Very informative and interesting report Rigged elections are nothing new in Russia, but this is the first time that smartphones have broadcast the brazen ballot stuffing live on the Internet. What is the official reaction? Instead of heeding calls from such people as former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who is demanding a fresh election, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed Hillary Clinton personally for instigating the street protests that followed the election. He criticized her for her outspoken remarks in which she rightly talked about the Russian people's right to a free election. Putin's reaction on state TV, while laughable, highlights once again the paranoia in the Kremlin, which has long feared a "Velvet Revolution" of the kind that brought down governments all over the former Soviet empire after flawed elections. While the United States sees Russia as only a part of its foreign-policy strategy, Moscow remains obsessed by the U.S. A Russian friend just told me an anecdote about a Russian woman who spent a week in the United States recently, and watched the networks and cable news obsessively during her time here. Before she left for home she expressed surprise that there had been nothing about Russia - having expected that in this country we would be obsessed with the Russians, as they are with us. In Egypt, electoral fraud in the last general election was one of the factors that led to the revolution in Tahrir Square. But as we now know after the first round of the freest Egyptian elections in living memory, in which secular liberals scored poorly, Tahrir Square was not Egypt. And Moscow does not represent the whole of Russia. Still, these protests by thousands of young people - which have not been covered on Russian TV - inspire hope that a new generation of Russians are prepared to stand up for their rights. Putin is showing signs of panic by ordering in riot police reinforcements to Moscow to deal with the unrest. Again the clashes between protesters and police have been streamed live on the Internet, escaping the Kremlin's control. In Egypt, they actually shut down the Internet during the revolution, but that cannot be an option for a country like Russia. More big protests are planned for Saturday - significantly, not only in the Russian capital, but in 90 other cities. It may be too late to affect the parliamentary polls, with the results to be declared tomorrow. But the U.S. should brush aside Putin's Cold War accusations of "foreign interference" and insist that he get his house in order to allow a free vote in the presidential elections next March". Taken from the monitoring centre of Kavkaz on behalf of the Caucasus Emirate .
Putin got only poor spy "education", he can think only in the categories of the Cold War, therefore he is the biggest brake on the Russia's Way to the True Democracy.
First report on Protest Saturday . AP's Moscow correspondent Jim Heinz commented on the anti-Putin rally of the liberal-democratic opposition took place in the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow: "If Saturday's protests are a success, the activists then face the challenge of long-term strategy. Even though US Sen. John McCain recently tweeted to Putin that "the Arab Spring is coming to a neighborhood near you", things in Russia are not that simple. The popular uprisings that brought down governments in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine the next year, and in Egypt last spring all were significantly boosted by demonstrators being able to establish round-the-clock presences, notably in Cairo's Tahrir Square and the massive tent camp on Kiev's main avenue. Russian police would hardly tolerate anything similar. Opposition figures indicated Friday that the next step would be to call another protest in Moscow for next weekend and make it even bigger. But staged events at regular intervals may be less effective than daily spontaneous protests. Russia's opposition also is vulnerable to attacks on the websites and social media that have nourished the protests. This week, an official of Vkontakte, a Russian version of Facebook, reported pressure from the FSB, the KGB's main successor, to block access to opposition groups, but said his company refused. On election day, the websites of a main independent radio station and the country's only independent election-monitoring group fell victim to denial-of-service hacker attacks". It is to be recalled that the protesters at the Bolotnaya Square adopted a resolution of five points. The main requirements are "the immediate release of all political prisoners", and "abolition of the results of rigged elections". Among the requirements is resignation the chairman of the Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov and investigation of all violations
