By Philip P. Pan
In late August, one of Russia's leading opposition figures addressed a small demonstration in downtown Moscow and laid into Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, comparing his rollback of democratic reforms to the attempted coup by Communist Party hard-liners in the last days of the Soviet Union.
"Everything that is going on now very much reminds us of what they wanted to do back in 1991," Nikita Belykh, chairman of the Union of Right Forces party, told the crowd. "We practically have a one-party system. . . . We practically have a state economy, a personality cult, militarization."
The remarks were hardly unusual for Belykh, 33, a burly, round-faced former deputy governor. Months earlier, he had been arrested while attempting to lead a protest march through the city. In October, when his party agreed to disband and forge an alliance with the Kremlin, he resigned rather than go along.
So it was a surprise when Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev summoned Belykh to the Kremlin this month and offered to appoint him governor of a province in central Russia -- and he agreed.
The appointment, which prompted accusations of betrayal by some of Belykh's colleagues, is a sign of the uncertainty surrounding Russian politics as Putin confronts the country's worst economic crisis in a decade and the fractured opposition tries to tap into rising public discontent and mount a new challenge.
After nearly a decade of rapid growth that buoyed Putin's popularity, plummeting oil prices and tight credit markets have pushed Russia into a severe slowdown, with some economists predicting that next year could bring the country's first recession since the 1998 financial crisis. In November, industrial output plunged nearly 11 percent while the number of unemployed climbed by 400,000, to 5 million people, according to official statistics.
Although more than three-quarters of Russians continue to approve of Putin and Medvedev, 40 percent now say the country is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 24 percent in September, according to a recent poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center. About 43 percent said the country was moving in the right direction, and 18 percent declined to answer.
Thousands of people participated in small demonstrations in several Russian cities over the weekend to protest a plan to raise tariffs on imported cars. Riot police clashed with protesters in the eastern port city of Vladivostok for the second Sunday in a row.
Several leading members of the democratic opposition set aside long-standing differences this month to form a new anti-Kremlin movement named Solidarity, after the victorious anti-Communist movement in Poland.
"The crisis means the incompetence of the authorities is on display," said Ilya Yashin, a leader of one of Russia's main democratic parties, Yabloko, and a member of the Solidarity coalition. "It means we have a chance to present an alternative."
He and other Solidarity leaders said they hoped to persuade the public that only democratic institutions such as independent courts and competitive elections can check the corruption and waste that are choking economic growth. But they acknowledged it would be a tough case to make in a society where many people associate democratic reforms with the economic and social turmoil in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"One of the tasks of the Solidarity movement is to rehabilitate those basic principles that, unfortunately, for a significant or even overwhelming portion of our fellow citizens, have become associated with failure, misery or reduction of freedom," said Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and one of the most prominent figures in the Solidarity leadership.
Vladimir Milov, another Solidarity leader and a former deputy energy minister, said Solidarity is an attempt to "rebrand" the democrats, he said, by setting aside the internal disputes and offering a concrete economic program. "We're not seen as constructive, while Putin is seen as practical," he said. "So we need to show we are serious, that we have serious people and serious ideas."
The opposition has tried and failed to unite several times in recent years. Kasparov helped establish another opposition coalition two years ago called Other Russia, but the main democratic parties boycotted it because it welcomed nationalist and socialist groups they considered extremist.
Solidarity, by contrast, has excluded those groups. Some prominent democratic politicians have also kept their distance from Solidarity, including former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Ryzhkov, leader of the Russian Republican Party.
Ryzhkov said he was hesitant to join because the group did not have an effective plan for challenging the Kremlin and because the public considers some of its leaders to be radicals. Instead, he said, he is working with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev to form a new party that would try to draw support from the political and business elites as well as the masses.
He acknowledged, though, that they have yet to come up with a complete strategy for challenging Putin. "All liberalization in Russia has been the result of a crisis," he said. "Now we have another chance, and we are preparing."
The Kremlin appears worried about the opposition and has moved to co-opt and divide it. In November, it established a liberal democratic party of its own, Right Cause, after persuading the Union of Right Forces, one of the main democratic parties, to disband and to join it.
Critics say the new party is a puppet of the Kremlin designed to draw support from the real opposition. Belykh, who resigned as chairman of the Union of Right Forces, began working with the Solidarity movement instead.
But then Putin and Medvedev offered him the governorship of Kirov, a small, impoverished region with a population of about 1.5 million. He said he took the job because they assured him they were not demanding his political loyalty, and because he wanted to show the public that democrats could be effective managers.
"Of course, building an individual island of liberalism in an illiberal country isn't going to work," he said. "But at least I can try to do something positive. One of the problems of the liberal movement is that we have no success stories."
Belykh said he was uncertain of Putin's and Medvedev's motives, and speculated that they were trying to signal a willingness to work with critics. "I don't know if it's real," he said. "Only time will tell."
