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.

A Case of Misoperation

The terrible tragedy at the Yaroslavl airport has given new relevance to the discussion about the deterioration of Russia’s air fleet. Indeed, statistics eloquently testify to the fact that the number of airplane catastrophes in Russia even outstrips those in African countries. Affairs in our aviation industry are in a deplorable state – the ruling Russian regime, having freeloading off of deteriorated Soviet infrastructure for the past two decades, has turned out to be incapable not only of developing the only branch of industry that could easily compete in the global market, but even of keeping it afloat. Costing it an incredible amount of strain, the arms race forced the USSR to maintain parity with the US in the aerospace industry, which allowed Soviet aviation, in addition to high-class military technology, to produce fully reliable civilian aircraft. While they do have clearly inferior-quality engines, avionics, and, of course, interior, the aerodynamic characteristics of Soviet planes nevertheless frequently surpassed their foreign colleagues.

On a recent episode of the Polny Albats radio show on Ekho Moskvy, Rector Konstantin Sonin of the Russian School of Economics disdainfully dismissed my mention of the successes of the Soviet aerospace complex – there was no place for the support of the domestic aviation industry in Gaider’s macroeconomic model. In lock-step behind his spiritual advisor Yevgeny Yashin, who tirelessly insists on triumphantly establishing a market economy in Russia, Sonin can only throw up his hands and lament the fall of domestic airplane construction.

The market, you know, regulates supply and demand on its own, and any interference by the state in this delicate process only disturbs the harmonious work of the market mechanisms that have been set up in our country. I would like to ask our homegrown liberal economists how the existence of AvtoVAZ figures into this harmonious scheme, since it continues to release its antiquated products as if nothing had happened and survives only thanks to various forms of state protectionism. In the company of refined British gentlemen, the invisible hand of the market does its work, but everything in the Russian “market” economy is governed by the avaricious paw of administrative resources, always followed by the muzzle of a civil servant grinning in anticipation of some new tasty morsel.

But the cars coming off AvtoVAZ’s conveyor belts have always brought a certain immediate advantage to the people controlling the production process, whether it be the mobsters of the tumultuous ’90s or Putin’s cronies of the stable ’00s. But investment in airplane construction has, as we know, the longest period of returns, stretching far past the limit of the commercial accounts of Russian civil servants and oligarchs. No major infrastructure projects in Russia can begin without the state’s direct involvement, and civil servants, depraved by quick and easy gas and oil dollars, see no reason to authorize long-term investment.

Because of its inextricable natural defects, the oligarchic and bureaucratic capitalism that has been established in Russia under the guise of “liberal reforms” has been incapable of providing the country with a model of sustainable economic development. Mikhail Prokhorov’s bravado-filled monologue has demonstrated once again the complete creative impotence of the Russian billionaires who flood the Forbes lists.

However, externally, the catastrophe in Yaroslavl differs markedly from other similar cases. First of all, the flight was far from typical, which, considering the very high social status of the passengers, presupposes a heightened level of attention to the quality of the flight. And the plane itself was built not so long ago – in 1993, and its last technical inspection was on August 16.

The initial speculation about the reasons for the catastrophe, which had to do with a defective motor or poor-quality fuel, have been refuted, which leaves the remaining possible explanations as either a mistake by the flight crew or a mistake by the ground crew that regulate flights at the airport. Of course, it is too early to come to any conclusions, but the basic circumstances at the airport on the day of the tragedy allow us to speculate that it was precisely the chaos caused by the arrival of the high-level leadership to the World Economic Forum that was the main reason for the catastrophe.

The plane crashed when it failed to gain enough height after takeoff, which almost certainly was caused by an insufficiently long time on the runway or something that appeared in its way. Either of those causes would be directly connected with the work of the airport’s ground crew responsible for takeoffs and landings. There’s no doubt that, on that day, the dispatchers were accompanied by Federal Protective Service officers called upon to ensure the safety of the flight of the state’s highest-ranking figures. We can also recall the crash of the Polish leadership’s plane in Smolensk, when the Russian dispatcher evidently acted on the orders of the leadership, which gave him orders based on political expediency and not aviation security.

By the way, it is not likely to be anytime soon that we will learn the name of the security services officer who probably gave the fatal order to shorten the length of time before takeoff for the Yakovlev-42 that crashed on the runway at the Yaroslavl airport. In today’s Russia, investigations of catastrophes that are in one way or another connected to the high-level leadership are never resolved. Or, the guiltiest parties are always said to be those who, by the will of fate, got in the way of the definitively unrestrained “bosses of the country.” And we can already see how the barometer of the investigation, which is subject to the inexorable laws of the pull of Russian politics, is indicating that the actions of the deceased pilots to supposedly “incorrectly choose the mode of engine operation” was the main reason for the tragedy…

P.S. This cover for Profile magazine can be wholly qualified as a frightening prophecy. The Yakovlev-42 was indeed unable to take off in Yaroslavl, and it very much seems that, even if only indirectly, Dmitri Medvedev had a hand in it. Medvedev himself continues to soar in the political skies all the same, although he doesn’t look much like an eagle. He’s more of a hummingbird – a tiny bird with beautiful wings who buzzes loudly, is extraordinarily greedy, and most importantly, is capable of flying backwards.

Translated by theOtherRussia.org.

Now that the Russian opposition’s newest major political party – Parnas – has been officially denied the opportunity to present itself as an option to Russia voters, opposition activists are left dwelling over possible plans of action for upcoming State Duma elections in October and the presidential election in March. In this editorial, Solidarity co-leader and United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov offers his analysis of the opposition’s options and makes his case for a full-on boycott of the Russian electoral process.

Don’t Register the Government!
By Garry Kasparov
July 7, 2011
Kasparov.ru

The refusal to register Parnas, which was inevitable after Mikhail Prokhorov’s emergence onto the political arena, concluded the attempts of the nonsystemic opposition to act within the bounds of the sanctioned political process. In principle, nothing unexpected happened – one cannot presume a rise in the number of registered parties in the midst of a consistent purge of the political landscape.

Given these conditions, the nonsystemic opposition must define its attitude towards the upcoming electoral farce. However, before proposing any plan of action, it is necessary to at least imagine the contours of the development of events in our country. I would like to find out: what sensible people are there who continue to believe that this government can change as the result of elections? A negative response to this question is largely what defines the opposition’s strategic plan of action – not to try and attain short-term tactical advantages within the bounds of the scenario dictated by the government, but to take a course to consistently delegitimize the government in the eyes of Russian citizens.

There are four possible plans of action: 1) a boycott, which is to say a refusal to participate in any sort of official “electoral” activities; 2) to remove our ballots from voting stations; 3) to ruin our ballots by crossing out each option, writing in different parties or using the ballot to express our opinion about the current government; or 4) to vote for any party besides United Russia. Particularly striking is the second option, which many people consider to be a modification of the third, so as to demonstrate a concrete level of participation and non-participation in the electoral process.

The political council of the opposition movement Solidarity has proposed two slogans for the parliamentary and presidential campaigns – “I won’t take part in a farce” and “put an end to the thieving government” – and ruled that the fourth option was unacceptable. It is from there that we will begin to analyze the possible options from the point of view of the opposition’s strategic plans, instead of attempting to simply react to the government’s actions in one way or another.

We cannot deny that people who continue to insist on the fourth option have certain logic. If it were to be successfully carried out, the weakening of United Russia theoretically could lead to the weakening of Putin and to a schism within the elite. But this type of scenario would presume at least some degree of oppositionist mentality within the political parties registered by the Kremlin. The recent events in St. Petersburg have once again demonstrated the extent of this ostentatious opposition.

In order to push Matvienko into the post of Federation Council Speaker, a municipal election has to be held, during which, as is perfectly obvious, the opposition has every chance to flood the unpopular mayor. But it is precisely at such moments that the systemic opposition is forced to work out their own Kremlin registrations.

Following the Communists, who found the positive side of the political biography of former Komsomol beauty Matvienko, former Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov also chose not to attempt to damage the reputation of his supposed main political rival. This political robot, reprogrammed with an oppositionist mentality, is constantly malfunctioning due to the signal that remains in his unformatted brain of allegiance to his creator. And now, submitting to the control switch, Mironov mechanically repeats the words about how desirable Matvienko’s departure from Petersburg is even at the cost of her appointment as speaker of the Federation Council.

So do the proponents of voting against United Russia really believe that this opposition with Zyuganov and Mironov – let’s try not to remember Zhirinovsky – is capable of changing the situation in the country? But then again, it’s clear that the call to cast your vote to any party besides United Russia by politicians from the liberal flank is nothing more than a call to vote for Right Cause. It is obvious that precisely Prokhorov and Right Cause will be the main beneficiaries of this sort of algorithm of action by the opposition, since the shrunken Yabloko, which has de-facto disappeared from the country’s political landscape, cannot present them with serious competition (nobody should be misled by Yabloko’s convincing victory in a recent Ekho Moskvy radio poll).

Unlimited material resources, plus the favor of the Kremlin that opens the doors to every television channel, guarantees Right Cause with the opportunity to present information about itself to practically every voter. And regardless of the glaring inadequacies of Prokhorov’s candidacy, which will undoubtedly be used by United Russia’s campaign, precisely this party has every chance to become the main force behind the protest voting movement. The results of such “elections” will be the creation of a new liberal model intended to negate the negative effect of the establishment of the Putin dictatorship, which is not at all constrained by excessive formalities.

In the public conscience, the other three options are seen just as much to be a refusal to take part in electoral procedures. That said, the second and third options are labeled as active forms of protest.

The third option is technically simple to carry out, since the actions of a person ruining a ballot are not visually different than those of one who is checking off boxes in a disciplined manner. Nevertheless, this option still indicates one’s concrete participation in voting. Ideally, ballots dropped in the ballot box would of course be counted in the presence of observers. But don’t think anyone harbors any illusions about the possibility of setting up any real observation of the vote count in any significant amount of polling stations. Therefore, the percentage of spoiled ballots is going to remain within the boundaries defined by the Kremlin’s manipulators.

The second option, as well as a modification of it proposed by Eduard Limonov – to officially demand to be stricken from the list of voters – has in mind a need for the manifestation of civic courage. Even if activists from oppositionist organizations have no problem removing their ballots from voting stations (and even burning them afterwards), such actions are hard to realize for many ordinary citizens, especially in small towns and rural areas. And residents of large cities could lose their decisiveness to take their ballots with them if faced with resistance from police or plain-clothes cops stationed to control the actions of voters. Is there really any doubt that the government will use all possible methods of psychological pressure to the fullest extent possible against the average voter if the opposition chose the second option?

Most representatives of the nonsystemic opposition call the first option a priori meaningless since, by today’s official rules, voter turnout does not affect whether or not an election is valid. However, it is entirely unclear why the government, which jealously follows even the slightest changes in the rating of public trust in the tandem and in their “Party of Crooks and Thieves,” would react so emotionlessly to a sharp drop in turnout on voting day. Of course, this would not lead to any immediate changes in the country, and moreover, Churov’s agency would carry out a timely, massive ballot stuffing in whatever amount necessary. But the primary indicator of the success or failure of the actions of the nonsystemic opposition should be not the fictional results announced by the Central Electoral Committee, but the real number of people who refuse to support the occupying regime.

The government has fully excluded the possibility for an alternative to appear within the bounds of the normal political process. The opposition must create a contrast using new technological possibilities and attract a significant number of followers to its ranks. This task will not be resolved by mobilizing all resources in the one day designated by the government as voting day. It is laborious work that requires changes within the very algorithm of the opposition’s activities, in restructuring its system of thought, and in its readiness to develop an acting alternative on every level of government, from federal to municipal. And the first step on this path should be a boycott of the “voting” procedures held out by an illegitimate government.