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With Tight Grip on Ballot,
Putin Is Forcing Foes Out
CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NY
Times
Sunday October 14, 2007
Balloting for Parliament will be held across
Russia in December, and this much is already clear: Vladimir A.
Ryzhkov, who was first elected in the turbulent yet hopeful days
after the Soviet Union’s fall and then blossomed into a
fervent advocate for democracy, will lose.
So will Viktor V. Pokhmelkin, who used his seat to crusade against
corruption in the police and other law enforcement agencies. Swept
away, too, will be Anatoly A. Yermolin, a K.G.B. officer turned
liberal stalwart who has been a lone voice in rebellion against
President Vladimir V. Putin’s expansive power.
Nearly eight years after Mr. Putin took office and began tightening
his control over all aspects of the Russian government, he will
almost certainly with this election succeed in extinguishing the
last embers of opposition in Parliament.
Strict new election rules adopted under Mr. Putin, combined with
the Kremlin’s dominance over the news media and government
agencies, are expected to propel the party that he created, United
Russia, to a parliamentary majority even more overwhelming than
its current one.
(Article continues below)
The system is so arrayed against all other parties that even
some Putin allies have acknowledged that it harks back to the
politics of the old days. Sergei M. Mironov, a staunch Putin supporter
and the chairman of the upper house of Parliament, suggested recently
that United Russia seemed to have been modeled on a certain forerunner.
“I think that the television broadcasts from the United
Russia convention reminded a lot of people of long-forgotten pictures
from the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,”
said Mr. Mironov, leader of another pro-Putin party, Just Russia.
Full
article here
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