In light of continued mass protests calling for new elections in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he is willing to meet with opposition leaders – but cannot identify who they actually are or what they want. In response, Georgy Satarov, a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin and the current president of the InDem Foundation, writes this rebuttal.

Putin’s Deceit
By Georgy Satarov
December 29, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

On Tuesday, December 27, Putin made an official statement with the essential point that the protesters don’t have a positive program. While the candidate for president has recently separated himself from the protesters to the most extreme extent possible, I, by contrast, am allowing myself to speak out, albeit delicately. What Putin said was deceitful to the fourth degree.

First of all: It is difficult to imagine a more positive program in today’s Russia than what’s been formulated on Moscow’s city squares: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t violate the law.

Secondly. The government itself is not in any condition to propose any sort of sensible or well-reasoned program that adequately reflects the situation in the country. Moreover, it isn’t even in any condition to carry out the mediocre programs that it actually does propose. A typical example would be the war on corruption.

Thirdly. The protesters on Moscow’s squares constitute our civil society. Their diversity is their resource. And a singular program does not suit its nature. Programs are usually presented by separate fragments of civil society – parties, public associations, etc.

Forth. If something sensible, cohesive and positive has come about in the form of a program, then it has been proposed precisely by civil society. There are so many examples of this that I’m afraid to try and number them. The fact that candidate Putin doesn’t know this is not a problem of society, but a defect of the candidate in question, who, on one hand, organically does not see society, but on the other hand does not need any real actual programs, aside from a program to refine its own ranks.

A lie repeated over and over can feign to be the truth, but will never become it.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

While condolences have poured into the Czech Republic from dozens of world leaders, neither Russian President Dmitri Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have extended any such sympathies.

On Sunday, US President Barak Obama praised Havel’s role in helping create a united Europe. French President Nikolai Sarkozy said that “Europe has lost one of its wise men,” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Havel’s “dedication to freedom and democracy is as unforgotten as his great humanity.”

December 19 was designated a national day of mourning in the Czech Republic.

President Havel passed away on December 18 following a long battle with respiratory illness. Known for leading Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and helping democratize the former Soviet republic, he has criticized the Russian government as “a specific combination of old stereo types and a new business-mafia environment.”

Commenting on the recent protests that have swept Russia following fraudulent elections on December 4, Havel opined in Novaya Gazeta that “There can be no talk of democracy as long as the leaders of the state insult the dignity of citizens, control the judiciary, the mass media and manipulate election results.”

Meanwhile, President Medvedev did extend his sympathies on Monday to the North Korean people on the death of leader Kim Jong Il.

“Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to Kim Jong Un following the death of Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Kim Jong Il,” read a press release on the Kremlin’s website.

Where the Russian justice system has failed to step up to the plate, the Financial Times has taken up the slack:

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Documents from Mr Kolesnikov, together with a Financial Times investigation, help to lift the veil on the history of Bank Rossiya, whose shareholders include several men with close links to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s supreme leader, including the son of his cousin. Yury Kovalchuk and Niko­lai Shamalov, two of its biggest shareholders, were co-founders with Mr Putin of a lakeside dacha enclave outside St Petersburg.

These men from Russia’s second city are seen by many businessmen and bankers as the core of a new generation of Putin-era oligarchs, combining wealth with links to the country’s top leadership just as their predecessors during the Boris Yeltsin years had done. This is despite Mr Putin’s pledge nearly 12 years ago to eliminate oligarchs as a class.

Now that Mr Putin plans to return as president in elections next March, after four years as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, claims of a new system of crony capitalism are under scrutiny.

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The paper trail Mr Kolesnikov has disclosed to the FT appears to show for the first time how two Bank Rossiya shareholders – Mr Shamalov and Dmitry Gorelov, a former KGB colonel – received via an offshore company funds originally donated for equipment for St Petersburg hospitals, just as they bought their bank stakes.

The documents then appear to show that these same funds and offshore companies may have helped finance the first in a string of Bank Rossiya acquisitions of financial assets from Gazprom, the state-controlled gas producer. Some investors allege the deals that followed were quasi-privatisations that helped to drain billions of dollars in value out of a gas group that had come to symbolise Russia’s commodities-fuelled resurgence. Bank Rossiya rejects this as “nonsense”, saying its growth is due to its professional management and successful strategy as a universal bank. The bank’s assets stood at Rbs274bn ($8.9bn) by October 1, up from Rbs6.7bn at the start of 2004 – a compound annual growth rate of more than 60 per cent.

Read the full article at the Financial Times.

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.”

According to Gorbachev, “I, for example, feel that after Putin went through two terms as president and now another term as prime minister that, I think, this story of a duumvirate, while it meets constitutional requirements, nevertheless essentially discredits democratic principles.”

In the former president’s opinion, the development of democracy in Russia is impossible while the people in charge of the country are not its actual leaders and do not defend the people’s interests.

Gorbachev believes that Russia’s leader should respect the rights of the people instead of the rights of “corporations.”

He also expressed doubt that upcoming parliamentary elections would be free and fair. Gorbachev labeled the ruling regime as “authoritarian” and said that the country can expect to have “to seriously fight for the rehabilitation of democratic principles, fair elections, and independent courts.”

He also said that voters should use the forthcoming elections as an opportunity to speak out against the current regime by voting against United Russia.

As the BBC also pointed out, other world leaders are less than thrilled at the idea of Putin taking up a third term as Russian president. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Putin’s decision “makes a bit of a mockery of the electoral process” and was “unfortunate.”

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, called Rice’s remarks “disrespectful.”

“The leading party and majority expect the opposition to behave calmly and not rock the boat,” Putin said at the closing State Duma plenary session on Wednesday. “But this is a vain wish: that’s why the opposition exists, so that the leading party holds on stronger to the steering wheel.”

“We have many undefined and risky factors ahead of us, and in the midst of a storm, a tempest, a crisis, it’s very important that the whole team works in harmony, so that the boat doesn’t capsize,” he added.

Elections for representatives to the Russian State Duma are scheduled for December 4. Only seven political parties have been officially registered by the Justice Department, which allows them to field candidates. Numerous incidents of pre-election fraud have already been noted by monitors. Members of the opposition are staging a boycott of the “dishonest” elections and calling for Russians to go out into the streets and protest on December 4.

In light of this past Friday’s Russian March, noted political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky examines the growing Russian nationalist movement and its origins in the Second Chechen War and ongoing conflicts in the North Caucasus.

The Russian March to Nothingness
By Andrei Piontkovsky
November 3, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In a country where the political regime is made up of a longtime diarchy of bandits, Putin and Kadyrov, the popular slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” cannot be seen as something nationalistic or patriotic. Regardless of all its apparent radicalism, it is a deeply ingratiating, slavish, plebeian exhortation.

It means “we want to feed all of our own crooks and thieves: Putin and Abramovich, Sechin and Chemezov, Medvedev and Fridman, Deripaska and Timchenko, the Rotenburg brothers and the Kovalchuk brothers.

It means “we want to return Kadyrov’s criminal offshore accounts here to Putin’s domestic “lawful” arena, even if it requires an third, even bloodier, Chechen war.”

“We want an empire, but without black-assed people” – this is the fatal contradiction of the Russian national consciousness, decisively entangled in its own complexes.

Russians do indeed feel humiliated, offended, and robbed within their own country. As do Russian citizens of other nationalities.

Kadyrov’s palaces, motorcades and parties with Western and Russian superstar-prostitutes of both genders that cost millions in budget money are just as disgusting as the even more extravagant bells and whistles of Mr. Botox. But they have the same attitude towards the “feeding” of the overwhelming majority of North Caucasians as Abramovich’s yachts have towards ocean cruises for participants of the Russian March.

Russian laws definitely don’t operate in Chechnya. But does anybody really still believe that they operate in Russia?

The problem of the North Caucasus is much deeper and more catastrophic than the ratio of the amount of budget transfers to different regions.

What’s going on in the North Caucasus is increasingly surpassing the bounds of a serious regional conflict and is turning into a central existential problem for the Russian Federation. All of the mistakes, failures, and crimes of Russia’s post-communist government in the realms of security, economics, national policy, and federative organization have become entwined in the Caucasus.

Why did we fight two wars in Chechnya? For Russia’s territorial integrity. But territorial integrity does not imply scorched, unpopulated earth. We fought to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. But we simultaneously destroyed their towns and villages with planes and salvo rocket systems (and the “Grad” system in open fields, with Putin and Stalingrad behind us) and kidnapped innocent people whose corpses were later found bearing signs of torture.

We have constantly proved to the Chechens the very opposite of what we proclaimed – we proved to them with all of our behavior that they are not citizens of Russia and that we have not considered them to be citizens of Russia for a long time already – but their towns and villages are Russian. And we proved this convincingly not only to the Chechens, but to everyone in the Caucasus. They were good at memorizing the visual lessons we taught them.

And this is the fundamental, tragic absurdity of the war that determined its inevitable result.

We lost the war against the Chechen separatists. One of the most brutal field commanders, Ramzan Kadyrov, won. He has such a degree of independence from the Kremlin that even the Soviet officers Dudayev and Maskhadov would never even dream of.

Having had to choose between the very bad and the monstrous as a result of his pre-election policies, Putin, I have to give him credit, chose the very bad. Admitting his defeat, he gave all the power in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his army and paid him compensation. In response, Kadyrov formally declared not so much loyalty to the Kremlin as his own personal union with Putin. The monstrous choice would have been to continue the war to the point of total destruction – in the spirit of Shamanov and Budanov.

Ms. Latynina, with her poetic nostalgia for the romantic times of the Circassian genocide, clearly sees this choice as a shameful rejection of the white man’s burden and a cowardly capitulation before the liberal-leftist dictatorship of multiculturalism. Oh, how wonderfully those shining Russian aristocrat officers butchered the natives back then, and even wrote in their journals – the Yezhednevny Zhurnals of the time – such intoxicating lines: “I f… and cry!”

War on Chechen separatism in the North Caucasus has been replaced by a different war, one generated by the first – the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

Over that time , Islamic terrorism has crept over the entire North Caucasus, where its number of followers has grown and the structures of its Jamaats have strengthened. And just like during the Chechen wars, we are increasing the number of Islamists with our policies. Take, for example, the rhetoric of our (at least for the time being) supreme commander, who is apparently experiencing a certain syndrome of a lack of brutality compared to Uncle Volodya. The entirety of his reaction to the terrorist attacks on Russian territory consists of uninterrupted calls to “utterly destroy” and punish everyone, even “those who do laundry and cook soup for the terrorists.”

Knowing the moral integrity of the counter-terrorism soldiers from Khanty-Mansiysk, sent off to the Caucasus as if on a temporary work assignment, Mr. Badminton, or at least his groomers, can’t be unaware that the only result of these calls is going to be a marked rise in the number of extrajudicial murders of people who are in no way involved with militants and reprisals against relatives of suspected terrorists. And this, in turn, increases the number suicide bombers and leads to new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

This is the twelfth year we’ve been fighting this war without understanding the scale of ongoing tragedy – the entire country is sliding into a civil conflict between nationalities – which the government’s policies are entirely responsible for creating, having long burned this wick from both ends.

In the Caucasus, having unleashed and lost the war, the Kremlin is paying compensation in exchange for a sham submissiveness not only to Kadyrov, but to criminal elites in all other republics. This is used to purchase palaces and the golden pistols that dangle off the rumps of local leaders. But the young, unemployed residents who have lost touch with their communities take off to join in Allah’s wars or are squeezed out of the Caucasus onto the streets of Russian cities.

But that is where a generation of children whose parents have utterly and forever lost out because of the failed economic reforms of the past twenty years has already grown up.

Televised cultural rulers and other masterminds have explained to them that all of their problems have been caused by “uncles in pith helmets” and “non-indigenous criminal gangs” who want to break them apart. Gangs of teenagers from working-class backgrounds who have been deprived of their future have a hard time getting to “uncles in pith helmets” or the heavenly residents of Rublevka, and so they unleash their accumulated fury by beating to death “persons of a non-indigenous skin color.”

And today the two armies of desperados, deceived and robbed by, as it were, the exact same people, have been thrown at one another.

Mentally, there is a growing gap between Russian and Caucasian youths, who have grown up in the midst of a brutal war, first Chechen, and then Caucasian in general.

Young Muscovites march around the city with cries of “f… the Caucasus! F…!” and the young mountain youths walk around the streets of Russian cities in a demonstrably defiant and aggressive fashion. They have developed the psychology of the victors. In their minds, Moscow has lost the Caucasian war.

In mind and in spirit, the Caucasus and Russia are vastly separate entities. Although neither the Kremlin nor the North Caucasian “elites” are prepared to make a formal separation.

The Kremlin is still living with its phantom imperial illusions of wide zones of privileged interests that lie far beyond Russia’s borders, and local leaders, starting with Kadyrov, don’t want to turn down the transfers from Russia’s budget.

The Islamists don’t want to separate, either. They have dreams of a caliphate that includes quite a large part of the Russian Federation.

A situation so humiliating for Russia cannot go on forever.

But there is no easy way out. In today’s political system, with this government, there is no way out in general.

An attempt to put an end to Putin’s “Kadyrov project” by force, as is openly advocated by the professional Russian – poor Zhirinovsky – and therefore by default the majority of demagogues in the Russian March, would mean a full-scale third Chechen war that would become a military, political, and moral catastrophe for Russia. Even those who hate Kadyrov and the Chechens who suffer because of him, and moreover his personal army, would never agree to submissively return to the times of the total tyranny of the federations. To make the same mistakes three times in a row would be total lunacy. Even Putin, the most obstinate about the Chechen issue, understands that.

But that wouldn’t stop the “party of blood,” which hasn’t managed to come to terms with the loss of Chechnya as a zone to feed off of and, perhaps more importantly, as a zone to exercise its drunken power over the lives and deaths of any of its inhabitants. The Kadyrov project has stripped many federal siloviki of these two basic pleasures, having made them exclusive to Kadyrov, and they are genuinely hateful because of this.

They say the price of their support is possible allies in the clannish, inter-Kremlin dismantlement – Kadyrov.

The siloviki who have an infernal desire to work again in Chechnya, of course, are mentally closer to Putin and his gang than to anyone else. But they understand perfectly well that Putin will never purge Kadyrov.

Putting an end to the Kadyrov project would be an official admission of Russia’s defeat in the second Chechen war and the proclamation of a third. This would be a return to 1999 from a much worse starting point. It would mean the total political delegitimization of Putin as “the savior of the fatherland in 1999.”

Our best political publicists have equally convincingly and passionately explained to us that our children were burned in Beslan and the hostages suffocated in Nord-Ost for the sake of the greatness of Russia and the triumph of her geopolitical interests. And where now is this greatness or this triumph?

Putin will definitely become one of the first political victims of the third Chechen war. During all twelve years of his rule I have said repeatedly that the Putin regime is not compatible with the life of the country. But God forbid we escape from Putin at such a price. Moreover that it wouldn’t let us escape from Putinism and its roots.

In 1999, the most notorious Kremlin blackguards (their names are well-known) who lead Operation “Heir” entered into an alliance with siloviki who were thirsty for revenge and, after Basayev’s campaign to Dagestan and the apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and the failed one in Ryazan, unleashed the second Chechen war in order to bring their own, as they thought at the time, obedient marionette to power. It is they who are they real murderers of Kungayeva, Budanov and the other tens of thousands of people, Chechen and Russian, who fell during their small triumphant war.

The president’s supporters were hard pressed to maintain their illusions after September 24, when Medvedev announced that he would not be running in the 2011 presidential elections: the gauntlet would instead be passed back to Putin, now likely to remain in office until at least 2024. Some, like Arkady Dvorkovich, were vocal in their disappointment. Others continue to invest their faith in the president’s purported agenda of modernization. It is the latter that opposition leader Garry Kasparov confronts in this new op-ed.

Turning the Chessboard
By Garry Kasparov
October 7, 2011

After the public humiliation of Medvedev on September 24, one would think that even his most devout followers, the ones who tried in vain to find the reform-minded characteristics of a “liberating tsar” in the pale image of Putin’s shadow, had ought to have turned their backs on him. The first one to emerge from their stupor was Sergei Aleksashenko (naturally, the people with the most direct connections to money will react to the operative changes of a situation quicker than others), who decided to refute our image of Medvedev as a weak leader without any willpower. After that, Igor Jurgens told us unabashedly that, regardless of the apocalyptic predictions that he and Yevgeny Gontmakher have been eagerly feeding the Russian press over the course of the past year, life is not going to end after Putin’s return to the Kremlin. “We will continue modernization, because there’s no other option,” – with this phrase, one of the main ideologues of systemic Russian liberalism has once again confirmed that the members of the Institute of Contemporary Development saw the campaign in support of Medvedev as a purely tactical measure related to additional opportunities to influence the situation in the country. Whereas it is impossible for liberals of the court to have strategic differences with the Putin regime.

Today, Ekho Moskvy Editor-in-Chief Aleksei Venediktov also spoke to both the country and the world about Medvedev’s grandiose reforms that we have failed to notice, reforms that do no less than begin to dismantle the Gulag. Medvedev, it turns out, has begun deep reforms in the sphere of human and civil rights, a sphere that not Khrushchev, nor Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin were able to take a stab at. Nikita Sergeyevich, of course, did not have enough of Medvedev’s polish, and he had a proletarian disdain for bourgeois civil rights and freedoms, but it’s his name that’s associated with the release of millions of Gulag prisoners – and, by the way, the denouncement of the cult of personality (Stalin’s, not Putin’s).

Venediktov writes that “the time has come to flip the chessboard and try to see all of this from white’s point of view.” First of all, I don’t understand at all why the Kremlin government is a priori given the white pieces, and, moreover, chess analogies are unlikely to be appropriate when talking about the Putin regime. Chess has clear rules that are obligatory for both sides, and the Kremlin, as we known, are always free to change whatever rules don’t fit into their Procrustean bed of political expediency. In fact, Aleksei Alekseyevich, I would like to note that “flipping the chessboard” is a term from the movie Gentlemen of Fortune, where it became customary to wipe the pieces off the board and smash it over the head of one’s opponent. When talking about chess, we usually say that the board is “turned.” And so, having turned the board, we see the position from white’s side. I see the Yukos case; I see the deaths of Magnitsky and Aleksanyan; Taisiya Osipova, who is being bullied by jailers and prosecutors with impunity; I see a tightening of so-called anti-extremist legislation; there’s a monstrous growth of corruption alongside the total lawlessness of the security services, I see that; I see a political space that has been completely paved over – but deep reforms in our system of rights, excuse me, I don’t see. Obviously, I lack the proper qualifications…

As Studio 360 writes:

This week, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced that Vladimir Putin would be United Russia’s candidate next year, all but assuring him the presidency — possibly until 2024. Many in Russia saw this coming, and the country’s artists have been pioneering new forms of risky, highly public dissent.

Anna Nemtsova, Moscow correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, has been following the growing movement of street artists. Voina (”War”), a collective from St. Petersburg, is responsible for some of the most daring art actions. “They declared a war,” Nemtsova tells Kurt Andersen, “to state corruption, injustice, and the political regime.”

It’s not high art. Voina’s actions (and the videos of them posted online) are designed only to mock and humiliate the Russian political class as humorously as possible, much like the illegal billboards of the collective Monolog. Last year Voina painted a 210-foot phallus on a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Bureau, the former KGB. Because of this and other actions (some of them truly Not Safe for Work), they remain underground to avoid arrest. But at the same time, the ministry of culture awarded Voina an art prize for their rude graffiti. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon we have in Russia,” Nemtsova says. “One hand is giving the prize, the other hand is punishing.”

Listen to the full piece here:

Featuring a lone protester from the Putin Must Go campaign (seen holding a sign reading “Путин должен уйти”), the clip does not split hairs in regards to the sham democratic process currently being played out in Russia.

The video very much speaks for itself: