MOSCOW — Dodging yet another question at the St. Petersburg Forum two weeks ago about whether he'll re-seek the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev requested that "people be patient for a little while, to keep up the intrigue and the suspense." He added, "That will be more interesting." And yet, there seems to be movement in that inscrutable Moscow summer swamp of intrigue. Finally, things are happening. Finally, things are getting interesting.
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To wit: On Saturday, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov was easily elected leader of the Right Cause Party* at the party's congress, just as expected. Speaking ex tempore, Prokhorov delivered a rather spicy, provocative speech. "Our country is called the Russian Federation, but judging by the leadership it is an empire where only the executive branch is working," he said. He spoke of an ongoing 100-year civil war in Russia, and laid out an ambitious, liberal party platform: slashing defense spending, introducing voluntary army service, returning power to the regions, reinstating the elections of mayors, and introducing the election of police chiefs and judges. He even said that political prisoners Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev should be paroled.
These ideas are usually propagated by the liberal opposition and are therefore roundly ignored by the state. But this is a billionaire, the third-richest man in Russia -- a position one cannot maintain without the Kremlin's warm feelings -- voicing them. What's more, all of this was carried on national TV, still the only real way that information can be broadly disseminated here and therefore a medium that tends to bar messengers of such liberal ideas. Arkady Dvorkovich, the president's economic advisor, weighed in later on Twitter. "The majority of the issues voiced by Prokhorov are attractive to me," he said. "Some needed to be discussed further." And as if this weren't enough, Medvedev himself decided to meet with the leader of this marginal, liberal party with no parliamentary representation to tell him that "some of your ideas line up with my own." Some of these ideas, the president said, are "revolutionary."
This is not particularly difficult to decipher. As I wrote earlier, the Right Cause Party is a Kremlin attempt to co-opt the well-educated, well-traveled, and well-off liberals increasingly dissatisfied with the system. Within the Russian political spectrum, they fall to the right. The idea is to create for this tier-two elite a party that would bring them into the system. It would also provide a steam valve for the so-called "pragmatists," liberals stuck in the increasingly stodgy and corrupt ruling party, United Russia. Leonid Gozman, the co-founder of Right Cause, has been very open about this. Prokhorov has been, too. "Let's forget the word 'opposition,'" he said at the party congress Saturday. "This is a word linked to marginal parties that have lost their connection to reality long ago."
This isn't a vague reference. Prokhorov is calling out specific parties: Yabloko, the party of the first generation of post-Soviet liberals, all the other failed parties of the next decade, and their latest incarnation, the Party of the People's Freedom, shortened as Parnas. The party is led by four liberal, ousted veterans of government: Boris Nemtsov, a prime minister under Yeltsin; Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former speaker of parliament; Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister; and Mikhail Kasyanov, once a prime minister known as "Misha 2 percent" for his skimming of the proverbial milk. Their experience in government makes them obvious choices to a Westerner searching out democratic heroes, but to a Russian their experience taints them, and their fractiousness is still more of a turn-off.
While Prokhorov was delivering his "revolutionary" speech, Parnas was picketing across town. A couple days earlier, Parnas's official petition to register as a party -- and enter December's parliamentary election -- had been denied because 40 people on their list of 46,148 signatures were found to have been dead or minors or had recanted their support of the party. ("Those who recanted told us they had done so because of pressure from the Interior Ministry [the police] and the FSB," Milov told me.)
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