On Sunday, Nov. 27, when Vladimir Putin accepted United Russia's nomination to be its presidential candidate, he mentioned something in his acceptance speech that seemed to come out of left field. "The representatives of certain foreign governments gather people to whom they give money -- so-called 'grantees' -- whom they instruct, find them 'suitable work' in order to influence the result of the election campaign in our country," he said, adding that "Judas is not the most respected biblical character among our people." It was old-school, West-bashing, Cold War-invoking Putin at his best.
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It was also, it turns out, very carefully aimed. Over the weekend, as United Russia waved its flags and cheered its leader, two journalists from state-controlled television station NTV showed up at the offices of Golos ("Voice" or "Vote"), the only Russian NGO with the means and credibility to monitor elections. The uninvited film crew came to sit in on a training session for volunteers and, according to Golos's accounts, made quite the entrance. They watched a Golos training video and interviewed the organization's director, Lilia Shibanova (as she told me, "aggressively"), asking her about her organization's connection to the CIA.
The next day, the same journalists arrived to find Grigory Melkonyants, Golos's deputy director. They stuck a camera in his face and started yelling at him about the etiology of his salary (the United States, naturally) and alleging that Golos was attempting to disrupt Sunday, Dec. 4's parliamentary elections. The resultant video, recorded on Melkonyants's phone, quickly went viral when it made it onto the web a couple of days later. It shows the two screaming at each other: NTV insinuating sordid connections to shadowy Western organizations, Melkonyants repeating over and over and over again: "You are Surkov's propaganda." (He was referring to Vladislav Surkov, the architect of the power vertical, creator of United Russia and Nashi, and a man who makes Karl Rove look like a professional dilettante.) The repetition of the phrase -- 84 times in all -- was designed to make the footage unusable for the kind of hatchet pieces NTV airs on figures who suddenly fall from official grace.
The half-hour film segment, called "Voice Out of Nowhere," finally made it onto the air Friday, but not before three Duma deputies wrote a letter to Russia's prosecutor general, alleging that Golos's newspaper breaks the law by "giving direct assessments of the progress of the election campaign in our country." Furthermore, the organization, the deputies allege, is merely a shell organization for the U.S. Congress and State Department to influence internal Russian politics. The deputies' demand? Shut Golos down.
A statement by Vladimir Churov, head of the Central Election Commission and loyal Putin defender, followed, claiming that Golos was waging a campaign against United Russia. There was the sudden removal of a banner on Wednesday from the liberal Internet newspaper Gazeta.ru advertising its joint project with Golos: an interactive map tracking all election law violations submitted by users. (Asked whether Gazeta.ru had been pressured to remove this banner, Editor in Chief Mikhail Kotov only said, "I'd rather leave this without comment.") Then, Friday, in a hastily scheduled court hearing and verdict, Golos was found guilty, during just one morning session, of abusing media privileges -- and ordered to pay a roughly $1,000 fine.
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