:: Russia - Yabloko Leader’s Vote Not Counted

Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin voted for his party when he cast his ballot on Oct. 11.

But when Moscow Polling Station No. 192 reported its results, Yabloko failed to receive a single vote, the party said.

“Probably, the leaders of the district [election] committee decided to show that I do not exist, either as a voter or as a citizen,” Mitrokhin said Friday.

“I have to disappoint them. Yabloko not only exists, but it also has the ability to ask law enforcement agencies to punish criminals who falsify elections,” he said in a statement.

Yabloko posted a copy of the voting results for Polling Station No. 192 on its web site, showing 904 votes for United Russia, 87 votes for the Communists, 29 votes for A Just Russia and zero votes for Yabloko, Patriots of Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDPR.

Yabloko’s latest claim came as evidence mounts of blatant falsifications in the elections, which were swept by United Russia and prompted a rare walkout in the State Duma last week.

Yet President Dmitry Medvedev has made no public comment on what is probably the biggest political scandal of his 18-month reign, and he has been coy about a demand by Duma rebels to discuss their grievances personally.

The president’s silence, meanwhile, has invited speculation about whether he fears a conflict with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, his political mentor and predecessor and leader of United Russia.

Medvedev, who is not a member of United Russia, has repeatedly pledged to boost democracy in Russia. But on the day after the elections, he praised them as “well-organized” and said United Russia’s victory showed it had a “moral but also legal” right to run the regions remarks that some analysts called hasty and difficult for him to retract now.

Kremlin spokesman Alexei Pavlov on Sunday attributed Medvedev’s silence to a belief that it would be wrong to react quickly to matters better left to the courts.

Putin also has suggested that those unhappy with the election results should go to court.

That is exactly what Yabloko and the Communist Party have vowed to do. The elections, held in 75 of the country’s 83 regions, brought big gains for United Russia, especially in the Moscow City Duma, where the party won 32 of the 35 seats. The Communists received the other three seats.

Yabloko on Saturday demanded that the vote be declared invalid, saying falsifications had sliced two-thirds off its total vote-count. “This was not a deprivation but a theft of votes,” Yabloko said in a statement.

The Moscow elections committee said Sunday that it was aware of Mitrokhin’s complaint about his vote not being counted, and his polling station would be among three that it would ask the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate, Interfax reported.

In addition to falsifications, Yabloko, the Communist Party and independent election observers have reported violations such as the misuse of absentee ballots, the improper use of administrative resources and pressure on people to vote for United Russia.

The Communist Party has promised to hold nationwide protests this week. OMON riot police detained Red Youth Vanguard leader Sergei Udaltsov and about 10 other people holding an unsanctioned protest in Moscow over the election results Friday.

LDPR and A Just Russia have also complained that the vote was unfair, and their deputies stormed out of the Duma with Communist deputies Wednesday, the first such walkout in nine years. The Communists and LDPR also demanded that an Oct. 27 meeting scheduled with Medvedev be brought forward.

National media have suggested that Medvedev’s silence about meeting with the deputies showed that he was not ready for political action.

But Pavlov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the uncertainty surrounding the meeting boiled down to Medvedev’s timetable. “It is purely because of his schedule. As a very active leader, the president just has had no time to squeeze in that meeting,” he said.

Pavlov said Medvedev would probably meet with the three parties “after Wednesday.”

The Duma rebellion, meanwhile, weakened considerably Friday when LDPR and A Just Russia rejoined the parliament. Communist Deputy Viktor Ilyukhin said Sunday that his party would make a decision Tuesday on when to return to the Duma.

Apart from having little political clout in the face of United Russia’s crushing 70 percent majority in the Duma, the other factions have been accused to varying degrees of co-opting with the government. LDPR is infamous for voicing nationalistic policies before usually toeing the Kremlin line, and A Just Russia is widely seen as a Kremlin-founded left-wing project to steal votes from the Communists.

Sergei Markov, a senior United Russia deputy, said Medvedev should not speak on the subject or meet the deputies too soon in order to avoid a heated debate.

“He cannot do that as long as [the deputies’] demands are too radical and their talk is full of blackmail,” Markov told The Moscow Times.

Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies, said staying silent was the only thing Medvedev could do if he did not want to hurt United Russia, since he had already congratulated the party the day after the vote.

He said Medvedev would like to see “emotions subside” before the meeting so the talks would focus less on election results and more on other issues.

Some observers said the Duma walkout was orchestrated by the Kremlin to warn United Russia functionaries not to jeopardize the ruling party’s comfortably high ratings through unnecessary electoral violations.

“Medvedev wants to separate himself from Putin but is afraid and doesn’t want to make sharp statements that could strain their relations,” said Andrei Piontkovsky, a veteran political analyst and a member of the Institute for Systems Analysis in the Academy of Sciences.

He said the initiative had gone from the Kremlin to LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party has taken credit for initiating the boycott, and the other two fractions supported it.

His words echoed those of Stanislav Belkovsky, a one-time Kremlin spin doctor who described the walkout as part of a coordinated political show. Belkovsky told Ekho Moskvy radio that Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, had wanted to warn regional leaders like Mayor Yury Luzhkov about excessive zeal in giving votes to United Russia.

Surkov also wanted to signal to Medvedev that United Russia’s total stranglehold on legislatures all but guarantee Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Belkovsky said.

Surkov told United Russia members at a closed-door meeting Friday that there was no point in discussing how many parties deserved representation because “the people have decided,” Kommersant reported Saturday. “You must not be ashamed of our well-deserved victory,” he was quoted as saying.

Medvedev has a record of offering a delayed response to major events. When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president last November, he did not mention it in his first state-of-the-nation address, delivered the day after the vote. Instead, he threatened to deploy missiles in Kaliningrad against a now-scrapped U.S. missile defense system. Medvedev later said he “completely forgot” about the election when delivering the address. He sent Obama a congratulatory telegram several hours after the speech.

Earlier this month, the Kremlin was silent for some 24 hours after the Nobel Committee decided to award Obama the peace prize. Medvedev became one of the last world leaders to react, issuing a short congratulatory statement the next day.

Markov, the United Russia deputy, said Medvedev had been right to chose a low-key reaction on both occasions because Russia should not become part of the global “Obamamania” phenomenon.

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