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.

Amidst numerous reports of ballot stuffing, censorship, destruction of campaign material, and – most commonly – fraudulent usage of absentee ballots, more candidates from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party won their campaigns than any others. The most successful runners-up included candidates from the Communist Party, the Kremlin-loyal A Just Russia party, and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

Yevgeny Shevchenko of the Patriots of Russia opposition party said that the winner for city with the most absentee ballot violations was Chelyabinsk, where a whopping 40,000 such ballots were issued.

An example from regional Yabloko party leader Igor Yermolenko in Samara helps to demonstrate why committing fraud with absentee ballots in Russia is disturbingly simple. Speaking to the Kasparov.ru news portal, Yermolenko said that a group of people at one Samara polling station left with 40 blank absentee ballots despite only handing applications for 19. The regulations for recording how many ballots were taken was ignored altogether.

Grigory Melkoniants, head of the independent Russian electoral watchdog Golos, confirmed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the elections were as dirty as in March.

“We recorded a whole series of violations on all levels of the elections, from the moment the campaign began to the counting of the votes, from buying votes to ballot-stuffing,” said Melkoniants. He added that the organization had video footage of people being paid for their votes.

Other startling violations included forcing university students to sign off on a list that they had voted for United Russia candidates and driving busloads of voters to multiple polling stations.

Despite the violations, some of Russia’s opposition parties were able to achieve relative success in some regions. According to Central Electoral Commission head Vladimir Churov, candidates from Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, and Right Cause won 167 mandates in Sunday’s elections. That number is markedly higher than the 27 mandates won by candidates from those parties in regional elections last March.

Boris Nemtsov, co-leader of the opposition movement Solidarity and one of the founding members of the newly-formed coalition For Russia Without Tyranny or Corruption, remarked on his blog about United Russia’s overall success in the elections:

“Every nation is befit of its government. Therefore, either our nation consists of traitors and thieves, or the elections weren’t actually elections,” he said. “I’m convinced that the second hypothesis is much closer to the truth than the first one.”

Gennady Gudkov, State Duma Deputy from A Just Russia

In conditions where there’s hydrochloric acid in the pool, it’s going to be difficult to win, considering that our opponent is swimming with paddles in clean water, and we’re in a pool of hydrochloric acid. With the kind of administrative and bureaucratic support that United Russia has, it’s going to be difficult to compete with the party in power. The elections are very dirty – dirtier than in March. In Chelyabinsk, for example, federal employees are being forced to vote in several different areas. We’ve been informed about this.

We’re counting on victory in the municipal elections of a number of outer-Moscow cities and on good results in several regions. If the elections were even a tad bit honest, United Russia would have joined the opposition long ago.

Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko Party Leader

It’s difficult to make predictions in our electoral process. I think there’s going to be ballot-stuffing in United Russia’s favor everywhere. How many will be stuffed, nobody knows. If it’s too few, then the governors, mayors, and regional administrative leaders will be risking their posts.

During the March campaign, we had good results in Tula in the Tverskaya region. There’s a positive trend, but there are no grounds at all to say that the elections will be honest. There’s going to be massive absentee voting in Chelyabinsk.

Boris Nadezhdin, Political Council Member of Right Cause

In the places where our tickets had good chances, they were removed [from the ballots]. This happened, for example, in Kazan and Kostroma. We have tickets left in Magadan and Chelyabinsk; I’m counting more on Chelyabinsk. Because first of all, a very scandalous campaign is going on in Chelyabinsk, and secondly, we are participating alongside Yabloko, and that means the chances of either party winning decrease considerably.

Andrei Andreyev, State Duma Deputy from the Communist Party

Currently I’m in Magadan, working on the elections. The electoral campaign is extraordinarily dirty and cynical. Magadan television, and the channel MTK in particular, is heaping utter garbage onto the three parliamentary parties besides United Russia.

Ilya Yashin, Solidarity Bureau Member

It wouldn’t be right to talk about the chances of the candidates, since this country has long since ceased to have elections, and instead there’s an appointment process reminiscent of elections only in appearance.

Candidates from the non-systemic opposition can participate in elections in order to hurt the government’s reputation, but they can only achieve success in the case that the system malfunctions – as happened, for example, in Tver and several other regions.

Yevgeny Shevchenko, Representative of the Patriots of Russia:

We see the chances of our regional branches in participation in the elections positively, since they accomplished very good work. However, the news from the regions gives some cause for alarm. We are cautious about the fact that party tickets were taken off the ballots for unsubstantiated reasons. We have fewer complaints than in previous years. Clearly, the regional authorities have finally listened to the president and have begun to create the conditions for competition in the regions, but there is lawlessness in the municipal elections in a whole swath of regions.

Sergei Ivanov, State Duma Deputy from the LDPR:

I see the chances for the LDPR in the elections as very good. We’ve been up against the administration’s resources since 1989, and we always find our voters.

Aleksandr Khitshteyn, State Duma Deputy from United Russia:

I can only say what work I do, and I’m in charge of elections in Samara. I’m convinced that United Russia candidates will get the majority of the mandates in city duma elections. As far as the elections for mayor are concerned, I’m convinced that Dmitri Azarov will win – what’s more, in the first round. The campaign has been sufficiently calm. Naturally, what’s unpleasant is the use of administrative resources by the current mayor, Victor Tarkhov.

Aleksandr Averin, member of the executive committee of the coalition, said on Tuesday that a founding congress would be held for the party on July 10. There, participants will adopt a charter and party program, he said. The coalition is confident that enough members can be recruited in the months leading up to the October elections to reach the minimum necessary for the official federal registration required for parties that wish to participate in Russian elections.

Other Russia cofounder and head of the banned National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov, will head the organizational committee, Averin added.

“We are going to demand the abolition of registration for political parties, and also participation in elections for all those who wish to,” Limonov said. He called the electoral campaign the Other Russia’s “second front,” the first being the “Strategy 31” rallies, held routinely in defense of the constitutional right to free assembly.

Limonov added that he expects the government to do everything possible to keep the opposition party out of the October elections.

A variety of Russian opposition groups have recently begun making renewed attempts to create officially registered political parties. The opposition movement Solidarity, lead in part by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, announced in May that it would be creating its own party to operate side-by-side with the movement. The groups Democratic Choice and the National Patriots have also made similar decisions in the past few months.

The requirement for the federal registration of political parties is widely criticized by Russian opposition groups as a tool used by the government to keep political competition out of the electoral system. Altogether seven parties are officially registered and allowed to participate in elections: the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, Patriots of Russia, Yabloko, A Just Russia, and Right Cause. This is down from 15 parties in 2008, 19 in 2006, and 35 earlier in 2006. The number decreased following changes in federal registration procedures over the course of those years.

While some opposition parties, such as three Bolshevik-related parties, are banned outright in Russia, many are simply never able to register. Andrei Savelyov, leader of the unregistered Great Russia, told the newspaper Kommersant that his own party has no such chance. That said, he hopes that “the government will come to its senses and allow citizens to exercise political freedoms.”

Vladimir Ryzhkov, representative of the unregistered Republican Party, expressed similar doubts. “Our government, and most of all the president and prime minister, grossly trample on the constitution and deprive a significant part of the political forces and society of the opportunity to participate in elections,” he told Kommersant. “In these conditions, it is the task of the opposition to explain to the population that this is not an election, but a farce.”

Dmitri Badovsky, Deputy Director of the Institute of Social Systems, agreed that it was unlikely that unregistered parties would have any success in either the registration process or, theoretically, the actual elections. “For the survival of the political arena, the Kremlin will enable a sharp activation of the small parties that are already registered, most of all Right Cause,” he explained.

Rally organizer and coalition co-founder Konstantin Doroshok said that a founding assembly was held on Wednesday, but leaders have yet to settle on a name for the new union.

The January 30 protest in Kaliningrad, in which between 7 and 12 thousand people participated, was notable both for its massive size and for the diversity of political forces represented. The new coalition features similar diversity, including the Kaliningrad branches of the parties Solidarity, Justice, A Just Russia, Patriots of Russia, Yabloko, and the Communist Party.

According to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, coalition leaders invited the local branch of the Right Cause party to join the union, but leader Mikhail Tsikel declined the proposal. The ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party is also not included in the coalition.

Doroshok said that the union’s main goal is “to break the political monopoly of United Russia,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party, which has dominated the country’s elections at every level since its inception in 2001.

Ekho Moskvy reported that Kaliningrad residents have been threatened with losing their jobs or having their wages slashed if they take part in the coalition’s upcoming rally on March 20. Likewise, students have been promised that they will be expelled.

Meanwhile, the Kaliningrad Public Chamber was set to meet on Thursday with the Public Chamber of Russia to discuss the situation in the region, which has been a media spotlight since January’s massive rally. A relatively new institution, the Public Chamber is an oversight body intended to monitor government activities.

Protesters in the January 30 rally gathered in Kaliningrad to collectively demand that high vehicle tariffs be annulled and that Kaliningrad Governor Georgy Boos and Prime Minister Putin both resign. Boos immediately cancelled his vacation plans and promised to meet with opposition leaders, although he cancelled multiple times before finally meeting with Doroshok on February 26.

Another rally of more than a thousand Kaliningrad residents was held in the city of Yernyakhovsk on February 28, and a demonstration of comparable size to the one on January 30 is scheduled for March 20.

The governor had initially called the meeting after one of Russia’s largest protests in recent history was held in Kaliningrad on January 30. By various estimates, between 7 and 12 thousand residents came together to protest tariffs and call for the governor’s resignation.

The protest gained widespread media attention domestically and abroad, provoking Boos to cut his vacation short and the Kremlin to scapegoat Oleg Matveychev, a political adviser responsible for the region who has now resigned under pressure. The governor then scheduled a meeting with rally organizers for February 2.

However, Boos phoned opposition leaders on Wednesday evening to tell them that the meeting would have to be postponed – already for the second time in less than two weeks.

According to Konstantin Doroshok of the Solidarity opposition movement, the governor said that the meeting would have to be put off because they have not yet been able to ensure participation from all local opposition representatives. He did not specify to Doroshok when exactly the meeting would be rescheduled.

The Gazeta.ru online newspaper cited sources in the Kaliningrad government as saying that the governor wanted to see Mikhail Tsikel, the local representative of the Right Cause movement, at the meeting with opposition leaders. However, in addition to being out of town, Tsikel did not participate in the January 30 rally.

Kaliningrad Regional Duma Deputy Mikhail Chesalin of the Patriots of Russia party was also notified of the meeting postponement by the governor on Wednesday. He added that during their conversation, the governor had mentioned the Communist Party. Local Communist Party representative Igor Revin told Gazeta.ru, however, that their party has not been invited to the meeting at all, leading to speculation as to why the governor would mention it.

Members of the regional branch of the Kremlin-backed liberal democratic party Right Cause congregated at the entrance to the city Kremlin wearing funeral insignia and armed with candy, which they distributed to passers-by in order to commemorate the now-deceased period of democracy.

Branch leader Denis Labuza released a bundle of balloons emblazoned with “democracy” into the sky, saying that if election of the mayor by popular vote was cut out of the city charter, it would be a sign that city officials do take into consideration the voice of the people.

The “funeral” was prompted by a session of the city duma that same day that introduced a change to the city charter, earlier proposed by the major. Instead of election by popular vote, the mayor will be now be chosen by a selection of deputies, and the leader of the city administration will be hired by contract.

During a meeting with opposition leaders to discuss a set of fraudulent regional elections in October, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev asked that participants not turn the meeting into a “funeral” for democracy. “I intentionally dressed darkly today,” the president said, “thinking that, who knows, you all might be in the mood for a funeral.”