Window on Eurasia: Blocking an "Orange Revolution" in the Middle Volga

20.01.05

Mari-El's president has employed highly coercive measures to stave off an "orange revolution"-style challenge in that Middle Volga region - an indication of the amount of public pressure for political change in at least one part of Russia and a measure of the willingness of officials there to try to do whatever it takes to block it.

During his earlier term, Mari-El President Leonid Markelov worked hard to silence his opponents. During his watch, journalists were frequently beaten by people who somehow were never caught by the authorities. And the republic's independent newspapers could remain so only if they were printed beyond Markelov's reach.

And in the course of the election campaign last fall, Markelov exploited his incumbency to the hilt. He not only monopolized the electronic media and published more campaign materials than the law allows, but his officials blocked both his opponents from getting their campaign items printed or from gaining access to most of the media.

Despite opposition complaints that Markelov's actions had made the election into a farce and calls by some to boycott the vote, Markelov won on December 19 with 57 percent of the vote, with his closest competitor obtaining less than 20 percent. Signalling his pleasure with the result, Russian President Putin on the very day of the vote gave Markelov an award.

If Putin was paying attention to developments in this relatively small Finno-Ugric republic - 760,000 people living on 23,300 square kilometers - and drawing his own conclusions, few other outsiders have been. And at that moment, Markelov almost certainly assumed that he had a more or less cloudless future in the Mari-El capital of Ioshkar-Ola.

But three developments since then have attracted more attention to that region and thereby changed the political equation there:

First, people likely connected to Markelov's regime succeeded in attacking the wrong journalist. On January 7, three youths attacked Elena Rogacheva, the Mari-El correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who is also the wife of a leading opposition journalist in what was almost certainly an act of intimidation rather than a police crime.

No matter where they occur, attacks on journalists with outside connections are almost certain to be covered by other journalists, both those in the media itself and even more by those in media watchdog groups. That is precisely what happened in this case..

Second, the opposition movement worked hard to adapt the tactics of the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Infuriated both by Markelov's actions in the election and enraged by his suggestion that it wasn't important for the republic to have an ethnic Mari as its head - he is not - his opponents organized and went to court.

Markelov's subordinates were able to block the Mari-El opposition from meeting as planned on December 23, although they were not able to prevent the group from issuing appeals to President Vladimir Putin, Mari living outside the republic, and other Finno-Ugric peoples around the world. (These and other details can be found at http://www.mari.ee)

Nor could the authorities block the opposition's ability to appeal to the courts, although not surprisingly, Markelov at least so far has been able to block local courts from ruling against him. But the opposition may be able to take the case further, attracting attention in places where Margelov does not have full control.

And third, Markelov's response to this challenge at the time of his inauguration on January 16 was so harsh that some outside media - including news agencies like Regnum and newspapers like "Kommersant" - have begun to shine the light of press coverage not only on the events of that day but on some earlier developments in Mari-El as well.

On the day of the inauguration, some 300 of Markelov's opponents, including both ethnic activists and pensioners angered by the Moscow's new benefits plan, converged on Ioshkar-Ola's Lenin Square to protest. Completely non-violent, they carried signs like "No to election falsifications" and "We are not slaves."

What awaited them? An enormous number of heavily armed militia and OMON officers spaced every meter or so across the square, apparently fortified by other officers not in uniform. In the words of one participant, it was like the October 1993 standoff in Moscow, leading him and others to ask why weren't all these police at work fighting real crime.

However that might be, of course, the officers soon made short work of the non-violent demonstrators, briefly detaining the participants until the inaugural celebrations were over but threatening to bring charges against the leaders of the opposition.

Such a show of force, of course, was clearly intended to intimidate the opposition, but it may have had just the opposite effect. Not only has the opposition pledged to continue the court-base challenges, but its members may have gained an important ally: the kind of media attention that could limit Markelov and empower them.

Paul Goble