Kremlin targeted by election protests

About 6,000 protesters took to the streets in Moscow on Monday in one of the biggest political demonstrations in years amid accusations that the Kremlin’s ruling party had relied on widespread fraud to secure a parliamentary majority.

Shouting “Russia without Putin” and “For a Russia without games”, the crowd of thousands squared off against police in a central Moscow square before heading towards the Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters, near the Kremlin.

The turmoil followed Sunday’s elections for the lower house of parliament where United Russia, which supports Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, saw its representation slashed from 315 to 238 seats out of 450. But even this reduced showing seemed to have been gained at the price of interference by authorities at polling stations.

International observers from the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported evidence of “flagrant procedural violations” and instances of “manipulation including several serious indications of ballot box stuffing”.

Vote counting at nearly a quarter of 115 polling stations across the country was described as bad or very bad by the delegation. “When you observe, as I did, the closure of the polling station, you see that all the rules of protocol are not respected …voter lists disappear and then the ballot boxes are opened. Even if you were blind and without hands you could see that there were certain violations,” said Tiny Kox of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

“If you see that and nothing happens, it is a major violation of the protocol and I think a major insult to all those who voted.”

The White House on Monday said it had “serious concerns” about the conduct of Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Amnesty International meanwhile condemned the detainment of peaceful protesters after more than 300 opposition activists and bystanders were reportedly arrested by police across Russia.

Some of the more questionable voting for United Russia came from warlord-run regions such as the north Caucasus. Vote tallies showed 99.5 per cent of Chechens and 91 per cent of Dagestanis voted for United Russia. Meanwhile, more than 90 per cent of patients in mental hospitals did the same.

“The Caucasus and our psychiatric hospitals have rescued United Russia from total humiliation” ran the headline on website Topnews.ru.

There were some other grounds for suspicion. In Moscow, for example, an exit poll conducted by both the Public Opinion Foundation, a polling agency that works for the Kremlin, and the Institute for Social Investigation, which made a study for the Just Russia party, each put the vote for United Russia at an identical 27 per cent. But the official result in Moscow after 97 per cent of the ballots were counted totalled 46.5 per cent. “This is suspicious, obviously,” said one sociologist who asked to remain anonymous.

The OSCE delegation’s critique was a sharp escalation from previous years when observers cited few instances of personally witnessed fraud, instead focusing on imbalances in pre-election media coverage and the close ties between the central election commission and United Russia.

At Monday’s demonstration in central Moscow, most people were under 30 – a generation that has traditionally been characterised as politically apathetic – and many said they were protesting for the first time, angered by the alleged falsifications.

One of them, Dmitry Kropotov, said he had worked as a monitor at a polling station where commissioners had reported an extra 300 votes than observers counted, and 70 votes disappeared.

“We are upset that our electoral right is being violated,” he said, walking with three colleagues from Moscow University.

Maksim Moravyov, 33, a project manager, said he had once supported Vladimir Putin, but no longer. “We had that vote stolen from us,” he said. “Maybe that right [to elect our government] never existed for us. But now we want it.”