According to Sergei Davidis, one of the organizers of the “For Fair Elections” march, a sticking point was that Deputy Mayor Aleksandr Gorbenko proposed a route that would keep the protesters outside of the Garden Ring, which encircles central Moscow. When Gorbenko rejected oppositionists’ requests to allow the march to be held closer to the center of the city, the organizers apparently felt they had no other choice but to agree.

But even the status of that proposal – the city’s own – was unclear.

“We were told that we’ll get an official written response tomorrow per our request to hold the march from Luzhniki to Krimsky Bridge,” said Davidis. “We’ll have to wait and see what we’re going to do after that.”

Left Front coordinator Sergei Udaltsov also confirmed that organizers had no luck in reaching an agreement over the route with city authorities.

He stressed that the city had insisted that the oppositionists gather at Luzhniki since the very beginning of negotiations, and had refused to make any concessions.

“Organizers of the march and rally still intend to insist on holding the events in the center of the city,” said Udaltsov.

The mayor’s office first turned down the march’s proposed route during a meeting on January 20, when Gorbenko claimed that it would be impossible “from the point of view of safety.” However, the move followed a long tradition on the part of Moscow authorities of driving oppositionists to the less-visible outskirts of the city under the pretext of preventing traffic problems.

The February 4 march will be the third mass protest against falsified election results in the past two months. The demonstrations have been the largest Russia has seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, and so far more than 19 thousand people have pledged on Facebook to turn out for the next one.

Yashin was released on Wednesday at 2:30 am in northwest Moscow. According to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, he was feeling fine.

Navalny was released from another facility at 2:35 am to a waiting crowd of journalists and supporters. The whistleblowing blogger said that intends to file a complaint against police for forcibly transferring him from a detention center to a police station.

“Ilya Yashin and I were asked if we’d like to go to the police station, but we declined. Several hours ago I was called supposedly to sign a document, after which someone in a t-shirt and flip-flops forced me into a car and took me away,” Navalny said. “I consider this to be unlawful and am going to complain about these actions by the police.”

Both oppositionists were arrested on December 5 following a mass rally at Moscow’s Chistye Prudy and sentenced to 15 days in jail for supposedly “violating police orders.” They were among 300 other demonstrators arrested out of a crowd of approximately 10,000; about 60 were given jail sentences from between 10 and 15 days each.

Oppositionists have scheduled another mass rally to protest the election results for December 24.

Olga Kurnosova, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the United Civil Front, said that protesters gathered on Pionerskaya Square and shouted slogans including “Power to the millions, not to millionaires!” “Putin, step down!” and “We are for fair elections!”

Along with Kurnosova, Oksana Dmitrieva from A Just Russia and leading opposition politician Boris Nemtsov made speeches at the rally.

While the protest had been sanctioned by city authorities, witnesses reported that around ten armored military trucks were seen making their way towards the center of the city on Sunday morning.

In addition, police briefly detained Nemtsov at the Moskovsky train station and demanded an explanation for his trip to the city.

According to Grani.ru, the police presented Nemtsov with a document labeling him as a “leader of extremists.” The opposition leader was released after explaining that he had come to participate in a sanctioned rally.

The incident compacted Nemtsov’s fears that he is being watched. “The police continue to follow me earnestly, and I suspect that my freedom could soon come to an end,” he said.

Accusations of “extremist” activity are commonly used by Russian government authorities to persecute or marginalize opposition politicians.

Also on Sunday, the Russian Central Electoral Commission rejected an application by fellow opposition leader Eduard Limonov to run for president.

The commission stated that the rejection was based on a lack of minutes from a meeting that is required by law to be held in support of the candidate.

Limonov denounced the decision as politically motivated and promised to challenge it in court. On December 15, the oppositionist found himself without a physical place to hold the meeting, since the hall he had rented was abruptly closed for “urgent repairs” the day of the meeting.

On Wednesday, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) accepted the documents required to file the request. “Commission member Elena Dubrovina gave Limonov a document confirming that the necessary documents have been submitted in the appropriate form and within the appropriate timeframe,” said Aleksandr Averin, executive committee member of Limonov’s Other Russia party.

According to Averin, the CEC should announce whether it will or not it will register Limonov on December 20 – four days before opposition activists have scheduled another mass demonstration to protest what they say are fraudulent parliamentary election results.

Generally marginalized by the Kremlin and Russia’s state-run media, Limonov was nearly prevented from gathering the proper number of signatures needed to apply for registration when a December 11 meeting of his supporters was suspiciously cancelled.

Writing on his LiveJournal, Limonov described how police had hung banners explaining that the building where the meeting was to be held was cancelled due to “urgent repairs.”

The oppositionist described the conversation between him and an officer at the scene:

Me – You are violating the law, by law we have the right [to hold this meeting]; on November 30 I submitted a written announcement to the CEC that we would be holding a meeting to launch my candidacy at precisely this address, since we paid rent and so on.
Lieutenant – The police have nothing to do with this, the property owners are making repairs… we were called in to keep order.
Me – This is a political crime… they were holding meetings in these very auditoriums yesterday evening…

The abrupt closure was eerily similar to tactics used to prevent opposition leader Garry Kasparov from running for Russian president in 2007.

Russian electoral law requires 500 signatures to be collected at a meeting of a potential candidate’s supporters in order for the candidate to be registered. Forced to collect signatures in a nearby bus, Limonov nevertheless obtained 800.

One of the conclusions that can be reached from the December 4 elections is that the “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has, once again, brilliantly lived up to its name. Cheating and thievery have ceased to even be an open secret, and it involved not only the massive falsifications that the party of power needed in order to hold on to their crumbling power vertical, but also the sharp rise in civil activeness, with large number of people unexpectedly refusing to play the role of silent viewers in the Kremlin’s marionette theater.

Experts in electoral math will soon undoubtedly be able to show us graphics of United Russia’s actual results. The unnatural vote spread across the various regions of the country, along with the numerous violations documented by observers at polling stations and in electoral commissions, will provide irrefutable evidence that Churov’s agency worked to over-fulfill their plan at the rate of a Stakhanovite.

By all accounts, United Russia’s objective results even across the entire country aren’t above 30 percent, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg the party in power suffered a crushing defeat, loosing not only to the Communist Party, but even, most likely, to A Just Russia. This casts doubt upon the professional integrity of our so-called sociological services, whose “public opinion polls” predicted just a week ago that United Russia would have the support of 53 percent of the population. But if the Foundation for Public Opinion and the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion aren’t ashamed of their Kremlin-provided roofs, then one would hope to hear from the Levada Center, which holds its reputation more dear, an explanation as to why their predictions turned out to be even more optimistic than the final results of Mr. Churov’s agency.

Another result of December 4 is that we can be certain that the period of social apathy that Russian society succumbed to ten years ago is now a relic of the past.

But today’s main question, of course, is about the readiness of the systemic opposition to begin a fight against United Russia’s dictate. It would be naive to say that the Communist Party, LDPR, or United Russia together with Yabloko are going to achieve a full nullification of the falsified elections, but the people who voted for them have the right to expect, at minimum, a demand to hold a recount where mass violations are uncovered, and the criminal prosecution of officials guilty of committing and hiding these crimes.

In addition, the systemic opposition is going to have to resolve the question of fielding candidates for president. Now that it’s been spooked, the government is going to try to minimize its risks and prevent the rise of any notable figures who are capable of uniting the protest electorate, which is exploding in front of their eyes. It’s not worth waiting for any revelations from the Communist Party or LDPR. Although, the Communists are completely capable of finding a more suitable candidate than Zyuganov, who feels at home in his comfortable role as the government’s sparring partner. But for A Just Russia, if it is, contrary to expectations, prepared to challenge the Putin regime, one potential solution comes to mind. Oksana Dmitrieva, whose success in a presidential election is something out of a science fiction novel – at least in the two capitals – could become the candidate whose presence makes a second round entirely plausible.

The events of the forthcoming week will put an end to the dispute that the nonsystemic opposition has been having for the past several months. The various plans of action for December 4 rested on one key point of disagreement: whether or not conditions exist where the Kremlin-fed systemic opposition could agree upon a bunt against Putin. A more favorable situation than the present is impossible to imagine.

If Mironov and Ko demonstrate their readiness to begin a fight to dismantle the regime by unleashing a real pre-electoral campaign attacking the national leader with the same principles with which they were ready to “flush the Party of Swindlers and Thieves down the toilet,” then I will be ready to publicly admit my mistake in judging the ineffectiveness of existing electoral mechanisms.

But if the actions of the systemic opposition lead to the emasculation of popular protest and turn out to be just a storm in a teacup that ends with the redistribution of Duma portfolios and financial flows, then I expect that my opponents will publicly admit that it is impossible to change the Putin regime within any sort of framework of electoral procedures and will begin to join in with our collective efforts to create an alternative list of voters. Incidentally, this is one of the very rare cases where I’d like to admit that I’m wrong…

Predicable as it may be, then, it was nevertheless surreal to hear the news on Sunday that the Kremlin-loyal opposition party A Just Russia had been charged with violating public transportation laws for a bus advertisement that officials say contained “agitation against United Russia.” Under Russian law, it is illegal to spread negative propaganda against a political party or candidate, and it was on this basis that the charges were filed. But while A Just Russia had recently taken up the slogan “For Russia Without Swindlers and Thieves” and included it in the offending ad, there was no explicit mention of United Russia itself. The Russian authorities, it seems, have begun to take the connection between United Russia and “swindlers and thieves” for granted.

A Just Russia candidate Alena Popova posted a scan of the official charges online. The red check indicates the article the ad supposedly violates, reading “advertisement information (interior, exterior) without client’s agreement;” the handwriting reads “agitation against United Russia.”

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.

On April 10, a conference on the international monitoring of parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011-2012 was held in Moscow. Russian human rights advocates called for fundamental reform of legislation governing elections, parties and public associations.

Noting that Russia no longer has direct elections for regional governors and arguing that parliamentary and presidential elections “have turned into an empty ritual,” Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva said that it was only possible to change the situation through protests and demonstrations. Head of the electoral watchdog Golos, Liliya Shibanova, spoke of “a multilayered system of filtration during and falsification of elections” and called for “strict monitoring and an appeal to international organizations.” And leader of the Interregional Association of Voters, Andrei Buzin, added that the new makeup of the Central Electoral Committee (TsIK), headed by Vladimir Churov – famous for what has been called his “unsurpassed” loyalty to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – “provides the basis to assume that the coming elections will be held like past ones.”

The activists said the TsIK should only “point out violations committed by candidates” and that the courts should be responsible for denying parties registration or taking them off the ballot, not them.

The minimum number of members needed to form a party should be reduced to 5,000 from the current 45 thousand, they added.

Members of the conference called on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Parliament to use their influence to “assist with the registration of parties,” to do away with censorship of the mass media and to stop “the persecution of the opposition” in Russia.

European Parliament deputies Kristiina Ojuland and Heidi Hautala said the parliament already has a group doing preliminary monitoring of upcoming Russian elections that includes members of all of the country’s political forces.

“We should have the same policies toward Russia as we do towards Belarus,” Hautala said, noting that the European Union has already placed sanctions on Belarusian civil servants.

Russian opposition politicians present at the meeting spoke about the persecution of the opposition. Other Russia party leader Eduard Limonov said the recently created People’s Freedom Party was “doomed to be denied registration” and that there was no point in directly monitoring elections if they “are already being falsified right now,” when the authorities have already denied registration to seven other opposition parties.

One of the leaders of the People’s Freedom Party, Boris Nemtsov, said the Russian authorities are not preparing for elections, but for “a special operation to preserve money and power under the slogan ‘we’re going to fight to the end.’”

On February 17, the European Parliament issued a critical resolution on Russia’s human rights situation. Deputies expressed concern over the conviction in the second criminal case against oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, and called upon the Russian authorities to do everything possible to institute a fair and transparent judicial system in the country as previously promised by the Russian president.

According to Andrei Buzin, head of Golos’s monitoring branch, the organization recorded 720 cases of violations for the March 13 elections, in which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party dominated in all 12 regions where voting took place.

There were three types of violations, Buzin explained. The first has to do with the tallying of votes and the removal of electoral observers, as was noted in the cities of Syktyvkar, Vladimir, Adygea, and the Kirov and Kaliningrad regions. There were also cases of falsified voting documents, where people vote for other voters, and violations of remote and absentee ballot procedures.

Buzin attributed the rise in violations with the upcoming campaign for federal elections to the State Duma.

“This is about checking our public’s reaction before the federal elections,” he said.

It is worth noting that Russia’s Central Electoral Commission only recorded 90 complaints of violations.

The head of Golos’s analytical branch, Aleksandr Kynev, said the rise in violations is a sign of a general fall in United Russia’s ratings.

Kynev said the fall also explains the widespread use of propaganda campaigns to bash opposition candidates. Such campaigns and violations occur when local authorities and party branches are unable to get the number of votes ordered by the ruling party through other means, he explained.

The reasoning of the local authorities is that “if we can’t raise our ratings, we’ll damage other ones,” Kynev said.

Despite the negative campaigning, the number of voters across Russia who decided to cast their vote for an opposition candidate appears to be on the rise. The Communist Party received more votes than usual in a majority of voting regions, and A Just Russia saw improvements in the central regions.

“Despite generally very difficult circumstances and very harsh pressure, real protest is growing and the people are ready to vote for a semblance of an alternative, even when there isn’t one,” Kynev said.

In the past, activists have proposed boycotting elections, turning in spoiled ballots, and raising awareness of the obvious fraud the government carries out. In one year of particularly blatant falsifications, deputies from the three parties besides United Russia that held seats in the State Duma walked out in dramatic protest. In the end, President Dmitri Medvedev brushed off all objections and claimed the election results “reflected voter preferences.”

With a new set of elections in Russia’s regions coming up in March, famous activist lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny has proposed a new strategy for the opposition: get out the vote for any party besides United Russia. He explained his reasoning on a blog post on Thursday:

Election day is going to be in March. The “elections” are being held in ten regions.

Afterwards, at the end of 2011, there will be federal “elections” for the State Duma.

We all understand perfectly well that these aren’t real elections – it is simply an unlawful process that results in representatives from the Party of Swindlers and Thieves – United Russia informing us that “we’ve received 65% of the vote.”

What is to be done in this situation?

I am forced to admit that my most dearly beloved topic – boycotting elections – has failed. It just doesn’t work.

That is to say: nobody, of course, goes to the polls – not because they’re boycotting them, but because they simply don’t pay any attention to them.

I think that, for all the normal people in our country, the time has come to change political strategy.

Our new conception should be: GO TO THE POLLS AND VOTE AGAINST UNITED RUSSIA.

That is to say, for any other party – it makes no difference.

You don’t need to explain to me that A Just Russia is no different than United Russia, that Zhirik [LPDR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky - ed.] is awful, and that the Communist Party is ancient.

It makes no difference in the slightest. You are voting against the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.

We need to ruin United Russia’s monopoly over the government.

Why should we do this if they’re going to “draw in” 65% anyway?
Elections are, in any case, a source of stress for this vile government. Falsification is a difficult process that involves many thousands of people (members of the electoral commission, etc.).

Administrations in the regions where elections are going to be held in March will be doing basically nothing besides creating administrative falsifications. It’s hard enough to draw in 65% from the real 35%. Drawing 65% from 20% is going to be even harder. We need to exacerbate their stress.

Will this be successful in creating problems?
And how. Right now, 15-20% of the population actually goes to the polls. There’s a very large amount of absentee (read: fake) voting. That is to say, to put it simply, the vote for United Russia is the vote of 7-10% of voters. If we bring 1% of the population that didn’t go earlier to the polls, we create a big problem. If it’s 5% – a colossal one. If it’s 15%, then

How is this better than a boycott?
Because this kind of action will be supported by all activists of various parties and we won’t have to deal with the long, pointless ruckus of arguing with them over a boycott. We will actually get hundreds of thousands of supporters of our campaign right away.

The goal of the campaign is simple. Using online and offline methods to maximally promote two simple messages:

1. United Russia is a party of swindlers and thieves.
2. Go to the polls without fail and vote against United Russia. For any other party.

To promote the campaign, Navalny has begun a poster competition:

Strictly speaking, the coming elections and their results mean nothing for us.

And in general, all of this can be done without strain in an entertaining way that would be fun.

To start, I would propose holding a contest for a trash poster.

There are three requirements:

- Posters should be in a4 format, so that everyone can print them on a home (office) printer and hang them in entryways, elevators, next to desks in offices, in office cafeterias/bathrooms. Bring one to your grandmother and hang it on her door so the old lady remembers how to vote.

- The poster can show whatever, but it should clearly deliver two basic messages: 1) United Russia is a party of swindlers and thieves 2) Go to the polls and vote for any party, but against United Russia.

However the message gets through is unimportant. Whether it’s with pictograms or holograms.

You could, in fact, use verse from the poetry contest on Twitter. They can be found there under the #er tag.

Stuff like:

- Get your relatives a job in the Council of Directors!
Join the Party of Swindlers and Thieves!

- Not afraid to rob in front of the entire public?
We need you for the party of swindlers and thieves!

Navalny plans to eventually draw up a list of all the submissions and a corresponding poll, but for now, here are a few worth noting:

“United Russia – party of thieves and swindlers”

“He voted for United Russia. Shameful! Don’t repeat the mistake!”

“We’re eating Russia. Soon we’ll eat everything.”

“He always votes for United Russia. If ordered, he’ll also kick you in the face.”

“This is what the Great Wall of China would look like if it was built by specialists from the party United Russia”

“Method No. 34: Sell a third of all exported oil through your personal friend’s company. Learn more about this and other methods of sawing up Russia at rospil.info”

“Don’t rock the boat! Vote for United Russia!”

“Before they swipe your last pair of pants, vote against the party of swindlers and thieves! ‘United Russia’ ‘Any other party’”