Russia’s opposition: fighting Putin at the polls

Vadim, the orange protester

Vadim Korovin says it wasn’t long after he parked his car in central Moscow on Thursday that the plain-clothes cops appeared. And the 19 tents he had in his car were being confiscated as stolen goods. “I could tell that they had decided to put me away for 10 days or so, until after the election,” says Vadim.

Why? Because he was going to distribute the tents to protesters planning to camp out in central Moscow after Sunday’s presidential poll and deliver Russia its own “orange revolution”.

Protesters are hoping that huge crowds will take to the streets in Russia’s cities after Sunday’s poll, just as they did in the wake of December’s parliamentary elections, widely seen as fraudulent.

For Vadim, 34, the entire political system is illegitimate, and he is sure that Vladimir Putin will be declared outright winner in the first round. “We haven’t had elections in Russia since 1996,” he says, when Boris Yeltsin won his second term as president, in a second round of voting against the Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyuganov.

We haven’t had elections in Russia since 1996. Vadim Korovin

Two years ago Vadim ran an internet advertising company. Fed up with paying 56 per cent tax, high costs driven by the expectation of bribes, and systemic corruption, Vadim decided to pack it in. “I realised that I wanted to get things changed,” he says.

Never before involved in politics, Vadim is part of a new group of young people in Russia at the forefront of the demand for change. His new media know-how has proved useful: his reediting of a film about the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky put Vladimir Putin in the dock, and took over 5 million hits.

Vadim is part of an organisation called Rosagit, one of many that have sprung up in Russia over recent months to coordinate activity and function on social networks such as Twitter.

For Vadim, the response to Sunday’s election is crucial. A protest is already planned for Pushkin Squre in central Moscow, on Monday evening, and Vadim believes that hundreds of thousands of protesters will come to demonstrate against a corrupt and fixed electoral system.

He hopes that many, like him, will decide to camp out and occupy public space. Their success will depend on how many come out. “If it’s 20,000, the police will try to break it up. If it’s 100,000, they’ll just encircle us. If it’s more than that, we’ll be able to have a real impact.”

Ksenia, celeb and Putin family friend

Ksenia Sobchak is one of Russia’s best-known faces, and a recent and outspoken convert to the opposition movement. Daughter of Vladimir Putin’s erstwhile boss in the St Petersburg mayor’s office, Anatoly Sobchak, TV host and socialite, until recently she was apolitical. But last December that all changed.

“When someone in your flat says anti-semitic things, that’s one thing. But when they go out on the street and start shouting about it, they have crossed the line.” It’s a curious analogy, but for Ksenia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin crossed his line when his party United Russia was widely seen to have crudely rigged last December’s parliamentary elections.

The Sobchaks go back a long way with the Putins. Anatoly Sobchak taught Putin as a law student, and in 1991 hired the former KGB operative to work for him in the Leningrad mayor’s Office. It was Putin who helped Sobchak leave Russia when he was plagued by poor health and corruption scandals and, says Ksenia, Putin was a great source of strength to her mother when Anatoly Sobchak died in 2000.

Ksenia has warm words for the Russian prime minister, whose loyalty to her father meant that he was left “literally, on the street” and without a job after Sobchak was voted out of the mayor’s office in 1996. According to Ksenia, Putin was forced to make money by giving people lifts in his car.

Putin needs to take real steps to respond to protest. Ksenia Sobchack

It was therefore a big deal for Ksenia to take the public stage at the huge opposition demo in Moscow on 24 December. “I called to leave a message for him before speaking,” Ksenia tells me. “It was out of courtesy and because of our family relations. But he didn’t call back.”

From then on, Sobchak’s political activity has only grown. She now runs a political talk show called State Dept, forced off Russian MTV after it invited the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, and now broadcast on a website belonging to the opposition presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov.

In February she responded to speculation that public figures were being forced to film clips of support for Vladimir Putin, by declaring, bound to a chair and under gunpoint, her support for his candidacy.

Sobchak hasn’t decided whether to vote for one of the alternative candidates or just to spoil her ballot. But she won’t be voting for Putin. Instead, she will be taking part in next week’s planned opposition demonstrations in central Moscow. Can Russia have its own orange revolution? “Putin needs to take real steps to respond to protest,” says Ksenia. How long does he have to do that? “Only a few months.”

The nationalist

The Putin opposition expected to take to the streets next week is a broad coalition, a vocal and controversial part of which is Russia’s growing nationalist movement. Vladimir Yermolaev, 34, was until recently part of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.

After it was banned as an extremist organisation last year, he and many of his comrades moved to the “Russians Movement”. Vladimir expects 50,000 protesters to come to Pushkin Square in central Moscow on Monday, of whom “several thousand” will be from various nationalist organisations.

Imperial black, yellow and white flags carried by nationalists are regular features of Russian demonstrations, having appeared in “Russian marches” across the country for years.

But their appearance in December’s marches, alongside Russia’s liberal opposition and many first-time protesters, marked a watershed in street politics. It also caused great consternation among some liberals, threatening a split as some called for separate events where no nationalists would participate.

The split did not occur, but many liberals feel uncomfortable standing next to movements that have been associated with racist attacks on and murders of central Asians and Caucasians. Yermolaev, dressed smartly in pink shirt and tie in a central Moscow cafe, does not condemn the attacks. “How can we condemn Russians who have joined together and who are fighting the way they can? Should we tell them to put up with it and be slaves to the blacks?”

Putin will not last the six-year term he is expected to win on Sunday. Vladimir Yermolaev

Vladimir argues that “Asians” and others are “different” from Europeans, and their migration to Russia should therefore be restricted. The North Caucasus – home to mostly Muslim ethnic groups such as the Chechens – should be turned into a separate state, and Russians evacuated from there. It’s not fair, says Vladimir, that other people have a territory to call their own, but Russians don’t have their own home.

Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, to Yermolaev’s mind, is often wrongfully portrayed in the west as a nationalist. He is someone with a Soviet mindset, and someone whose corrupt regime must go. This is where the nationalists and other Putin opponents have found common ground.

The current political system in Russia rests on a fraudulent electoral system, says Vladimir, corruption is rife, and the country is not developing. “Our common goal is to create fair rules to the game. When we’ve done that, we will compete with each other.”

Vladimir will be demonstrating next week in central Moscow. What does he think is the likely outcome? It may be possible to force change through sheer numbers in the coming days – but it’s not probable.

More realistic, says Yermolaev, is a political crisis in the autumn or next spring, brought about my mounting economic and social difficulties – and Putin’s falling popularity. “Putin will not last the six-year term he is expected to win on Sunday,” he tells me.

Nick Sturdee is a freelance journalist specialising in Russia