Russian Elections

Russia is slipping backward.

 

Do you want to say that West is more confortable place for corrupted officials and oligarchs?Well,you know it better.

We have slipped back 20 years ago.

 

Great job. Now calculate average salary on 12 and make sure I was right.

What made you to make this dumb assumption?

$1 =31 Ruble

Bla-bla-bla. Nonsense.

Epic fail is epic.

It is you, who are living with them. Free Western Societies are ideal for thieves. Thanks for valuable info.

BTW, so what is Muslims taking over your faterland?

Do us a favor, each time you make these sort of statements, add an "in my modest opinion".

 

Do you now what is Encounters of the Third for you?

 

And you cares about the riots in France, Portugal and Greece. Ostap this is only for you sounds pointless. United States is very far from Europe

 

Moscow prepares for Russian Spring Revolution as thousands protest Putin's election fraud
Publication time: 5 December 2011, 23:33

Several thousand people turned out on this cold and rainy night to protest what observers and opposition leaders say were rigged parliamentary elections that gave a fraudulent victory to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his ruling United Russia party.

As an icy rain fell, an initial crowd of hundreds who gathered on a tree-lined boulevard for a sanctioned rally swelled to as many as 10,000, as chants of "Putin out!" and "Russia without Putin!" rang out.

The protest is thought to be the largest Russian opposition rally in years.

Widespread displeasure with Putin and his party has surrounded the December 4 poll, which the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said exhibited "limited political competition and a lack of fairness."

The independent Golos election watchdog organization also said that it had received more than 1,500 complaints of electoral violations and been the subject of targeted harassment from government authorities.

Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov, who spoke at the protest rally, said the official results could not be considered legitimate.

Vladimir Ryzhkov spoke at the opposition protest in central Moscow.

"About 10 to 15 percent of the votes were the result of ballot box stuffing, falsifications, and the rewriting of protocols. United Russia's real result is no more than 35 percent, maybe even less than that," he said.

"They have the most catastrophic situation in cities with a population of over one million: they got 20 to 25 percent there, at best. So, this is a failure," Ryzhkov added.

Even with the claims of fraud, the more than 49 percent United Russia is said to have won represents a significant drop from the last election, when it claimed 64 percent of the vote.

This year, three parties split the remaining vote: A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party.

Our correspondent reported seeing several thousand protesters crowded onto the boulevard that stretches away from Moscow's Chistye Prudy metro, with some people climbing fences to better hear the speakers. Among those who rallied the crowd were the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, writer and liberal Dmitry Bykov, Evgenya Chirikova from the Save Khimki Forest movement, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and Solidarity Youth head Ilya Yashin.

Nemtsov called the election "a crushing defeat for Putin and his party of swindlers and thieves," and said there have been 'thousands [of reports] of falsification facts, of 'carousel' voting, [and] stuffed ballot boxes."

"We're now starting a campaign to open a criminal case against these vermin. They stole 13 million votes from us. In Moscow they didn't even get 25 percent but drew up 46 percent for themselves. Our observers across the whole country traced total violations. So [United Russia leaders] can conduct themselves however they like, but no one believes them at all."

Among the protesters was Anna, a 22-year-old student, who told RFE/RL. "We came here because the results that they have given us are an insult and it's an insult to us that our vote didn't play a role."

Twenty-eight-year-old Gennady, who works in marketing, said he came out to register his lack of faith in the election results.

"We decided to come here because we observed how things happening yesterday and last night, we watched all the videos on YouTube showing all this falsification and ballot stuffing, we've seen that there are pens at polling booths that have disappearing ink in them and all these things," she said. "We asked our friends, our relatives and their friends who they voted for and none of them said United Russia -- and still we get this fantastical result. We came here today to support people like us who don't agree with this result."

Police in riot gear detained an unknown number of protesters. At one point, hundreds of people who had begun marching toward the Central Elections Commission were stopped and taken away in buses.

Western correspondents reported seeing dozens of police buses and riot police in helmets and batons forcing apart protesters who had interlocked their arms.

Amnesty International issued a statement this evening criticizing what it said were at least 300 arrests made over the weekend and calling on authorities to release everyone in custody.

Nicola Duckworth, Director of Amnesty International's Europe and Central Asia Programme, said, "These disgraceful detentions highlight once again the failure of the Russian government to respect its citizens' rights to freedom of expression and assembly."

The election and protests come just three months before Russia votes for a new president, with Putin still the odds-on favorite to win.

 

another wall of text with no personal comments whatsoever... I hate walls of texts... why not just post the link and save some bandwidth?

 

Dutch ,
It is true that average American attention span is very low and two or three sentences are usually sufficient before they get back to their food or nod off .
But let us try and encourage them to get back to where they were before America turned into Porker Ville .
Here's another report which saves people having to dial it themselves .
Take it step by step and piece by piece . It's not that difficult after a bit of practise .It's also interesting , revealing and written by Russians --- they manage lots of connected sentences in their reports .

There is at least one area in which last Sunday’s parliamentary elections proved to be a breaking point, a milestone in the development of the Russian society. It was the role that the Internet in general and social media in particular played in informing the public about the course of the polling, the fraud and the results of the vote.
At about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Anna Kachkaeva, a prominent Russian media expert and the dean of the Communications Department at the Higher School of Economics, wrote on her Facebook page: “Well, one can state that these elections are for the first time taking place in the real situation of parallel information flows – the official one and the one of mass civic networks.”

In fact, the day began very poorly for opposition-minded Internet media. The Web sites of a large number of media and groups monitoring the elections, including Echo of Moscow radio, Kommersant.ru, which publishes stories not only from the Kommersant newspaper, but also from other publications of the publishing house, Bolshoi Gorod magazine, OpenSpace.ru and the Golos association – one of the most prominent monitoring groups – were knocked out by DDoS attacks.

But the move by unidentified “killer hackers” triggered a massive reaction in the Russian blogging community, and served as an additional mobilization call. One blogger after another, from such popular figures as anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny to rank-and-file civic journalists, offered their blogs as vehicles for publishing reports of violations.

Twitter played a key role in the dissemination of exit polls from individual regions and even individual polling stations across Russia. Given many Twitter users’ anti-United Russia bias, the majority of these were meant to show that support for United Russia was weak in the regions. Here is one of the dispatches, roughly translated: “Polling station #671 (Ivanov Region) UR – 22.63%, Just Russ – 18.17%, Communists – 35.77%, LDPR – 12.69%.,” tweeted by a local amateur monitor and then re-tweeted through clearinghouses like Alexei Navalny’s blog, which has many more readers.

That move – and there were many of those reporting exit polls early in the day – has raised the issue of the legality of such activity. According to the Russian election law, it is forbidden to publish any new polls, and especially exit polls, during the last week before elections, and especially on the day before elections. It is only after the polling stations in the country’s westernmost region of Kaliningrad close at 9 p.m. Moscow time that the traditional media begin reporting the exit polls. But what about the blogs, which are not registered as media outlets? Nashi activists demanded that Navalny be arrested for breaking the “silent period,” and the Central Election Commission issued a statement saying it would investigate the case.

Social networks also served as a conduit for disseminating evidence on alleged vote rigging. YouTube clips like this one show “carousels” of voters submitting ballots at more than ten different polling stations, vote counters opening up a ballot box that has been stuffed with votes for United Russia, and pens with erasable ink being used at a Moscow polling station. On Facebook, user Dmitry Surnin, who was monitoring the elections yesterday in Moscow, posted this count of the voting tallies, which he says are considerably different from what was posted on the Central Election Commission’s Web site today.

The clip by user Singinau on YouTube, depicting a chairman of a local Electoral Commission as he seems to be filling in voting bulletins – a move that constitutes a crime – was reposted on many Facebook and Twitter accounts and garnered more than 500,000 views in just one day.

Another form of activity was informing one’s friends on social networks of whether people had voted and if they did, which party they had voted for. Special userpics began appearing on Facebook depicting the party the user had voted for. Political figures from the unregistered Parnas party, who advocated ruining the ballots as an expression of protest, posted pictures with the ballots crossed out.

Toward the evening, as the exit polls and the first results started to appear, voter reactions swept over the blogosphere. Late in the evening two twitter tags, the first #жалкий and the second an unprintable insult, began linking to @MedvedevRussia, after the president tweeted “Thank you for supporting United Russia!” Many of the responses were unprintable, but here is what user anzgri wrote: “You are a liar… you serve Putin and not United Russia. Retweet this.” When Golos’ map of violations was knocked offline during the day, it moved all of its data over to this GoogleDoc, where it tallied over 1,300 violations. At three in the morning, Golos finally signed off on twitter: “The elections are illegitimate. Good Night.”

“Civil journalism had opened a completely new era last Sunday, with hundreds if not thousands of Facebook users, Vkontakte [Russian social network] users, Tweeterers and LiveJournal bloggers monitoring the elections, serving as a comprehensive public watchdog,” said Vassily Gatov, the vice chairman of the Russian Publisher’s Guild and the head of RIA Novosti’s MediaLab – a think tank tracking trends in new media. “That was a truly amazing feeling of the tech-savvy crowd taking the role every media outlet should care about: are our votes counted properly? Is the system cheating in order to get some predefined results that would favor a particular (of course, ruling) party? People of different social backgrounds and of various political affiliations were reporting from all over the country – leaking the suspicious manipulations at poll stations, taking videos of fake bulletins in the boxes, detecting voting violations with tweets. The network of networks had said just its first word.”

Kachkaeva, of the Higher School of Economics, said that the size of the audience of the traditional media – first and foremost television – is still incomparable to that of the Internet. But interaction between the two has also started taking place. Blogs were publishing television videos and some local television channels began picking stories from the Internet. Even on the state-run Rossiya 1 television channel, where the election night coverage demonstrated a variety of opinions unheard of on national television in the past decade, the subject of fraud publicized in social media and the very new phenomenon of Internet-era election watching became a notable subject of discussion. “It was a breaking point, something completely new,” said Kachkaeva