In less than a year, Russia will go to the polls to vote for president, and the winner – for the first time – will be awarded with a six-year term. While intrigue swirls over which of the ruling tandem – President Dmitry Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – will be the anointed candidate of the ruling party, United Russia, wobbly economic conditions have led to declines in both leaders’ favorability ratings (though still well above 60 percent), and there are new signs of strain between them.
Medvedev, who has to this point been largely considered Putin’s puppet, appears to be breaking from his mentor. In March, he publicly scolded Putin for calling western intervention in Libya a “crusade,” saying such remarks were “unacceptable.” Shortly afterward he took the even more serious step of announcing (through his economic aide, and as part of a push for greater economic transparency) that all government officials serving on company boards must leave them by July 1. This will of course include Putin’s closest ally, Igor Sechin, who would be forced to either give up his post at Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, or leave the government.
Analysts were quick to note that this is the first time Medvedev has seriously asserted his authority and taken on Putin’s team. “This is a major development which marks Medvedev’s first independent move affecting the interests of influential members of Putin’s team,” analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said. “The closer the elections, the more aggressively he is acting.”
At the same time, there are signs that both members of the “tandem” are losing favor with the Russian people. In one recent analysis, the Kremlin-friendly Center for Strategic Research concluded that most Russians want to see a third candidate vie in the 2012 race. The report cautioned that the current leaders’ political favor may be on its final descent, and that a continued decline of trust could lead to a political crisis that could “in its intensity surpass the end of the 1990s and closely approach the end of the 1980s.”
Meanwhile, bloggers on the popular LiveJournal platform have accused pro-Kremlin forces of staging a campaign against political discussions on the internet. Alexei Navalny, whose blog (navalny.livejournal.com) about corruption within state companies and the ruling party United Russia has over 40,000 readers, alleged that Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov was behind persistent spamming attacks on his and other blogs, as well as a crash of the LiveJournal website for seven hours the day before the March 31st opposition protest. In addition, top political bloggers have complained that meaningful discussion on their blogs is becoming impossible, because of a flood of comment spam, inserted either manually or with the use of spam-bots.
“In 2008 there was the illusion that you could drown dissenting voices by investing in pro-government media... today the stakes are clearly on DDoS attacks, spam, bots in comments and other equivalents of the good-old jamming and silencing methods of the Soviet era for enemy voices,” wrote Anton Nossik, a longtime internet media manager and expert on social networking resources in Russia.
Surely as the election draws nearer, such attacks on internet blogs and social networking sites (which, incidentally, have been critical to mobilizing opposition forces in the Middle East) are likely to become a regular occurrence.
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