Andrey Kolesnikov made another comparison in the Novaya Gazeta. “Putin’s Popular Front,” he wrote, “is Mussolini’s corporation: everything from
Shmakov’s unions [Mikhail Shmakov was the chairman of FITUR, the Russian trade union
federation which unites 49 trade unions and counts 25 million members, MHVH] to the
women’s organisations, all under one roof. . . . In implementing the idea of a popular
front, I see the principle enunciated by Il Duce in 1925: ‘All within the state, nothing
outside the state, nothing against the state.’”[38] Putin’s Front, however, still left some place for other parties, thereby rescuing
Russia’s “pluralism.” Real opposition parties, such as the Peoples’ Freedom Party (Parnas) of Boris Nemtsov,
Vladimir Ryzhkov, and Mikhail Kasyanov, were eliminated beforehand from this “pluralist”
system. On June 22, 2011, the Justice Ministry refused to register the party.[39] The Duma elections of December 2011 came too early for the All-Russia People’s
Front to play a role. But after the election ”victory” of United Russia, which was
characterized by massive fraud and the growing estrangement of the urban electorate
from this party, the Kremlin began to purge the party of its most corrupt elements.
At the same time it began to build the All-Russia People’s Front as a political formation
to capture the votes of the conservative and anti-Western segment of the Russian electorate
in the next election. In order to give the—mostly provincial—representatives of this
“silent majority” a chance to enter parliament, Vladimir Putin, on March 1, 2013,
submitted a draft law providing for a restoration of a mixed electoral system in which
one half of the MPs are to be elected in single-mandate constituencies.[40] By May 20, 2013, organizing committees of the All-Russia People’s Front were created
in all Russian regions. It was telling that Moscow and St. Petersburg would be the
last regions where the Front opened offices.[41] The founding congress of the Front, renamed into “People’s Front for Russia,” took
place on June 12, 2013, the official “Russia Day” holiday. At the end the chairman
of the congress said that he still had “a very stupid question.” He asked: “Who do
we choose as leader of our movement?” In the room they started to chant: “Putin, Putin.”
“Shall we vote? There are no other candidates? Vladimir Vladimirovich, I congratulate
you with all my heart.”[42]
However, the new “People’s Front for Russia” was not the only safety valve, invented
by the Kremlin, to save the system. When, at the Duma elections of December 4, 2011,
the disaffected liberal intelligentsia of Moscow and Saint Petersburg turned away
en masse from United Russia and neither did they vote for the fake “Right Cause” party
(which, after Prokhorov left, only got 0.6 percent of the vote), Vladislav Surkov
proposed in an interview a new fake party for “angry urban communities.”[43] In reality, however, the next Kremlin creation was not the promised party for “angry
urban communities,” but a party for a quite different audience: the conservative Cossacks
and their sympathizers. On November 24, 2012, the Cossack Party of the Russian Federation
was founded. There are about 7 million Cossacks in Russia, mostly living in frontier
regions. It is a nationalist electorate, deeply Orthodox, and dedicated to Putin,
who, in 2005, was given the title of Cossack colonel—a title previously held by the
tsars. According to the president of the party, Sergey Bondarev, a former United Russia
MP and deputy governor of the Rostov region, “the party is not only for Cossacks,
but for all citizens of Russia. We are not left-wing and not right-wing, we are straight
ahead.”[44] The abbreviation of the new party, CaPRF, was almost the same as CPRF, the abbreviation
of the Communist Party, which led to protests from the Communists, who accused the
Kremlin of wanting to siphon off voters from their party.
