2 December 2011
MOSCOW – Russian prosecutors accused the country's largest independent election-monitoring group of violating election laws, days before a parliamentary vote in which observers and opposition groups forecast widespread fraud.
The move comes as the Kremlin battles voter apathy and indications that the lofty personal appeal of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is beginning to wane. The main pro-Kremlin political party, United Russia, is expected to lose seats in the national vote on Sunday for the first time since it was founded in 2001.
With a tight grip on the political system and major media, the Kremlin has sidelined all important rivals. But allegations of widespread manipulation could undermine the credibility of the vote, which is important to Mr. Putin's legitimacy at home and abroad as he prepares to return to the presidency next year.
In the last national parliamentary elections in 2007, Russian officials accused Western vote observers of bias, and a delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ultimately canceled its plans to monitor the contest.
Lately, the Kremlin has targeted local vote monitors, casting them as stooges to Western masters. In a speech to a pro-Kremlin party congress on Sunday, Mr. Putin denounced foreign interference in Russia's elections through "so-called grant recipients" whom he compared to Judas Iscariot. Mr. Putin advised that the funds were "money down the drain."
The independent group under investigation, Golos, has been monitoring elections in Russia since 2000, and is funded by the U.S. and European governments. Golos will be monitoring Sunday's vote despite the accusations, the organization says. Russian opposition parties and the OSCE will also observe.
Golos's importance has grown in recent years as other nonprofit groups have shut down operations because of tighter government restrictions, said Spencer Oliver, secretary-general of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.
"Its work is not illegal. It is a nonpolitical effort to monitor elections," said Mr. Oliver. He called Golos "one of the better sources" for learning about elections in Russia's regions.
On Tuesday, three deputies in Russia's lower house of Parliament, the Duma, issued a call to prosecutors to shut down Golos for allegedly interfering in the elections.
Prosecutors announced on Thursday that they had followed up on the Duma request and found that Golos had violated electoral laws, which weren't specified.
Golos Deputy Executive Director Grigory Melkonyants said prosecutors issued a letter of warning to the organization, accusing it of publishing opinion polls after the legal deadline. The letter also said the group was publishing "biased and inaccurate" information, and that its interactive map purveys a "sharp negative assessment of the activities of political parties."
Mr. Melkonyants rejected the charges. He said prosecutors also issued a warning to the group's executive director, Lilia Shibanova, to refrain from "continuing to conduct illegal activities."
Mr. Melkonyants said he remained unsure what activities Golos was supposed to discontinue. "This all just sounds like censorship," he said.
This year, Golos created an online interactive map where Russians around the country can read about alleged electoral abuse in their communities and lodge their own complaints. The map now holds more than 4,500 complaints, most of them touching on the Kremlin-controlled party, United Russia.
Golos workers have long been pestered in Russia's regions, where local authorities regularly try to bribe or threaten workers into reporting on the group's activities, said Mr. Melkonyants. But he said he believed the success of the interactive map drew the wrath of the Kremlin.
The group was hit by an "unprecedented" wave of harassment about a week ago, he said. "Now something happens daily," he said.
On Wednesday, Gazeta.ru, an online news service that helped design and promote the election-violation map, removed a bannered link to the map from its website. Its deputy editor resigned in protest.
Last week, state-run newspaper Rossisskaya Gazeta ran an article attacking the group under the headline, "The Voice of Money."
Over the weekend, a television crew from the Kremlin-controlled NTV network barged into training sessions for observers, demanding to know whether they worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, workers said.
Lilia Shibanova, the executive director of Golos, agreed to give an interview, but the crew returned later and got into a shouting match with Mr. Melkonyants who recorded it on his mobile phone and then posted the video on the Internet. The video has had nearly 400,000 hits so far this week on YouTube.
As the TV producer delivered questions, Mr. Melkonyants repeatedly shouted back, "You are Surkov's propaganda," a reference to Vladislav Surkov, first deputy chief of staff to Russia's president, and head of the Kremlin's political machine.
