Polls show protesters most likely to vote for two politicians whose views are poles apart
THE LEADERS of Russia’s extra-parliamentary opposition are united in their aims to put an end to the rule of Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party but that’s as far as it goes. Many of them have diametrically opposed views on what should replace the current system and the movement’s most prominent member, the anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, is at least as far to the right as Nick Griffin of the British National Party or Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National.
The organisers of the big December 24th street demonstration on Andrei Sakharov Prospect, just around the corner from where I used to live in northern Moscow, commissioned the country’s leading polling organisation, the Levada Centre, to survey the views of those who attended the demonstration. They learned a lot about themselves from the results.
The two leadersthe demonstrators declared themselves most likely to vote for in the presidential elections on March 4th were Navalny (22 per cent) and liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky (21 per cent). No two political leaders could have more opposing views.
Of all those who have led the protests and there have been many of them, Navalny is the rising star. He has charisma. His blogs on navalny.ru and rospil.ru have been instrumental in raising awareness of the endemic corruption in today’s Russia. His Twitter account has more than 170,000 followers (including myself). The sharpness of his wit has struck a chord with Russians whose sense of humour has seen them through worse times than these, and a recent 15-day prison sentence has increased his “street cred” with younger protesters. His depiction of United Russia as “The Party of Crooks and Thieves” has become part of everyday speech in Russia.
But there isa dark side to Navalny. His links with far-right groups, his attendance at meetings with racist skinheads and his own professed attitudes to migrants place him at the opposite pole to Yavlinsky, who is the closest thing Russia has to a western-European, centrist politician with a strong human rights record.
Navalny, a real-estate lawyer who has had a fellowship at Yale, in his most explosive statement in a popular video showed that cockroaches could be killed with a slipper or a fly swat but when some people dressed in Muslim attire appear on the screen he says “in this case I recommend a pistol” (http://tiny.cc/a34cx).
There is a worrying undercurrent of racism and xenophobia in today’s Russia with Navalny allying himself with the former and prime minister Putin taking advantage of the latter with allegations that the opposition gets its funds from America.
Racism in Russia can go a lot further than the words of Navalny. There are those who act rather than speak and not every Russian has a pistol.
Just a week ago in Moscow a poor dvornik(yard cleaner) from Tajikistan had his throat cut and was left to bleed to death. Police have not ruled out racism as the motive.
Grigory Yavlinsky's popularitywith the demonstrators is not reflected in the views of the general public. His Yabloko party received just 2.9 per cent in the controversial Duma elections in December; a figure that even when alleged vote-rigging was taken into account was still pathetically small. Many of Yabloko's problems stem from Yavlinsky's own personality.
He is a bright, intelligent man but comes across as arrogant and intolerant of those whose views are not as advanced as his own.
Other prominent peoplein the protest movements have been every bit as united in their opposition to the Putin administration but do not share the same views on other matters. Perhaps the most bizarre alliance has been that between the Jewish former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Eduard Limonov, the writer and anti-Semitic leader of the now-banned National Bolshevik Party. When I was in Limonov's apartment in suburban Moscow recently he spoke to me of his time in Serbia where he was associated with Radovan Karadzic. A copy of Hitler's Mein Kampfstood on his bookshelves.
There is videoevidence of him firing from a machine gun into the city of Sarajevo in the company of Radovan Karadzic during the Yugoslav conflict. (http://preview.tinyurl.com/7bt8pnt) The most popular personality of all among demonstrators, according to the Levada poll, is journalist Leonid Parfyonov but he has no intention of standing for the presidency. He has announced that he will abide by the traditional journalistic rule that he is there to report on the story, not to be part of it.
One man who has already opened his presidential campaign is billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. He stands out in a crowd not only because of his immense wealth but because he happens to be 6ft 8in tall.
Prokhorov is Russia'sthird richest man, having made his money in precious metals, and instead of buying a British soccer club has focused on the United States where he owns the New Jersey Nets basketball outfit where most of the players are as tall as he is.
Prokhorov has the advantage of having lots of money to spend on his political ambitions but this is outweighed by a number of disadvantages.
First of all he is an oligarch and Russian voters despise oligarchs.
This means he is unlikely to be a real challenge to Putin who he has described in the recent past as the only real hope for Russia. Many Russians, therefore, regard him simply as a plant for the authorities, who want someone to sweep up liberal votes without posing a serious challenge. His recent access to the government-controlled NTV channel has heightened these suspicions.
Another politician who has been involved in the demonstrations is Boris Nemtsov. A former minister in the Yeltsin administration, Nemtsov is too closely associated with the chaos of the Yeltsin years to command significant electoral support.
Others who havegiven popularity to the protesters are the eco-warrior Yevgeniya Chirikova, leader of a campaign to stop a motorway running through the Khimki forest near Moscow; popular detective story author Boris Akunin; and rock singer and songwriter Yuri Shevchuk. All of them have honest-to-goodness democratic instincts. But none of them, like the others above, is likely to be a serious challenger to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin when polling day comes around on March 4th.
Séamus Martin is a retired International Editor and Moscow Correspondent of The Irish Times. His documentary series Death of an Empireon the fall of the Soviet Union and the Rise of the new Russia continues on RTÉ Radio One on Saturdays at 7.30pm
