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.

Considering that Russian internet service providers have blocked access to the petition from 50 percent of the country and that hacker attacks have rendered it periodically inaccessible to anyone at all, the number of Russians who agree with that statement is likely to be much higher. Nevertheless, given the number of signatures the document has received, opposition leader Garry Kasparov says he is confident that “we can already bravely confirm that any pessimistic expectations have been entirely refuted.”

In creating such a petition, explained former Deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition is hoping to achieve a series of common and long-held goals: honest elections, political competition, a parliament that serves as a venue for discussion, and a change in the ruling elite. “It is obvious that Putin will never voluntarily relinquish power in Russia,” the petition asserts. Blaming the prime minister for brutally suppressing dissent, fostering corruption, and failing to modernize and develop the country, the authors of the petition conclude that “this is a cross that Russia can bear no longer.”

A translation of the petition’s manifesto by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is reproduced in its entirety below.

The petition in Russian can be found at Putinavotstavku.ru.

Putin Must Go
The Anti-Putin Manifesto, RFE/RL

Citizens of Russia! The recognition that the ruling elite has led our country into a historical dead end has prompted us to issue this statement.

The transfer of virtually unlimited power by the [Yeltsin-era] Family, which was trying to guarantee its own security, to a man of dubious reputation who was distinguished neither by talent nor by the requisite life or professional experience has resulted predictably in the serious degradation of all institutions of state governance.

Even a significant portion of the ruling “elite” feels that a change is necessary, as attested by the loud reaction to [President Dmitry Medvedev’s] opus “Forward, Russia!” But Medvedev’s modernization project bears a distinctly artificial character and is aimed at a single goal – to redo the decorations while maintaining the nature of an authoritatian-kleptocratic regime.

We state that the sociopolitical construction that is killing Russia and has now bound the citizens of our country has one architect, one custodian, and one guardian. His name is Vladimir Putin.

We declare that no essential reforms can be carried out in Russia today as long as Putin controls real power in the country.

We declare that the dismantling of the Putin regime and the return of Russia to the path of democratic development can only begin when Putin has been deprived of all levers of managing the state and society.

We declare that during the years of his rule, Putin has become the symbol of corrupt and unpredictable country that is pitiless in its treatment of its own citizenry. It is a country in which citizens have no rights and are for the most part in poverty. It is a country without ideals and without a future.

If, as the Kremlin propagandists love to repeat, Russia was on its knees during the Yeltsin period, then Putin and his minions have pushed its face into the filth.

In the filth of the authorities’ contempt we find not only individual rights and freedoms, but human life itself as well.

In the filth of a false and feeble imitation of political and social institutions – from the bureaucratic phantom of United Russia to the Nazi-like Putin Youth.

In the filth of soul- and mind-warping televised obscurantism that is turning one of the most educated nations in the world into a soulless, amoral mob.

In the filth of total thievery and corruption emanating from the very pinnacle of Russian power. If not for the years in which Putin roamed the galleries of the Kremlin, the billionaires of his inner circle –Abramovich, Timchenko, the Kovalchuks, Rotenberg – would not exist. Nor would the parasitical state corporations of his friends – these black holes of the Russian economy.

Having begun his rise to power with the epical statement about “wiping them out in their outhouses,” Putin over the course of nearly 11 years has used this universal “tool” of ruling the country, and it has proven particularly effective in regard to his political opponents and business competitors.

Any political, social, or economic dissent is immediately suppressed: in the best cases, by administrative restrictions, but often by the bully clubs of the riot police, by criminal prosecution, by physical violence, and even by murder. Putin has proven that he is willing to destroy his personal opponents by any means available.

During the time that Putin has been at the pinnacle of state power, everything that could be ruined has been ruined. Pension and administrative reforms have been undone. There has been no reform of the armed forces, the secret services, or the law enforcement and judicial systems. The health-care system remains in its previous, pathetic condition.

The decline of education and science, which has been farmed out to the Ozero cooperative group, has reached the point where the “titans” of Russian scientific thought must be considered people like Petrik and Gryzlov.

Ten whole years have been lost – years when a boom in hydrocarbon and metals prices could have been used to modernize the country and carry out a structural reorganization of the economy. That is why the blow of the global economic crisis hit Russia so mercilessly, and it is far from over for us.

Having been named prime minister by Yeltsin, Putin not only was unable to correct the fatal mistakes made by his predecessors and put out the flames in the Caucasus, but his policies managed to raise that conflict to a new level that is capable of destroying the integrity of the country.

The “Kursk,” the Nord-ost theater, Beslan, the tens of thousands who died in the internecine second Cacasus war, the thousands who have lost their lives in infrastructure disasters, who burned in homes for the elderly and the handicapped that were unfit for human habitation, the dozens of murdered journalists and human rights activists and political opponents of the regime, and the ordinary victims of sadistic police lawlessness – these are the gravestones of the years of Putin’s rule.

These are the unexposed secrets of the Putin regime: the [1999] entry of [Shamil] Basayev into Daghestan; the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk; the so-called training exercise in Ryazan.

People have long since stopped being surprised by Putin’s incapacity for strategic thinking. He is unable to see what the world will be like in 10-15 years and what place Russia can and must occupy in it. He is not capable of evaluating the real threats and risks facing the country, and that means he is in no position to correctly plan possible moves or identify potential allies and rivals.

A clear illustration of these short-sighted polices are the recent surrender agreements with China, in which Putin lightly erased the Russian Far East and Siberia off the map.

Further evidence of Putin’s lack of understanding of the future is his maniacal passion to build gas and oil pipelines in all thinkable and unthinkable directions; his initiation of expensive, ambitious projects (like the Sochi Olympics and the bridge to Russian Island), which are absolutely wrong for a country in which a large portion of the population lives below the poverty line.

Having temporarily moved form the presidential chair to the prime minister’s offices and having left in the Kremlin an obedient placeholder who is “of the same blood” – a modern Simeon Bekbulatovich – Putin has created an openly unconstitutional construction for governing the country for life.

It is obvious that Putin will never voluntarily relinquish power in Russia. His fierce intention to rule for life is no longer based on a thirst for power itself so much as on the fear of being held responsible for what he has done. For the Russian people, this is humiliating. But for the country it is fatally dangerous to have a ruler like Putin. This is a cross that Russia can bear no longer.

As the Putin grouping feels it the ground falling from under its feet, it could at any moment move from targeted repression to mass repression. We are warning law enforcement and security agency officers not to stand against their nation, not to carry out criminal orders from corrupt officials when they send you out to kill us for Putin, Sechin, and Deripaska.

Now the national demand at demonstrations from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad must be the call “Putin Must Go!” Ridding ourselves of Putinism is the first, obligatory step on the path to a new, free Russia.