Moscow’s Electoral Commission earlier denied registration to four of the Movement’s candidates, citing technical errors with their signature lists. The last three candidates, including economist Vladimir Milov, were removed for similar reasons, Shorina said. Each was running in one of the capital’s single-mandate districts.

The candidates will now have the chance to appeal the Commission’s ruling, Shorina said. The group will use all methods at their disposal, including legal action, she added.

Another liberal democratic party experienced nearly identical problems. Three independent candidates from the Pravoe Delo party were prevented from registering by the Commission. Only one member of Pravoe Delo, Elena Guseva, was ultimately registered for the election.

Solidarity had put forth a total of seven candidates – Ilya Yashin, Igor Drandin, Ivan Starikov, Nikolay Lyaskin, Roman Dobrokhotov, Vladimir Milov and Sergei Davidis. Each one was barred registration over minor issues with their collected lists of signatures. In Yashin’s case, the Commission deemed that 100% of his collected signatures were invalid. Yashin and the other opposition politicians maintain that the decision to remove them was political, asserting that their lists were identical to those submitted by other parties.

Moscow City Duma elections will take place on October 11th. Candidate lists from some Parties- Yabloko, Patriots of Russia, the Communist Party, United Russia, Just Russia, and the LDPR- have been approved by the city’s Electoral Commission.

Sytkin, who heads the regional branch of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front party as well as the Solidarity democratic movement, showed the latest letter to reporters.  The paper contains a photograph of the activist under the sights of a sniper rifle, with written calculations of distance, angle, wind speed and light conditions.  The accompanying text warns Sytkin that he is constantly in the sights of a sniper rifle, which may go off is he continues to publish critical articles in the Kasparov.ru online newspaper.

Sytkin, who suspects that local authorities may be responsible for the threats, has appealed without success to the police.  On May 10th, he received a notice that his request for a criminal investigation had been denied.  The opposition leader has since appealed to regional prosecutors and the Russian Prosecutor-General’s office.

The Tambov branch of the Solidarity movement faced a number of problems when it tried to hold its founding conference earlier this year.  The building rented for the conference pulled out of its contract at the last minute.  Yelena Vasilyeva, a member of Solidarity’s federal council, was delayed by police as the tried to board a train departing Tambov.  An hour after the train left the city, Vasilyeva was attacked and beaten to the point that she required emergency care.

After the conference, Sytkin began receiving threats through the mail.  The letter’s authors told Sytkin they would burn down his apartment, blow up his office, or “simply throw a brick on your head off the roof, or stalk you in your courtyard and properly thrash you, like Lev Ponomarev.”

The declared purpose of the event was to defend the social rights of Russia’s citizens.  Participants also called for the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Government.

Speakers at the event included Solidarity leaders Garry Kasparov, Ivan Starikov, Lev Ponomarev and Oleg Kozlovsky.  Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the head of the Russian People’s Democratic Union (RNDS) also took the stage with other activist leaders.  Speakers blared the organization’s semi-official theme song: Russian rock legend Viktor Tsoi’s “Change!”

Solidarity’s orange banners waved among the crowd.  Demonstrators also came out to represent nearly all of Russia’s independent democratic groups, and activist carried flags showing support for numerous groups, including the Union of Right Forces, Oborona and Smena.

The liberal Yabloko party declined an invitation to the event.

Seven instigators, activists from the pro-Kremlin Young Russia movement, were detained during the rally.  The group got on the roof of a nearby building and tried to unfurl a banner reading “Quit rocking the boat.”  Another pro-Kremlin activist was detained when he climbed on a tramway stop and threw leaflets with the same slogan.  As the activists were detained, the crowd chanted “the militsiya is with the people!”

A concurrent demonstration in St. Petersburg was cancelled Friday after organizers failed to get permission from city authorities.  Officials had offered a single location five kilometers (3.1 miles) from the nearest metro station, and had rejected three sites proposed by organizers.

Leaders of Solidarity say the Russian government is failing to act responsibly in the face of a snowballing economic crisis, and have called for widespread political reform.

The group also presented its own set of anti-crisis on February 6th.  Some suggestions include include using budget funds to help citizens as opposed to corporations, battling rising prices for consumer goods, and openly speaking with the public about the economic crisis gripping the country.

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Watch video from the Solidarity press conference presenting the group’s anti-crisis plan (Rus).

Demonstrations, numbering hundreds of people, have also taken place in other Russian cities, centering in the far-eastern Primorye region. Car enthusiasts and importers are angry at the new tariff, which raises prices on used cars imported from Japan and other Asian countries.

The tax, initiated December 10th, aims to encourage domestic production of cars and press Russians to purchase cars made in the country.

While authorities have not backed off the tariff since protests began nearly two weeks ago, they have begun to make some concessions. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to cut shipping charges on domestically made cars, so that Russians in the far east would not pay more than those living in the European side of the country.

Still, many demonstrators were unsatisfied with the proposal and shocked at the police response to a peaceful demonstration. Vladimir Litvinov, who leads a human rights group in Vladivostok, spoke candidly with The Associated Press:

“We support a civilized resolution to all the problems,” he said, “but when they send Moscow riot police to break up a gathering in our city, and they start breaking arms and legs and heads… People are very, very angry. It’s hard to predict what might happen now.”

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Solidarity, an opposition movement launched by democratic critics of the Russian government, released a statement directed toward protesters:

An address from Solidarity to participants of protests against raising tariffs on foreign cars.
December 19, 2008

Dear friends and colleagues!

Our movement expresses solidarity with your valid and legal demands, and fully backs you. Raising tariffs on foreign-made cars is a blow to more than twenty million car enthusiasts in our country, and a blow to jobs in the auto business. [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin took this decision to protect the oligarchs close to him, who own car businesses: S. Chemezov (AvtoVaz) and O. Deripaska (AvtoGaz). This will not lead to anything other than higher car prices and the preservation of a lagging Russian auto industry. In substance, when he had to choose between twenty million car lovers and the oligarchs, Putin chose the latter.

On December 19th, Putin spoke out with an initiative to purchase domestic cars out of the [federal] budget. However, we doubt that he and members of the government will lead by example and support the domestic car industry. [We doubt] that Putin will stop driving in a Mercedes with a convoy of countless foreign-made cars.

Solidarity proposes that civil servants drive domestic cars, and that import tariffs not be raised.

Only a protest with solidarity can force the authorities to carry out the will of the people!

-The office of the Solidarity Federal Political Council

Around 200 delegates from over 40 Russian regions met in Khimki, on the outskirts of Moscow, electing a leadership council, finalizing the group’s name, and selecting a song by Russian rocker Victor Tsoi as the movement’s anthem. The group is named Solidarity, after the Polish movement which helped free that country from communism.

Kasparov, who chairs the United Civil Front party, said it was impossible to reform the Putin-Medvedev regime, and that it needs to be completely dismantled. The economic and financial crisis was putting Russia “on the edge of catastrophe,” Kasparov said, adding that the Russian authorities would have trouble keeping power as economic problems grew.

Independent politician Boris Nemtsov urged participants to actively engage trade unions as a lever of influence. Rising unemployment as part of the economic crisis, Nemtsov said, was creating a new base of people who were more inclined to being politically active.

Solidarity encompasses Russian democrats of various stripes, including former members of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) party, human rights activists, and members of the Yabloko party. Human rights defender Valeriya Novodvorskaya called on the group to avoid past mistakes, and to cut close ties with leftist radicals and communists.

Delegates were met by hecklers from pro-Kremlin youth groups on both days of the meeting. The protesters lit smoke bombs and threw leaflets. Some dressed like monkeys and hurled bananas into the air.

In a particularly sickening and cruel stunt, delegates arriving at the conference Friday found a group of youth releasing dying and wounded sheep into the street. The animals, wearing hats and shirts with the word “solidarity” on them, were violently thrown on the road from a bus. While the hecklers would not identify which group they represented, one of the Solidarity delegates recognized the young men as members of the pro-Kremlin Young Guard movement.

[Watch video of the provocation - YouTube (WARNING: graphic material].

The event was attended by opposition leaders and Kremlin critics including Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin and economist Vladimir Milov.

Kasparov, who heads the United Civil Front, said the conference was “small, but a victory,” and asked participants to analyze the mistakes made by Russian democrats over the past 20 years. In the 1990s, he said, democrats “succumbed to the general euphoria, which then led to the current catastrophic situation.” The major purpose of the new movement, Kasparov said, was to recreate an alternative political space.

“The authorities are afraid,” he said, “when anyone steps out of the frame of the system they have formed. In the imitation of a political space created by the Kremlin, there is no left, no right, no liberals, no nationalists.”

During his presentation, liberal politician Boris Nemtsov countered those skeptical about the new unified movement. “We were told: ‘you will all bicker, you all want to be the leader,’” he said. “But we drew lessons from our mistakes. We will not have leaders, we will have collective leadership.”

Nemtsov said the main goal of the democratic movement was to give the Russian public the right to choose their leaders once again. The Kremlin, he said, was trying to seize and hold power indefinitely. “One needs to understand that all attempts to change the Constitution today are attempts to make our country into something resembling Turkmenistan,” he said.

The new movement will break from past attempts at uniting democratic forces, and will not have a single leader. Former Union of Right Forces chair Nikita Belykh explained that the movement would be decentralized, and would have “working branches” in dozens of Russia’s regions. Belykh said that a political party could eventually emerge from the movement, but that such a step could only come far in the future.

The founding congress of the new movement will take place on December 13th. Representatives from around 40 Russian regions are expected to attend, and will vote on a final name for the movement and formally announce its formation.

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Read about attempts to interfere with the conference (Rus)
Watch video from the conference (Rus)

A national referendum is not required to make the proposed changes permanent. The legislation must be approved by two-thirds of the State Duma, then by three quarters of the Federation Council. If the law is then adopted by at least two-thirds of Russia’s regional legislatures, it will return to the president for signing.

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Hands off the Constitution! [A statement from Solidarity, 11.06.2008]

Yesterday, the Russian authorities for the first time voiced an initiative to amend the Russian Constitution and extend their own term limits. Ironically, [the initiative] was raised by Dmitri Medvedev, who has been in office for less than half a year. In his post, [Medvedev] has not had time to achieve any visible results whatsoever, apart from the war with Georgia, confrontation with the civilized world and the country’s accelerating crawl into an economic crisis. He has certainly not merited raising the issue of extending his term.

We do not see any basis for extending term limits for the president and other government bodies. Amid heavy suppression of media freedoms and the political opposition, the country is still being deprived of the ability to openly look upon the governing power structure, and the lamentable results of its time in office . The most important of these are unheard-of corruption, uncontrollable inflation and growing economic problems. Objectively, these rulers have earned dismissal, not lifetime appointments.

In today’s conditions, we categorically oppose discussing any possible changes to the Russian Constitution. Amendments like this can only be discussed when democracy is restored in the country. Today, when the citizens are numbed by unbridled government propaganda; when independent sources of information are inaccessible to the majority of the population; when the ruling “parliament” is appointed by the Executive Branch and independent politicians do not have the chance to get their ideas across to wide segments of the public; any discussions of amending the Constitution will resemble profanity and farce, and the amendments themselves will easily be dragged through in a way convenient for the ruling faction.

By voicing their intent to extend their own terms, the Russian authorities prove only one thing– that they are interested in nothing other than the effective usurpation of power in the country for an indeterminate period. This contradicts the goals of democratizing the country, and the return of Russia to the European path of development.

We are against turning Russia into a backwards, third-world authoritarian regime, where the rulers remain in power for life through different pretexts. The main purpose of “Solidarity,” the united democratic movement we are creating, is the unification of Russia’s citizens, for the sake of restoring democracy, order and lawfulness in the country. The founding congress of the group will take place on December 13, 2008.

We call on all Russians who value freedom to join with the Solidarity movement. [Solidarity] will fight against the illegal actions of the ruling junta, whose intention to change our Constitution is aimed at usurping power and perpetuating their rule, which is calamitous for Russia’s interests.

Down with autocracy! Hands off the Constitution!

Members of the coordinating group for the founding congress of the Solidarity movement.

D. Bilunov
G. Kasparov
O. Kozlovsky
O. Kurnosova
V. Milov
B. Nemtsov
L. Ponomarev
M. Reznik
A. Ryklin
Yu. Samodurov
I. Yashin

Democrat-info.ru

11.06.2008

translation by theotherrussia.org