Tens of thousands of Russians last week joined in the biggest protest rallies since Vladimir Putin first became president, 12 years ago, to decry alleged fraud in the recent parliamentary elections. Many shouted, “Putin is a thief,” while others chanted, “We are the 143 percent,” a reference to the obviously fraudulent official vote tally in the Rostov district. Hundreds of people across the country were arrested at protests, which Putin blamed the U.S. for instigating. In an unprecedented concession to public opinion, the ruling United Russia party’s top official, Boris Gryzlov, resigned this week as the State Duma speaker. Still, officials flatly rejected opposition calls for new elections and announced that the new Duma would be seated next week.
Even Russia’s docile press is turning on Putin, said Michael Schwirtz in The New York Times. For years, newspapers have been allowed to criticize the Kremlin as long as they didn’t attack Putin directly. This week, though, Kommersant Vlast printed a photo of a ballot on which someone had scribbled “Putin is a d---.” The sarcastic caption read, “A correctly marked ballot that was ruled invalid.” The editor was promptly fired, but the issue was already on the newsstands.
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So what? asked Niall Ferguson in TheDailyBeast.com. It’s a shame for Russians, of course, who have no hope of democracy and whose “public life remains horribly, and perhaps incurably, deformed by 70 years of communist rule.” But with its dwindling population and low GDP, Russia is no longer a global player. These days, it “looks increasingly like Nigeria with snow”—just another “messed-up petro-kleptocracy.”