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Protesters Organize as Putin Hints at Dialogue

© RIA Novosti . Yana LapikovaVladimir Putin says he is ready to meet with opposition activists
Vladimir Putin says he is ready to meet with opposition activists - Sputnik International
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Following last month’s massive street rallies challenging his rule, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he did not see a suitable partner to discuss the issues consuming the protesters.

Following last month’s massive street rallies challenging his rule, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he did not see a suitable partner to discuss the issues consuming the protesters.

But on Wednesday, Putin said he was “ready” to meet a new civic group set up by several prominent Russian public figures to defend the rights of the voters.

“I do not rule out… I personally and my colleagues, we are ready to meet with them,” Putin said while meeting with senior Russian media figures in Moscow.

A group of journalists, writers, bloggers and civil society activists announced earlier on Wednesday the creation of the “League of Voters” – a public movement that its founders believe would help organize the grassroots anger and frustration over the allegedly unfair Russian election system into the informed and responsible civil action.

“Our goal is to make the election process healthier,” prominent journalist Leonid Parfyonov said during a news conference hosted by RIA Novosti.

For the next few weeks, the organizers say, the League’s main goal is to ensure that the upcoming elections, in which Putin will run for his third term as president, are fair - but its long-term goals are much more grandiose.

“We want a system of civil control of elections, as well as what comes afterwards, to be created in our country,” Parfyonov, who took part in December mass protests in Moscow, said.

The idea of the League, which was officially established on Monday, was coined by novelist Boris Akunin at the biggest protest rally on December 24. Its founders have promised to stay away from politics, stressing that their initiative was purely civil.

Rock musician Yuri Shevchuk, who joined the conference via a video link from St. Petersburg, described the coalition members as “people who don’t have political ambitions.”

“We are all amateurs here,” Shevchuk, who enjoys great popularity among the Russian opposition, said, sighing each time when he was forced to answer questions from journalists.

“But you know,” he added, “Titanic was built by professionals. And it was amateurs who built Noah's Ark.”

Will Putin get a partner for dialogue?

Following nationwide demonstrations in December, triggered by what protesters have described as “mass violations” in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in parliamentary elections earlier that month, the Russian premier and presidential candidate said he was ready for dialogue with protesters.

However, he then said he had “no one to negotiate with” since the protesters neither had a “common platform,” nor widely-accepted leaders to represent their demands.

It’s yet to be seen whether the League will be able to produce such leaders.

Pavel Salin, an analyst at the Moscow-based Center for Political Assessments, said he believed the new alliance has “vast potential,” unlike established opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov, whom the protesters “largely reject."

“To ride the wave of the protest movement in Russia today, you have to distance yourself from politics,” Salin told RIA Novosti.

The coalition's rejection of politics will be a “basis for dialogue” with the Kremlin, said Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information think tank.

“Vladimir Putin has honestly claimed he does not see anybody who he can talk to among opposition politicians,” Mukhin said. “However, there are such people among public figures. He'll have plenty to talk about with them.”

The League organizers have proposed a range of initiatives designed to boost civil activism in Russia, including the monitoring of the upcoming elections, volunteer work and the organization of protests.

When asked whether they were ready to become negotiators to discuss political reforms with Putin, some of the League founders were affirmative, while others said they would back their peers but not engage personally.

Later on Wednesday, Putin noted, though, that some of the League organizers rejected an invitation to the January 13 ceremony in the Kremlin where journalists were awarded government prizes, and therefore lost an opportunity to talk to him. The organizers have been invited in their personal capacities, not as representatives of protesters.

“They say: ‘We want dialogue. The authorities don’t hear us,’” the premier said. “I wonder what they want. They say there is no discussion - or do they simply not want one?”

‘Much more than seven people’

As vote protests took place mostly in big cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and several others, it’s also unclear whether the League’s initiatives will win over the sentiments of other Russians.

“All innovations begin in the capital and then spread throughout the country,” said political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin, one of the League’s initiators.

The organizers say the internet will become their main tool to spread their effort throughout Russia, but they will also campaign offline.

In 1968, when Soviet troops entered Prague, only seven people came to Red Square in Moscow to protest, popular writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya said, referring to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 designed to crush the anti-communist movement there, known as the Prague Spring.

“Today," she said, "we are much more than seven people.”

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