Russians take to the streets

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.

All very bracing, but it won’t change much, said Robert A. Saunders in Newsday. Putin still controls all the levers of power. Now he realizes “that he has violated the social contract with Russia’s middle class,” so he will appease them with the appearance of a genuine political contest for next March’s presidential elections. Cue the “pseudo-candidacy” of Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire metals tycoon who announced this week that he would run against Putin. (See Best columns in Business) He will “lend the election an air of legitimacy.” But make no mistake. Putin’s victory next March is still “just as assured as it was a few weeks ago.”

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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.”