo types and a new business-mafia environment.”

Commenting on the recent protests that have swept Russia following fraudulent elections on December 4, Havel opined in Novaya Gazeta that “There can be no talk of democracy as long as the leaders of the state insult the dignity of citizens, control the judiciary, the mass media and manipulate election results.”

Meanwhile, President Medvedev did extend his sympathies on Monday to the North Korean people on the death of leader Kim Jong Il.

“Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to Kim Jong Un following the death of Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Kim Jong Il,” read a press release on the Kremlin’s website.

In a press release issued Friday, the Yabloko party said that it had sent a packet of documents testifying about fraudulent results at eight areas in Moscow. “The data results issued by Yabloko’s observers in these areas significantly differs from the official results,” the statement asserted.

Party members noted that observers were included among the plaintiffs and that the complaints had been sent to seven different district courts. They plan to submit even more documents next week.

The lawsuits come following the largest protests Russia has seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. Despite widespread anger among Russian citizens at alleged blatant electoral fraud, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has downplayed protesters’ complaints.

On Thursday, the Federation Council dismissed a European Parliament resolution calling for a review of electoral results and for jailed oppositionists to be released as “legally untenable.” The president made no comment, saying that the resolution “means nothing” to him.

Where the Russian justice system has failed to step up to the plate, the Financial Times has taken up the slack:

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article.

Documents from Mr Kolesnikov, together with a Financial Times investigation, help to lift the veil on the history of Bank Rossiya, whose shareholders include several men with close links to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s supreme leader, including the son of his cousin. Yury Kovalchuk and Niko­lai Shamalov, two of its biggest shareholders, were co-founders with Mr Putin of a lakeside dacha enclave outside St Petersburg.

These men from Russia’s second city are seen by many businessmen and bankers as the core of a new generation of Putin-era oligarchs, combining wealth with links to the country’s top leadership just as their predecessors during the Boris Yeltsin years had done. This is despite Mr Putin’s pledge nearly 12 years ago to eliminate oligarchs as a class.

Now that Mr Putin plans to return as president in elections next March, after four years as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, claims of a new system of crony capitalism are under scrutiny.

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article.

The paper trail Mr Kolesnikov has disclosed to the FT appears to show for the first time how two Bank Rossiya shareholders – Mr Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov, a former KGB colonel – received via an offshore company funds originally donated for equipment for St Petersburg hospitals, just as they bought their bank stakes.

The documents then appear to show that these same funds and offshore companies may have helped finance the first in a string of Bank Rossiya acquisitions of financial assets from Gazprom, the state-controlled gas producer. Some investors allege the deals that followed were quasi-privatisations that helped to drain billions of dollars in value out of a gas group that had come to symbolise Russia’s commodities-fuelled resurgence. Bank Rossiya rejects this as “nonsense”, saying its growth is due to its professional management and successful strategy as a universal bank. The bank’s assets stood at Rbs274bn ($8.9bn) by October 1, up from Rbs6.7bn at the start of 2004 – a compound annual growth rate of more than 60 per cent.

Read the full article at the Financial Times.

In light of this past Friday’s Russian March, noted political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky examines the growing Russian nationalist movement and its origins in the Second Chechen War and ongoing conflicts in the North Caucasus.

The Russian March to Nothingness
By Andrei Piontkovsky
November 3, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In a country where the political regime is made up of a longtime diarchy of bandits, Putin and Kadyrov, the popular slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” cannot be seen as something nationalistic or patriotic. Regardless of all its apparent radicalism, it is a deeply ingratiating, slavish, plebeian exhortation.

It means “we want to feed all of our own crooks and thieves: Putin and Abramovich, Sechin and Chemezov, Medvedev and Fridman, Deripaska and Timchenko, the Rotenburg brothers and the Kovalchuk brothers.

It means “we want to return Kadyrov’s criminal offshore accounts here to Putin’s domestic “lawful” arena, even if it requires an third, even bloodier, Chechen war.”

“We want an empire, but without black-assed people” – this is the fatal contradiction of the Russian national consciousness, decisively entangled in its own complexes.

Russians do indeed feel humiliated, offended, and robbed within their own country. As do Russian citizens of other nationalities.

Kadyrov’s palaces, motorcades and parties with Western and Russian superstar-prostitutes of both genders that cost millions in budget money are just as disgusting as the even more extravagant bells and whistles of Mr. Botox. But they have the same attitude towards the “feeding” of the overwhelming majority of North Caucasians as Abramovich’s yachts have towards ocean cruises for participants of the Russian March.

Russian laws definitely don’t operate in Chechnya. But does anybody really still believe that they operate in Russia?

The problem of the North Caucasus is much deeper and more catastrophic than the ratio of the amount of budget transfers to different regions.

What’s going on in the North Caucasus is increasingly surpassing the bounds of a serious regional conflict and is turning into a central existential problem for the Russian Federation. All of the mistakes, failures, and crimes of Russia’s post-communist government in the realms of security, economics, national policy, and federative organization have become entwined in the Caucasus.

Why did we fight two wars in Chechnya? For Russia’s territorial integrity. But territorial integrity does not imply scorched, unpopulated earth. We fought to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. But we simultaneously destroyed their towns and villages with planes and salvo rocket systems (and the “Grad” system in open fields, with Putin and Stalingrad behind us) and kidnapped innocent people whose corpses were later found bearing signs of torture.

We have constantly proved to the Chechens the very opposite of what we proclaimed – we proved to them with all of our behavior that they are not citizens of Russia and that we have not considered them to be citizens of Russia for a long time already – but their towns and villages are Russian. And we proved this convincingly not only to the Chechens, but to everyone in the Caucasus. They were good at memorizing the visual lessons we taught them.

And this is the fundamental, tragic absurdity of the war that determined its inevitable result.

We lost the war against the Chechen separatists. One of the most brutal field commanders, Ramzan Kadyrov, won. He has such a degree of independence from the Kremlin that even the Soviet officers Dudayev and Maskhadov would never even dream of.

Having had to choose between the very bad and the monstrous as a result of his pre-election policies, Putin, I have to give him credit, chose the very bad. Admitting his defeat, he gave all the power in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his army and paid him compensation. In response, Kadyrov formally declared not so much loyalty to the Kremlin as his own personal union with Putin. The monstrous choice would have been to continue the war to the point of total destruction – in the spirit of Shamanov and Budanov.

Ms. Latynina, with her poetic nostalgia for the romantic times of the Circassian genocide, clearly sees this choice as a shameful rejection of the white man’s burden and a cowardly capitulation before the liberal-leftist dictatorship of multiculturalism. Oh, how wonderfully those shining Russian aristocrat officers butchered the natives back then, and even wrote in their journals – the Yezhednevny Zhurnals of the time – such intoxicating lines: “I f… and cry!”

War on Chechen separatism in the North Caucasus has been replaced by a different war, one generated by the first – the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

Over that time , Islamic terrorism has crept over the entire North Caucasus, where its number of followers has grown and the structures of its Jamaats have strengthened. And just like during the Chechen wars, we are increasing the number of Islamists with our policies. Take, for example, the rhetoric of our (at least for the time being) supreme commander, who is apparently experiencing a certain syndrome of a lack of brutality compared to Uncle Volodya. The entirety of his reaction to the terrorist attacks on Russian territory consists of uninterrupted calls to “utterly destroy” and punish everyone, even “those who do laundry and cook soup for the terrorists.”

Knowing the moral integrity of the counter-terrorism soldiers from Khanty-Mansiysk, sent off to the Caucasus as if on a temporary work assignment, Mr. Badminton, or at least his groomers, can’t be unaware that the only result of these calls is going to be a marked rise in the number of extrajudicial murders of people who are in no way involved with militants and reprisals against relatives of suspected terrorists. And this, in turn, increases the number suicide bombers and leads to new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

This is the twelfth year we’ve been fighting this war without understanding the scale of ongoing tragedy – the entire country is sliding into a civil conflict between nationalities – which the government’s policies are entirely responsible for creating, having long burned this wick from both ends.

In the Caucasus, having unleashed and lost the war, the Kremlin is paying compensation in exchange for a sham submissiveness not only to Kadyrov, but to criminal elites in all other republics. This is used to purchase palaces and the golden pistols that dangle off the rumps of local leaders. But the young, unemployed residents who have lost touch with their communities take off to join in Allah’s wars or are squeezed out of the Caucasus onto the streets of Russian cities.

But that is where a generation of children whose parents have utterly and forever lost out because of the failed economic reforms of the past twenty years has already grown up.

Televised cultural rulers and other masterminds have explained to them that all of their problems have been caused by “uncles in pith helmets” and “non-indigenous criminal gangs” who want to break them apart. Gangs of teenagers from working-class backgrounds who have been deprived of their future have a hard time getting to “uncles in pith helmets” or the heavenly residents of Rublevka, and so they unleash their accumulated fury by beating to death “persons of a non-indigenous skin color.”

And today the two armies of desperados, deceived and robbed by, as it were, the exact same people, have been thrown at one another.

Mentally, there is a growing gap between Russian and Caucasian youths, who have grown up in the midst of a brutal war, first Chechen, and then Caucasian in general.

Young Muscovites march around the city with cries of “f… the Caucasus! F…!” and the young mountain youths walk around the streets of Russian cities in a demonstrably defiant and aggressive fashion. They have developed the psychology of the victors. In their minds, Moscow has lost the Caucasian war.

In mind and in spirit, the Caucasus and Russia are vastly separate entities. Although neither the Kremlin nor the North Caucasian “elites” are prepared to make a formal separation.

The Kremlin is still living with its phantom imperial illusions of wide zones of privileged interests that lie far beyond Russia’s borders, and local leaders, starting with Kadyrov, don’t want to turn down the transfers from Russia’s budget.

The Islamists don’t want to separate, either. They have dreams of a caliphate that includes quite a large part of the Russian Federation.

A situation so humiliating for Russia cannot go on forever.

But there is no easy way out. In today’s political system, with this government, there is no way out in general.

An attempt to put an end to Putin’s “Kadyrov project” by force, as is openly advocated by the professional Russian – poor Zhirinovsky – and therefore by default the majority of demagogues in the Russian March, would mean a full-scale third Chechen war that would become a military, political, and moral catastrophe for Russia. Even those who hate Kadyrov and the Chechens who suffer because of him, and moreover his personal army, would never agree to submissively return to the times of the total tyranny of the federations. To make the same mistakes three times in a row would be total lunacy. Even Putin, the most obstinate about the Chechen issue, understands that.

But that wouldn’t stop the “party of blood,” which hasn’t managed to come to terms with the loss of Chechnya as a zone to feed off of and, perhaps more importantly, as a zone to exercise its drunken power over the lives and deaths of any of its inhabitants. The Kadyrov project has stripped many federal siloviki of these two basic pleasures, having made them exclusive to Kadyrov, and they are genuinely hateful because of this.

They say the price of their support is possible allies in the clannish, inter-Kremlin dismantlement – Kadyrov.

The siloviki who have an infernal desire to work again in Chechnya, of course, are mentally closer to Putin and his gang than to anyone else. But they understand perfectly well that Putin will never purge Kadyrov.

Putting an end to the Kadyrov project would be an official admission of Russia’s defeat in the second Chechen war and the proclamation of a third. This would be a return to 1999 from a much worse starting point. It would mean the total political delegitimization of Putin as “the savior of the fatherland in 1999.”

Our best political publicists have equally convincingly and passionately explained to us that our children were burned in Beslan and the hostages suffocated in Nord-Ost for the sake of the greatness of Russia and the triumph of her geopolitical interests. And where now is this greatness or this triumph?

Putin will definitely become one of the first political victims of the third Chechen war. During all twelve years of his rule I have said repeatedly that the Putin regime is not compatible with the life of the country. But God forbid we escape from Putin at such a price. Moreover that it wouldn’t let us escape from Putinism and its roots.

In 1999, the most notorious Kremlin blackguards (their names are well-known) who lead Operation “Heir” entered into an alliance with siloviki who were thirsty for revenge and, after Basayev’s campaign to Dagestan and the apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and the failed one in Ryazan, unleashed the second Chechen war in order to bring their own, as they thought at the time, obedient marionette to power. It is they who are they real murderers of Kungayeva, Budanov and the other tens of thousands of people, Chechen and Russian, who fell during their small triumphant war.

“It’s a sign of the ineffectiveness of the system of government on the whole when, in order to resolve a basic question, one needs to appeal to the president, governmental representative or governor of a large region,” he said.

He also complained that “governors find out about decisions made by the government from the media – decisions that concern them personally, not things about what the socio-political course is going to be like over the next ten years or about international decisions, but about concrete economic decisions,” Medvedev stressed.

“The authorities have become alienated from one another,” he went on. “Even the governors, who I speak to often – they’re also falling out of the global flow of communication.”

“This means that our structures are bad; they don’t work,” Medvedev said in sum.

The comments come after the president’s recent announcement that he would not be running for reelection in March 2012, and that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would be running in his stead. Moreover, the two admitted that they had already agreed on this course of action at the beginning of Medvedev’s presidency in 2008.

Over the course of his tenure, Medvedev has often made liberal-spirited statements that project an image of progressive leadership and contrast with Putin’s more overtly authoritarian sensibilities. While analysts have long clashed over whether the president’s sentiments actually have any bearing on state policy, the revelation that he was never intended to remain in office longer than four years gives credence to the view that they were never much more than show.

The president’s supporters were hard pressed to maintain their illusions after September 24, when Medvedev announced that he would not be running in the 2011 presidential elections: the gauntlet would instead be passed back to Putin, now likely to remain in office until at least 2024. Some, like Arkady Dvorkovich, were vocal in their disappointment. Others continue to invest their faith in the president’s purported agenda of modernization. It is the latter that opposition leader Garry Kasparov confronts in this new op-ed.

Turning the Chessboard
By Garry Kasparov
October 7, 2011

After the public humiliation of Medvedev on September 24, one would think that even his most devout followers, the ones who tried in vain to find the reform-minded characteristics of a “liberating tsar” in the pale image of Putin’s shadow, had ought to have turned their backs on him. The first one to emerge from their stupor was Sergei Aleksashenko (naturally, the people with the most direct connections to money will react to the operative changes of a situation quicker than others), who decided to refute our image of Medvedev as a weak leader without any willpower. After that, Igor Jurgens told us unabashedly that, regardless of the apocalyptic predictions that he and Yevgeny Gontmakher have been eagerly feeding the Russian press over the course of the past year, life is not going to end after Putin’s return to the Kremlin. “We will continue modernization, because there’s no other option,” – with this phrase, one of the main ideologues of systemic Russian liberalism has once again confirmed that the members of the Institute of Contemporary Development saw the campaign in support of Medvedev as a purely tactical measure related to additional opportunities to influence the situation in the country. Whereas it is impossible for liberals of the court to have strategic differences with the Putin regime.

Today, Ekho Moskvy Editor-in-Chief Aleksei Venediktov also spoke to both the country and the world about Medvedev’s grandiose reforms that we have failed to notice, reforms that do no less than begin to dismantle the Gulag. Medvedev, it turns out, has begun deep reforms in the sphere of human and civil rights, a sphere that not Khrushchev, nor Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin were able to take a stab at. Nikita Sergeyevich, of course, did not have enough of Medvedev’s polish, and he had a proletarian disdain for bourgeois civil rights and freedoms, but it’s his name that’s associated with the release of millions of Gulag prisoners – and, by the way, the denouncement of the cult of personality (Stalin’s, not Putin’s).

Venediktov writes that “the time has come to flip the chessboard and try to see all of this from white’s point of view.” First of all, I don’t understand at all why the Kremlin government is a priori given the white pieces, and, moreover, chess analogies are unlikely to be appropriate when talking about the Putin regime. Chess has clear rules that are obligatory for both sides, and the Kremlin, as we known, are always free to change whatever rules don’t fit into their Procrustean bed of political expediency. In fact, Aleksei Alekseyevich, I would like to note that “flipping the chessboard” is a term from the movie Gentlemen of Fortune, where it became customary to wipe the pieces off the board and smash it over the head of one’s opponent. When talking about chess, we usually say that the board is “turned.” And so, having turned the board, we see the position from white’s side. I see the Yukos case; I see the deaths of Magnitsky and Aleksanyan; Taisiya Osipova, who is being bullied by jailers and prosecutors with impunity; I see a tightening of so-called anti-extremist legislation; there’s a monstrous growth of corruption alongside the total lawlessness of the security services, I see that; I see a political space that has been completely paved over – but deep reforms in our system of rights, excuse me, I don’t see. Obviously, I lack the proper qualifications…

As Studio 360 writes:

This week, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced that Vladimir Putin would be United Russia’s candidate next year, all but assuring him the presidency — possibly until 2024. Many in Russia saw this coming, and the country’s artists have been pioneering new forms of risky, highly public dissent.

Anna Nemtsova, Moscow correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, has been following the growing movement of street artists. Voina (“War”), a collective from St. Petersburg, is responsible for some of the most daring art actions. “They declared a war,” Nemtsova tells Kurt Andersen, “to state corruption, injustice, and the political regime.”

It’s not high art. Voina’s actions (and the videos of them posted online) are designed only to mock and humiliate the Russian political class as humorously as possible, much like the illegal billboards of the collective Monolog. Last year Voina painted a 210-foot phallus on a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Bureau, the former KGB. Because of this and other actions (some of them truly Not Safe for Work), they remain underground to avoid arrest. But at the same time, the ministry of culture awarded Voina an art prize for their rude graffiti. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon we have in Russia,” Nemtsova says. “One hand is giving the prize, the other hand is punishing.”

Listen to the full piece here:

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.