Thousands of troops belonging to the Wagner Private Military Company, a mercenary force linked to the Russian regime, crossed back over the border from Ukraine and marched towards Moscow, on June 23. Russian leftist and former local councillor in Moscow, Alexandr Zamyatin explains why.
Moscow
Last month's protests in Russia may have been sparked by the arrest of opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, writes Aleksandr Buzgalin, but they were mostly a mass response to the social and economic suffering of the people.
In Russia, the winter of 2011-2012 was unusually stormy in the political sense. The results of both the parliamentary and presidential elections were clearly worked out in advance, and everything went as foreseen.
President Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party were confirmed in power. But the meetings and demonstrations of tens of thousands of people that took place regularly in Moscow and elsewhere over months placed this order in doubt.
Still more significant was the fact that, even after Putin’s win, the political struggle continued. In May, it intensified.
It's been a lively couple of months for Russia's opposition. After last December's parliamentary elections, the country was hit by the largest demonstrations since the 1990s. Defying freezing temperatures, tens of thousands gathered in Moscow alone to protest against election irregularities and the victorious United Russia party of Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. The huge rise in turnout, compared with any demonstration in recent memory, surprised everyone, especially the opposition.
A few months ago I was simply a political analyst. However, since March, I have stepped back into a role I had almost forgotten — that of coordinator of an informal political movement, in this case to organise a boycott of the Russian presidential election.
Since supporters of President Boris Yeltsin were routed in parliamentary elections in December, Russians have been faced with the prospect that their next president may be Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
If a presidential election were held in Russia in the near future, the winner would very likely be a populist candidate pledging strong action against corruption and crime; opposing privatisation and promising a
Russian President Boris Yeltsin appears to have blocked local authority elections called by the Russian parliament for December 8.