After Targeting Protesters and NGOs, Russia Extends Crackdown on Dissent Into Parliament
Following the heavily manipulated elections in 2003, in which pro-democracy parties lost nearly all of their seats, Russia’s Parliament, already largely loyal to the Kremlin since 2000, finally ceased to be an independent body. Then Speaker Boris Gryzlov famously declared it “not a place for discussions.” Unanimity was cemented with the removal of the last independent deputies in 2007: not only dissenting legislative initiatives, but even dissenting voices were no longer tolerated. In the last (and perhaps the most fraudulent) elections in December 2011, genuine opponents of Vladimir Putin were not even allowed on the ballot—which explains why the nominally “opposition” parties in the current Duma are backing key Kremlin initiatives (such as the recent law directed against NGOs).
Yet, as tens of thousands of people went to the streets to protest election fraud in what became Russia’s largest pro-democracy rallies in two decades, a handful of Duma members responded to the changed public mood and openly broke with the Kremlin. Gennady Gudkov, Dmitri Gudkov (his son), and Ilya Ponomarev—all of them from the otherwise docile A Just Russia party—regularly participate in street rallies, sport white ribbons (the symbol of the protest movement) at Duma sessions, and use the parliamentary rostrum to call members of Putin’s United Russia party by their popular nickname: “crooks and thieves.”