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PDFRussia’s opposition was back on the streets over the weekend and its Moscow rally was addressed by Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB operative and erstwhile ally of President Vladimir Putin, who was stripped of his Duma seat last Friday.
Observers believe that there is little doubt that Gudkov’s expulsion was ordered by Putin in “a sign that the Kremlin may have given up on the soft-authoritarian system of managed democracy and is preparing to use more direct repressive means to keep people in line.”
According to Andrei Piontkovsky (right), an analyst at the official Institute of System Analysis, “Putin divides all people into supporters and traitors….Gudkov for him is a double traitor. He left the KGB, and then he left United Russia. What has happened to Gudkov is a clear signal for the entire elite, a warning that any lack of loyalty will be severely punished.”
Tens of thousands of people marched in Moscow for Saturday’s ‘March of Millions’, Robert Amsterdam reports:
….police estimated the crowd at 14,000, opposition leaders said over 100,000, and many say the number was closer to the 25,000 permitted by Moscow officials (AFP has a round-up of the various claims). The crowd expressed outrage over Putin’s rule, the jailing of Pussy Riot, and the ouster of Gudkov, who, along with opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov, spoke at the rally, saying that ‘Russia no longer has a constitution’. Udaltsov says he was arrested at the close of the protest. Supporting marches were held in St Petersburg, and in Yekaterinburg. Putin’s former ally and ex-finance minister Alexei Kudrin spoke out against Russia’s current cracking down on opposition leaders, calling it a ‘worst-case scenario’.
In this video of his farewell speech, in Russia, the New York Times reports, “he told the attentive if scant members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, exactly what he thinks is going on behind the scenes in their country.”
The Times provides a helpful translation of what it calls “an unusually open accusation by a well-connected politician of the alleged machinations of those in power in Moscow:”
The elite forces of the FSB [the successor to the KGB], SK [the Investigative Committee of Duma] and other prosecutorial organs are launched against the opposition; surveillance, bugging your phones, breaking into your e-mail, your PC, etc., breaking into your apartment, secret video recording…
And what is happening here is that I am being politically repressed — because I criticized the vacuity of reforms, because I called for the resignations of incompetent ministers, governors and bureaucrats immersed in corruption…It’s also revenge for my participation in the latest protest of hundreds of thousands…
Nobody believes you [the authorities] anymore, you have no trust… The European Parliament issued a resolution condemning your activities….. But what is Europe to us? Although our elite gets itself treated there, studies there, sends its children to school there and goes there to rest and relax? …
Where can we integrate with Pussy Riots, Gudkovs, raids and all the abuses that the power now instigates with full force? And why does the head of the state and the guarantor of the Constitution keep silent? Doesn’t he know what is happening here today, how this Constitution is trampled upon? What, does he approve of what is happening today at the Duma? Does he understand what a dangerous precedent is being established today?…
Andrei Piontkovsky is a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.
