Translated material
Who's the boss
Putin's supporters decided to keep him in power at any cost, and his opponents decided to remove him from the Duma elections through the courts
Yesterday at the Tver Drama Theater, delegations from 79 Russian regions created an all-Russian movement of supporters of the current president “For Putin!” On the same day, the first brave souls appeared who were going to remove the president from the list of the party in power in the parliamentary elections through the Supreme Court.“Zaputintsy” adopted a statement explaining their position: “Respecting the loyalty of the head of state to the constitutional principles of limiting the number of presidential terms (the President of the Russian Federation has repeatedly stated his intention to leave his post after the expiration of the legal term of office - Ed. ), we consider it vitally necessary to support his savings policy people. We must preserve all the positive achievements of recent years, prevent temporary workers and populists from coming to power, seeking to plunder accumulated resources and once again throw our country into the abyss of clan squabbles and petty ambitions.”
One of the initiators of the movement “For Putin!” lawyer Pavel Astakhov told reporters about several KamAZ signatures collected in support of the current president. According to Mr. Astakhov, in total, the Zaputinites brought about 30 million signatures to the forum. The lawyer said: “It doesn’t matter who Putin will be after 2008 - the head of the leading party, the chairman of parliament or the prime minister, the main thing is that he is the leader of the country.” “We have not gathered for the third term of the president. We respect the position of the president and propose to find him a place that will allow him to remain the national leader of the country. We choose the owner of the house, right? Here, too, we propose to choose a master for the country,” Mr. Astakhov tried to logically explain the mass impulse. Although history is silent about such a form of family or political expression of will as “election of the owner of the house”.
The Zaputintsy elected a coordinating council, but did not rush to choose a leader. As one of the initiators of the movement, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Tver Region Irina Blokhina, said, the meeting was attended by delegations from 79 regions of Russia, more than 700 people in total. According to her, Tver was chosen as the meeting place because one of the largest mass rallies in support of the head of state took place here on October 24. At the same time, the organizers of the forum tried in every possible way to prove that neither the administration of the Tver region, nor the administrations of the regions from which the delegations arrived, nor the presidential administration were involved in holding the forum and that this was a pure initiative from below.
The deputy chieftain of the Great Don Army, Vladimir Voronin, spoke at the meeting. “We, the Don Cossacks, decided that we will not rest until we understand whether the continuity of our president’s course will be maintained,” he assured those gathered. The famous surgeon Rinat Akchurin, in turn, said: “Putin raised questions about national projects, he is returning the army to duty. This is a person who, without showing off on TV, holds the international brand of Russia and has enormous authority in the world.” Then the political action in the Tver Drama Theater was continued by actor Gosha Kutsenko: “Now our country has something to lose, something to treasure. All artists are anarchists at heart. But I support Putin and believe that a person with such potential, having done a great job for the revival of Russia, will not turn away from his path.”
Unfortunately, a number of media representatives were deprived of the opportunity to observe these scenes. Before the start of the event, the organizers denied entry to all foreign journalists, as well as a number of Russian publications. Left out, in particular, were the Reuters agency, two Japanese television companies, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the CBS television company, Gazeta.Ru, the Russian Newsweek, Radio Liberty and the REN TV television company (she was allowed into the hall for ten minutes for protocol shooting). The organizers motivated the refusal by the lack of seats, but all Russian state television companies were allowed into the hall.
General Director of the Council for National Strategy Valery Khomyakov, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent, suggested that the actions of the “Zaputinites” are more likely to harm than help the head of state: “In my opinion, such initiatives undermine the international authority of our president. Such excessive zeal only causes laughter. I think this movement was not formed in the Kremlin - governors and regional elites believe that the president needs to be supported. But they need not worry. Vladimir Vladimirovich will not go anywhere, he will lead United Russia and retain enormous leverage over political processes.”
However, the president’s support yesterday was not universal. The leader of the Union of Right Forces party, Nikita Belykh, appealed to the Supreme Court with a demand to exclude Vladimir Putin from the list of candidates for State Duma deputies from United Russia for his repeated violations of the law. According to Mr. Belykh, after the Union of Right Forces began to criticize the election program of United Russia, the Putin Plan, the party “was attacked by the power of the state political machine,” and its candidates began to be squeezed out of the lists. Mr. Belykh said that as a result, the right has recently lost several leaders in its regional lists. He also saw signs of “illegal campaigning” in the president’s direct line with voters, which also became the reason for going to court.