According to Solidarity representative Denis Bilunov, members of the movement used the congress to implement changes to the makeup of the organization and to pass resolutions on certain policies.

In particular, the movement decided to officially support a campaign begun by human rights and civil activists dubbed “For Russia Without United Russia,” referring to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s political party. Decisions were also made to support free preschool education and oppose the import of nuclear waste onto Russian territory.

In his address, Solidarity co-leader Boris Nemtsov said that protests should become the number one aim of the organization. Since the most successful large-scale events are held in St. Petersburg and Moscow under the Strategy 31 campaign in defense of free assembly, Solidarity absolutely must participate in these demonstrations, he said.

Fellow co-leader Garry Kasparov warned the congress that Russia wasn’t going to see anything like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which was brought on by reports of fraud in that country’s November 2004 presidential election. Instead, he argued that oppositionists should figure on a scenario like the ones currently rocking the Arab world. “10-20-30-50 thousand people in the streets of Moscow – that’s a solution to the problem,” Kasparov said, adding that the organization needs to show that liberal values have never been part of the basis of Russian state policy.

“The established regime is never going to give up power as a result of elections,” he insisted.

Solidarity was established at the end of 2008 as a coalition of Russian democratic forces that opposed the ruling regime. From the very beginning, Solidarity assigned itself the task of uniting disparate groups of Russian democrats to form a distinct alternative for the future development of Russia and to change the political regime in the country.

In a recent article, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov argued that the country’s ruling regime is degrading faster and faster every day. Indications of this, he wrote, include the government’s work to persecute lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny and the unscrupulous behavior of backtracking police Sergeant Artem Charukhin. The overall picture is one of a government spiraling hopelessly into the abyss.

Kasparov isn’t alone in his assessment of the state of Russia’s regime. Writing in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, columnist Yulia Latynina remarked that Kasparov’s story of his 2007 arrest was a wake-up call for her: “The cops brought him coffee and asked: ‘So when’s it going to collapse?’ As I recall, it was only at that moment that I understood clearly that even the paid-off cops that the oppositionists hate and Russian citizens fear are in no way defenders of the government. They envy their bosses and hate them for zipping around in Mercedes while they do the hard work that has to be done.”

In this version of the same article written for the Moscow Times, Latynina offers a scathing assessment of “Russia’s extraordinarily weak leaders.”

It Smells Like February 1917
By Yulia Latynina
March 2, 2011
The Moscow Times

The smell of February is lingering in the air — February 1917, that is.

I am not talking about the revolutions in the Middle East but about Russia’s extraordinarily weak leaders and the growing contempt that the leading public figures and ordinary citizens are showing toward them.

Look how quickly the seemingly ironclad vertical power structure can evaporate into thin air. For example, Bolshoi prima-turned-celebrity Anastasia Volochkova had no qualms about publicly thumbing her nose at United Russia when she quit the party after revealing that she was “tricked” into signing a group letter in support of prosecuting former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the 1970s, no Soviet citizen would have even thought about snubbing the Communist Party.

Then there was Natalya Vasilyeva, spokeswoman to Judge Viktor Danilkin in the second criminal case against Khodorkovsky, who revealed that the verdict was written by the Moscow City Court and forced on Danilkin. Certainly Vasilyeva would have never dared such a move if she thought that her life were at risk.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities are worried about their loss of control over citizens who blatantly display insolence and contempt toward the current regime. Pressed to the wall, the only thing President Dmitry Medvedev could say to deflect attention from these embarrassing weaknesses was his Putin-like bluster in Vladikavkaz last week, when he implied that foreign powers are conspiring (again) to disintegrate Russia.

Let’s not forget Russia’s courts. Billionaire Gennady Timchenko filed a libel lawsuit against opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, and Nemtsov turned around and filed a slander case against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Timchenko sued Nemtsov for writing that Putin’s old friends — himself, Yury Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers — were “nobodies” before Putin came to power but quickly became billionaires during his reign.

Nemtsov responded to the charges by presenting documents to the court showing that, before Putin came to power, Timchenko had a yearly income of 326,000 euros ($450,000) in 1999, while Forbes estimated his fortune at $1.9 billion in 2010. Nemtsov also presented a document showing that Timchenko had flown gymnast Alina Kabayeva along with Putin’s friend Nikolai Shamalov, the nominal owner of Putin’s $1 billion Black Sea palace, in his private jet.

Nemtsov filed a lawsuit against Putin for stating during his annual televised call-in show that Nemtsov and others had embezzled billions of dollars along with tycoon Boris Berezovsky in the 1990s.

The only thing Putin’s lawyers could present as evidence in court was a Wikipedia article about Berezovsky that made no mention of Nemtsov but did state that Berezovsky financed and organized Putin’s presidential election campaign in 2000.

The notion that Putin is a leader who instills fear and discipline among bureaucrats and citizens is a myth. One WikiLeaks diplomatic cable revealing that most of Putin’s decrees went unfulfilled is enough evidence in and of itself.

With Putin looking more like Tsar Nicholas II, the smell of February 1917 is clearly in the air. It is the smell of a confused, wounded and weakened leader and a bureaucratic class standing dazed before the public eye. It is the smell of blood in the water.

It is not an especially pleasant odor because as experience has shown in impoverished countries led by corrupt and incompetent rulers, this kind of February 1917 can easily bring about another October 1917.