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.”

The event, organized by the unregistered People’s Freedom Party (Parnas), was attended by about 1500 people, including representatives of the opposition groups Solidarity, the United Civil Front, the Other Russia party, the Left Front, the Russian People’s Democratic Union, and numerous other civil and political organizations.

Speakers included Parnas leaders Vladimir Ryzhkov, Boris Nemtsov and Mikhail Kasyanov, Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov, Moscow United Civil Front leader Lolita Tsariya and Solidarity activists Ilya Yashin and Anastasia Rybachenko, as well as rap musician Dino MC.

Speaking as the actual MC, Vladimir Ryzhkov said the rally marked the beginning of a national campaign: “We have five weeks until the elections, and in that time we must achieve some results. We have two tasks. The first is to not give a single vote to United Russia, and the second is to catch anyone falsifying [electoral results].”

According to Ryzhkov, the leading party’s real ratings are much lower than they would like people to think, with the actual figure hovering below 40 percent approval.

In his turn, Eduard Limonov put the blame for the current situation on the Russian intelligentsia. He called on famous writers such as Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Valentin Rasputin to come out and join the oppositionists in protests on the December 4 election day.

Despite disagreements within the opposition as to what mode of action to take on election day (options include voting against every candidate, voting for candidates from any party other than United Russia or staging a boycott), all speakers present agreed that the most important thing was to stand together against United Russia.

Approximately 200 people participated in the rally, which is held regularly on the 12th of every month to provide a forum for Russians to express their collective discontent with government authorities. The protesters hailed from a variety of opposition and civil rights movements, including the Moscow Council, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights, For Human Rights, the Left Front, the Moscow Workers Council, groups of automobile owners, environmental activists, and others.

Gathered near the Kremlin on Teatralnaya Square, the group chanted anti-government slogans such as “it’s time to change the government,” “Russia without Putin,” “it’s time to change course,” and “fictional elections are illegal,” the latter representing protesters’ current main grievance. Several leading activists, including Sergei Udaltsov, Lev Ponomarev, and Konstantin Kosyakin, gave speeches calling for a boycott of December parliamentary elections and telling people to go out into the streets in a sign of protest.

Police had thoroughly cordoned off Teatralnaya Square, with rows of officers lining the path from the square to the nearby metro in order to prevent participants from moving outside of their designated area of protest. The event had been sanctioned by Moscow city authorities, but an application to hold a subsequent march to the presidential administration building was turned down on the basis that it would cause traffic jams. However, Kosyakin proposed that the group march anyway, in spite of the ban.

The would-be marchers were immediately halted by police, with four arrested in total. As of Wednesday night, the activists were still in police holding.

A total of nine Day of Wrath protests have been declared unlawful by Moscow city authorities and cracked down upon between 2010 and 2011. Today’s was the first to be granted sanction in a long time, the ban on the march notwithstanding.

Following a Day of Wrath protest this past August, organizers announced that they were giving government authorities a month to organize a meeting between members of the country’s top leadership and themselves to discuss the demands of participants in detail. The meeting, however, never took place.

The decision was announced at a press conference on Wednesday, which the oppositionists used to discuss cooperative tactics and strategies. “Under the current conditions, we feel that the December 4 parliamentary elections will be illegitimate,” says the declaration. “We call on citizens to boycott these shameful ‘elections’ in any rational way.”

“We call on all honest citizens to come out on December 4 to protests that will be held on the central squares of Russia’s cities and villages,” the declaration goes on.

Among the signees to the document were Solidarity co-leader Garry Kasparov, the organization’s political council organizer Denis Bilunov, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, Islamic Committee of Russia founder Geydar Dzhemal, and leading activists Yury Mukhin, Anatoly Baranov, and Aleksandr Krasnov.

Garry Kasparov said that Russians must ignore the elections and begin building a parallel political reality using contemporary technology, referring to Leonid Volkov’s internet project “Democracy 2.”

Aleksandr Krasnov proposed using December 4 not as an election day, but as the beginning of an act of civil disobedience that would end with the resignation of the ruling authorities. He insisted that the creation of a new political reality is only possible once the current one has been destroyed.

To express their discontent with the illegitimacy of the elections, Krasnov noted that voters can also de-register to strip themselves of voting rights or obtain, but not use, absentee ballots (which in Russia are available from polling stations) to symbolize that they will not be participating.

Anatoly Baranov argued that the only way to carry out the boycott is for every citizen to take their absentee ballot and bring it out to a protest.

A recent survey carried out by the Levada Center showed that more than half of Russians don’t believe that the upcoming elections will be free or fair. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they were certain that the December 4 proceedings will be no more than an imitation of an election and that the government determines who will hold seats in the State Duma.