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.

Authors of the report say that while Russia is making progress towards fulfilling the 1985 European Charter on Local Self-Government, which calls for the political, administrative, and financial independence of local government authorities, it must reintroduce direct elections for regional leaders, defend citizens’ current ability to elect mayors,  and begin seriously fighting against corruption.

Particularly problematic, notes the report, is Russia’s federal law regulating local self-government, especially a recent amendment that allows mayors and regional leaders to be fired by the Kremlin.

If Russia brought back direct elections for regional leaders, it could “bring back the former level of regional democracy that Russia enjoyed until 2004,” the authors say.

There was also a recommendation that Russia ease the process of creating and registering political parties – a major complaint of opposition groups. Moreover, conditions should be created so that independent candidates have the ability to participate at all levels of local elections.

The Kremlin was not pleased with the report.

Federation Council member Svetlana Orlova said that “it doesn’t follow to impose [the report’s] point of view onto Russia,” because “there are different procedures in the countries of the Council of Europe, like, for example, there are no direct elections for the heads of regions in Sweden.”

“Nobody can reproach Russia for a lack of democracy on the local level,” Orlova went on. “The system that has developed in Russia is absolutely normal, and it corresponds with all democratic norms.”

Russia has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1996.

Various structures of the council have repeatedly criticized the Russian authorities for many of its policies. In June, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly issued a resolution condemning human rights violations in the North Caucasus. Moreover, it said that the situation with violations of human rights and of the supremacy of law in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan is the worst in the entire geographic territory covered by member-countries of the Council of Europe.

Approximately seventy people attended Wednesday’s event, which was organized by opposition leaders to discuss the history, current state, and future of their campaign against the prime minister. Denis Bilunov, executive director of the opposition movement Solidarity, said the petition was originally intended for social and political organizations to sign, not the general public. However, he said, it turned out that the petition’s message appealed to a far greater number of ordinary Russians than was expected, so a website was set up to collect signatures online. Over 12 thousand people signed the petition in the first week alone.

Bilunov additionally spoke about the technical problems faced by the campaign, including frequent attacks by hackers that have repeatedly disabled the petition’s website. He also said that a full third of the 42 thousand signatories that had been collected by Wednesday have expressed interest in more actively supporting the campaign.

United Civil Front leader and Solidarity bureau member Garry Kasparov spoke at the meeting as well. Given that anti-government opposition groups face a great deal of repression in Russia, Kasparov said that the organizers would have considered even five thousand signatures to have been a success. He spoke about the fact that the petition has been subjected to an information blockade in the media; state-run television channels remain the main source of news for most Russians, and all of them have failed to mention the petition in their reporting. Nevertheless, said Kasparov, the thousands of messages of support and direct connections formed between citizens on the petition’s website make the project worth doing.

“The demographic and biographic cross-section of the signatories shows that there are a great deal more people in Russia who are discontent than they want us to know,” said Kasparov. “We don’t know yet what will come of all this, but 42 thousand people, even by today’s draconian laws, already almost constitutes a political party.”

Prominent political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky pointed out that for all the verbal attacks by the campaign’s critics, not a single person has come forward to speak out in defense of the prime minister or to refute the petition’s accusations.

“This is testimony to the fact that the regime is in a state of decay, insofar as there are no people who believe in any kind of ideology,” Piontkovsky said. “Regimes like this usually end in the collapse of the elite.” The political analyst went on to say that he didn’t believe Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and his political team would be able to successfully rid themselves of the prime minister – only because they fear being left alone with a society that would continue to raise uncomfortable issues with the government.

Piontkovsky also proposed a number of measures to increase awareness of the campaign against Prime Minister Putin, including serious preparations for a rally in Moscow, which he proposed by held in the fall.

“Even three thousand people demanding that Putin be dismissed would be a serious political event,” he said.

Despite the already massive number of signatures on the petition, attendees of the meeting agreed that the campaign needed to move from the internet into the living world to become an effective force for change. Participants proposed a number of measures to that end: increasing awareness that the petition does indeed have a great deal of support from Russian society, involving various political movements in their campaign, using social networking and blogs to spread information, and holding one-man demonstrations – the only form of protest that does not require government sanction to be held legally in Russia – to collect more signatures.

Kasparov noted that there was a limit to how many anti-government protesters the authorities could endure before they became decidedly afraid. “If in Moscow, for example, 100 thousand people come out into the streets, many of the people in that crowd are going to turn out to be the relatives and friends of a lot of police officers and OMON [riot police] officers, so we don’t know if they would carry out their orders” to break up the event, he said. “Through our actions, we are changing the balance of power in society.”

Kasparov said that Prime Minister Putin’s resignation was the campaign’s primary political goal because it would free President Medvedev to implement legislation that would allow for free and fair elections. Currently, politics at every level and in every region of Russia is almost entirely monopolized by United Russia, the Kremlin-backed political party headed by the prime minister himself. What isn’t controlled by United Russia is largely controlled by Kremlin-loyal opposition groups, such as A Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. The government has done virtually nothing to address the widespread accusations of fraud that consistently come up during major elections.

Since its inception on March 10, 2010, the petition calling for Vladimir Putin to resign has been signed by a wide variety of opposition figures, human rights advocates, public figures, journalists, and other activists. Among the first to sign were prominent rights activists Elena Bonner and Lev Ponomarev, Solidarity bureau members Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, and Ilya Yashin, Yabloko party members Maksim Reznik, Boris Vishnevsky and Aleksei Melnikov, journalists Yevgeny Ikhlov, Anatoly Baranov and Aleksandr Ryklin, and writers Vladimir Bukovsky and Viktor Shenderovich. At the time of publication, 43,012 people had signed the petition in all.

Commission member Andreas Gross told the press that the Russian government had failed to observe the right to free assembly. “It is not apparently to the Russian government that the right to free assembly is a basic human right and should not be a topic for debate,” said Gross.

Russian opposition groups have long complained of brutal repression in response to their rallies, which are usually denied sanction by regional authorities. Of particular note are the Strategy 31 rallies organized by the Other Russia coalition, dedicated to the 31st article of the Russian constitution guaranteeing freedom of assembly. Moscow city authorities have categorically refused to sanction the rallies, although organizers have chosen to hold them regardless. Each of the half-dozen rallies has ended with scores of detentions and brutal repression by the police.

While the Moscow mayor’s office has insisted that the Strategy 31 rallies would be sanctioned if the organizers agreed to move them to another location, Gross said that he found such pretexts untenable. Moreover, he said that he made it clear to government authorities that beating members of unsanctioned protests was not acceptable.

Commission member György Frunda brought attention to problems in Russia’s electoral system. The current 7 percent threshold that a political party must reach during elections to hold seats in the State Duma is too high, he said. “The electoral system on the whole is in need of change,” as was the state prosecutor’s office, Frunda added. Gross said in conclusion that the commission hoped to see an increase in the number of parliamentary parties in the State Duma after the next set of elections.

Currently, the only political parties in the State Duma are the Kremlin-backed United Russia party(holding 70 percent of the seats), the Communist Party (12.7 percent), and the loyal oppositionist parties A Just Russia (8.9 percent) and the Liberal Democratic Party (8.4 percent). The 7 percent threshold makes it very difficult for opposition parties to gain seats, especially given that elections in Russia are already generally accompanied by widespread voter fraud in favor of United Russia.

The monitoring commission plans to return to Russia in July, and will release a full report of its findings in the beginning of 2011.