Party Led By Putin Steamrolls Opponents
Intimidation Cited As Elections Loom

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 30, 2007; A01

MOSCOW, Nov. 29 -- Across Russia, officials loyal to the Kremlin have used unprecedented administrative pressure and harassment to disrupt the electoral campaigns of opposition parties and maximize the vote of United Russia, the party that President Vladimir Putin is leading into Sunday's parliamentary elections, according to opposition party members, independent monitors and political analysts.

Millions of pieces of opposition campaign literature have been seized or destroyed, those observers report. Parties have found themselves unable to secure billboard or other advertising space, so that on the streets of Moscow and other cities it appears that only one party, United Russia, is running.

Campaign workers have been arrested and beaten across Russia. For example, in the Urals city of Perm, workers were detained while attempting to canvass voters. A party organizer was reported beaten up in the Mordovia region. And a candidate for the Yabloko party was shot and killed last week in the southern republic of Dagestan.

Speaking to foreign diplomats in the Kremlin on Wednesday, Putin dismissed the cacophony of complaints from the opposition. "We know the value of real democracy," he said. "And we want to hold honest elections that are as transparent and open as possible, without organizational failures and problems. I am confident that this upcoming election will be of precisely this kind."

But across the country, people tell a different story. Employees and students at state enterprises and institutions, including hospitals and universities, have come under pressure from their bosses and deans to vote for United Russia on Sunday or face retribution, according to activists.

On national and regional television stations, which are controlled by the authorities, opposition parties have received brief, non-prime-time slots for political statements and been neglected or derided in news programming. Putin and other United Russia leaders, in contrast, are the subject of glowing reports.

"There was no political campaign; there was only propaganda for United Russia," said Lilia Shibanova, director of Golos, a Russian private organization that monitors elections. "In all state media, there was huge preference and prevalence in coverage of United Russia. Any coverage of other parties was almost 100 percent entirely negative."

Russian elections have long been marred by dirty tricks and the mobilization of state resources on behalf of particular parties.

"There was unfair competition in 2003," said Vladimir Gelman, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, referring to Russia's last parliamentary elections. "But the dominance of the ruling party was not as overwhelming as it is now. The pressure is very, very hard."

Putin's decision to head the United Russia ticket, the first time a sitting president has led a party in parliamentary elections, has essentially turned the vote into a personal plebiscite. The governors of the country's 85 administrative regions, who depend on the president for their jobs because he abolished direct gubernatorial elections, appear determined to secure the maximum turnout and maximum vote for United Russia.

Sixty-five of the governors are heading local United Russia election lists Sunday, compared with 29 in 2003. That has placed almost the entire regional apparatus -- from police to tax inspectors -- at the party's disposal.

According to opposition parties and analysts, citing contacts in regional administrations, governors have received informal directives that they should at least match Putin's 71 percent of the vote in the 2004 presidential election .

United Russia's vote has never matched Putin's personal election figures, and even with Putin at the top of the ticket, vaulting to 70 percent is a daunting challenge, according to opinion polls. In the most recent regional elections, in March 2007, the party got 46 percent on average.

In interviews, organizers in 10 regions for opposition groups including the Communist Party, the Union of Right Forces, Yabloko and Fair Russia uniformly complained of official harassment, of being shut out of the media and of voters being threatened with loss of livelihood or position if they fail to vote for United Russia.

In the Siberian region of Kemerovo, for instance, opposition parties said they learned that the governor had demanded undated resignation letters from all district administrators, to take effect if United Russia draws less than 70 percent of the vote in their areas.

The district administrators, in turn, demanded resignation letters from their deputies. "You now have bureaucrats threatening pensioners that their heat will be cut off unless they vote for United Russia," Alexey Roshin, a Communist Party official in Kemerovo, said in a telephone interview. "And you know, this is Siberia. It's cold here. . . . There was always some pressure, some tricks, but the difference now is huge."

Sergey Cheremnov, a spokesman for Kemerovo Gov. Aman Tuleyev, who is heading United Russia's local party list, dismissed the allegations. "It's an absurdity," he said in a telephone interview. "It sounds like somebody's stupid joke."

In Perm, a city in the Urals, Tatyana Volegova, who runs the small Yabloko party's elections headquarters, said activists are routinely detained by police when they attempt to canvass voters. "In one village, we had young women handing out leaflets, and they were all put in cells with drunks for three hours," Volegova said. "When they were released, they were told not to come back."

In Nizhny Novgorod, Oleg Repin, a regional organizer and candidate for the Union of Right Forces, said that billboards the party had reserved last summer were suddenly unavailable when the campaign began.

Even Fair Russia, a party that was created by the Kremlin with Putin's open blessing, complains about the stifling of competition. "We cannot call these elections honest," said Dmitry Gudkov, a spokesman for the party, some of whose leading candidates have been threatened with arrest or had their offices searched.

In Mordovia, about 400 miles southeast of Moscow, Vladimir Vasiliev, a 26-year-old graduate student and Union of Right Forces candidate, said police came to his mother's apartment to fetch him for military service, then put him on a wanted list as a draft dodger when they failed to find him. As an enrolled student and a candidate, Vasiliev said, he should be exempt from military service.

The party's regional organizer was beaten up and left the area, Vasiliev said, and a warehouse where the party stored election newspapers was broken into and the literature slashed with chain saws and smeared with oil. "Our campaign has been paralyzed," he said.

Nationally, about 20 million pieces of Union of Right Forces campaign literature were seized by authorities, the party said. By its count, 17 of its leading candidates have resigned after being told by local authorities that their businesses or families would suffer if they did not.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Union of Right Forces had violated Russia's campaign law by failing to properly account for its funding of election literature, a charge the party denies.

"I would totally disagree with you that those people were threatened who abandoned their lists," Peskov said in a meeting with a small group of foreign journalists this week. "If parties are losing members of their lists, the best way for them is to blame everything on the Kremlin. . . . This is just an attempt to cover the disorder in this party."