President Putin appeared to be heading for a landslide victory in Russia’s parliamentary elections tonight amid widespread reports that millions of citizens were coerced into voting for his party, United Russia.
Early results from the central election commission indicated United Russia was leading with 62% of votes, with the Communist party trailing a distant second on 11.5%.
Two other partners looked set to scrape into the State Duma: the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic party of Russia with 10.6% and Fair Russia, another Kremlin-linked party, with 7.1%. Exit polls indicated similar figures.
Turnout was expected to be high at over 60% compared to 56% in the last Duma election in 2003.
Observers said the poll and run-up campaign were the least fair in the entire post-Soviet period with thousands of public sector workers complaining they were threatened with losing jobs or bonuses if they did not cast their ballot for United Russia.
While the pro-Kremlin United Russia has a genuinely large public following on the back of Putin’s high personal ratings, monitors said the result had been inflated by up 20% through a campaign of intimidation and black PR.
Liliya Shibanova, director of Golos, a monitoring organisation with 2,000 observers across the country, told the Guardian: “We have seen an unprecedented attempt to manipulate the vote. There has been mass forced voting and a raft of other violations.”
Kremlin aides were known to be desperate to orchestrate a crushing win for United Russia as an endorsement for Putin to stay on as de facto leader of the country despite having to give up the presidency next spring. The president headed the party’s list in today’s election which was to choose 450 members of the State Duma lower house of parliament.
The lead-up to polling day was marred by widespread claims of dirty tricks. Shibanova said huge numbers of workers in state enterprises and students had been obliged to take absentee ballots from their polling stations and vote at their place of work or study. Bosses and teaching staff then hinted or told voters directly that they would lose jobs, fail exams or be kicked out of dormitories if they did not vote for United Russia. In some regions up to 54 times more absentee ballots had been issued than during the last Duma elections in 2003, she said.
Opposition groups today reported that police had arrested dozens of their activists across the country. Those detained included leading members of the Other Russia, the anti-Kremlin coalition headed by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Dmitry Krayukhin, a human rights activist and independent election monitor from the town of Oryol, said police arrested him on the eve of today’s election.
“I was walking down the street not far from my office when a young man pushed into me and started yelling. I immediately realised it was a provocation. Suddenly two or three militia guys came out from a nearby car and surrounded me.
“They pushed my face into the snow and handcuffed me. I was then taken down the station and charged with stealing a mobile phone,” Krayukhin told the Guardian.
The police only released him after Amnesty International and other human rights groups intervened, Krayuhkin said. But the local head of the Other Russia, Georgy Sarkisyan, was still in prison and unable to vote after police arrested him for hooliganism, he added.
Opposition leaders also questioned the size of the turnout, and said they huge voting figures were the result of administrative fraud. Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent MP, said the number of absentee ballots from his Siberian constituency had ballooned from 1,500 during Russia’s last 2003 election to 20,000 this time.
Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist party leader, said the election had been “the most irresponsible and dirty” since the Soviet break-up in 1991.
One independent exit poll in the far eastern port of Vladivostok suggested that United Russia had done worse than expected. The party polled only 40% - with the Union of Rights Forces, an opposition party, in second place with 14%, and the communists third with 13.9%, the poll by the Golos organisation suggested.
The Communist party complained that election officials were touring flats and houses with a mobile ballot box in an attempt to boost the vote for United Russia.
“They didn’t make any effort to tick people off the voters’ list or stop them voting twice. Officials simply went round local apartments,” Artyom Skatov, a communist spokesman in the town of Novosibirsk told the Guardian.
Tonight Grigory Golosov, a professor in the faculty of political sciences and sociology at St Petersburg’s European university, described yesterday’s vote as “fair but not free.”
He said the level of “outright fraud” in the election was minor. But he added that in much of Russia the local administration had compelled people to vote for United Russia.
Some of the results for turnout from Russia’s ethnic republics were “amazing”, Golosov said, with 82% of the population apparently voting, including a 92% turnout in Chechnya.
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