One inconvenience of heading a puppet political party is that, at any moment, the puppet master may remind you who is really pulling the strings. Mikhail Prokhorov learned this lesson the hard way. Last week, the Forbes billionaire, whose fortune is estimated at $18 billion (making him the third-richest man in Russia and the eighth-richest man in Europe), was publicly shown his place by a midlevel Kremlin apparatchik. Radii Khabirov, deputy head of the internal politics section at the presidential administration—a subordinate of the Kremlin’s notorious deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov—directed the national convention of Right Cause party to dismiss Prokhorov as leader. Delegates, who had just three months ago enthusiastically embraced the billionaire and called him their “Czar, father, God, and military commander,” equally enthusiastically (by 75 “ayes” to zero “nays,” with two abstentions) voted to fire him.
Friends had warned Prokhorov not to play the Kremlin’s game. He ignored their advice and agreed to become the nominal head of Right Cause, an ostensibly “liberal” party set up by the Kremlin to imitate the presence of pro-democracy forces on the December ballot—for the sake of legitimizing Russia’s “elections” in the eyes of the West. The real liberal opposition, the Popular Freedom Party led by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, was denied registration in June—the same month Prokhorov was picked to lead Right Cause. While calling for moderate “reforms”—such as electing 25 percent of Duma members in single-member districts rather than through party lists—Prokhorov emphasized that he was not opposed to the system and maintained unwavering loyalty to Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. But, as Boris Nemtsov observed after Prokhorov’s removal, “Even if you are 95 percent dependent [on the Kremlin], and only 5 percent independent, you are already considered a criminal.”
Prokhorov’s “5 percent independence” consisted of wanting to place a handful of his own people—such as Yekaterinburg activist Yevgeny Roizman, known for his controversial methods of combating drug addiction—onto the party list, rather than just signing off on the preapproved list handed down from the Kremlin. (Two days before his dismissal, Prokhorov had a private meeting with Surkov.) Prokhorov had half-jokingly suggested that he would make a good prime minister—the position currently held by Putin—and that he may consider running for president in 2012. Coupled with his formidable wealth, such words may have proven too much for his Kremlin curators.
“We will soon find out who is the real leader of the party—Prokhorov or Surkov,” noted Roizman two days before the convention. The answer was clear enough. Prokhorov, thrown out by the same people who had hired him three months earlier, accused Surkov of being “a puppeteer who has privatized the political system.” His place at the top of the Right Cause list in the December “elections” was given to little-known lawyer Andrei Dunayev—reported to be the aforementioned Radii Khabirov’s personal attorney. The second spot went to Andrei Bogdanov, the Kremlin’s errand boy who had previously helped it seize control of the Democratic Party of Russia from Mikhail Kasyanov, and posed as a “democratic candidate” in the 2008 presidential “elections.” In case not everyone got the message, Vladislav Surkov has just reminded his colleagues that “our principles of working with the political space will remain the same.”
The Kremlin’s “liberal” project has been shut down. All the better. If someone—in Russia or in the West—still had illusions about the possibility of “reform from within” or at least some token competition in the upcoming “parliamentary elections,” these have been conclusively put to rest. When political change finally does come to Russia, it will not come from inside the corrupt and lawless authoritarian system.
Friends had warned Prokhorov not to play the Kremlin’s game. He ignored their advice and agreed to become the nominal head of Right Cause, an ostensibly “liberal” party set up by the Kremlin to imitate the presence of pro-democracy forces on the December ballot—for the sake of legitimizing Russia’s “elections” in the eyes of the West. The real liberal opposition, the Popular Freedom Party led by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, was denied registration in June—the same month Prokhorov was picked to lead Right Cause. While calling for moderate “reforms”—such as electing 25 percent of Duma members in single-member districts rather than through party lists—Prokhorov emphasized that he was not opposed to the system and maintained unwavering loyalty to Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. But, as Boris Nemtsov observed after Prokhorov’s removal, “Even if you are 95 percent dependent [on the Kremlin], and only 5 percent independent, you are already considered a criminal.”
Prokhorov’s “5 percent independence” consisted of wanting to place a handful of his own people—such as Yekaterinburg activist Yevgeny Roizman, known for his controversial methods of combating drug addiction—onto the party list, rather than just signing off on the preapproved list handed down from the Kremlin. (Two days before his dismissal, Prokhorov had a private meeting with Surkov.) Prokhorov had half-jokingly suggested that he would make a good prime minister—the position currently held by Putin—and that he may consider running for president in 2012. Coupled with his formidable wealth, such words may have proven too much for his Kremlin curators.
“We will soon find out who is the real leader of the party—Prokhorov or Surkov,” noted Roizman two days before the convention. The answer was clear enough. Prokhorov, thrown out by the same people who had hired him three months earlier, accused Surkov of being “a puppeteer who has privatized the political system.” His place at the top of the Right Cause list in the December “elections” was given to little-known lawyer Andrei Dunayev—reported to be the aforementioned Radii Khabirov’s personal attorney. The second spot went to Andrei Bogdanov, the Kremlin’s errand boy who had previously helped it seize control of the Democratic Party of Russia from Mikhail Kasyanov, and posed as a “democratic candidate” in the 2008 presidential “elections.” In case not everyone got the message, Vladislav Surkov has just reminded his colleagues that “our principles of working with the political space will remain the same.”
The Kremlin’s “liberal” project has been shut down. All the better. If someone—in Russia or in the West—still had illusions about the possibility of “reform from within” or at least some token competition in the upcoming “parliamentary elections,” these have been conclusively put to rest. When political change finally does come to Russia, it will not come from inside the corrupt and lawless authoritarian system.
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