MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Dmitry Shusharin) - The appointment of a new chairman of Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) is the best indicator of the political processes under way here.
On March 13, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved five new members of the CEC to replace the outgoing ones.
The new chairman, Vladimir Churov, had worked at St. Petersburg's city hall together with Putin, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District Dmitry Kozak. Some experts said it was to support Churov's candidacy that parliament recently passed a law which does not oblige CEC members to have a legal education.
Other commentators said that the new chairman is a member of the reserve team on which Putin has been lately relying. The team also includes Deputy Prosecutor-General Alexander Bastrykin, Deputy Interior Minister Oleg Safonov, and head of the Interior Ministry's Investigation Committee Alexander Anichin.
All of them have known Putin for a long time, but they have never used his name or their relations with him for commercial purposes.
All this shows that the clan principle of governing the state is becoming reality. We see the development of a system of "unofficial power." Commentators said unanimously that the former CEC chairman, Alexander Veshnyakov, was loyal to Putin, but he thought he was an equal member of the team whose opinion should be respected. This is why he criticized the most odious amendments to the electoral legislation.
Churov said upon taking office that he "will not comment on legislation, but monitor compliance with it."
When taken out of context, the phrase sounds trite, but it has an element of hidden polemic against the former CEC chairman. Churov has proclaimed his credo as a functionary in the broad meaning of the word, which makes sense, since those who want to have a successful career in a clan-governed state must not strive to be more than mere functionaries.
There are reasons to assume that the new CEC members will turn the commission from a political into a technical agency. This is the opinion of most experts and politicians, but I believe that their evaluation does not take into account the factor of context.
The situation in which elections were held in 14 Russian regions and the events that happened before and after them are enough to formulate hypotheses, if not draw conclusions, about the authorities' view of the situation.
The success of the second ruling party, Just Russia, was planned well in advance (though the major scale of that success probably came as a bit of a surprise), but the authorities hardly expected the relatively high results of the Communists. In addition, the resolve of some parties to contest the election results in some regions as fraudulent has apparently alarmed the Kremlin.
It ordered about 2,000 policemen to prevent a picket by the Union of Right Forces (SPS), which said that election results had been falsified in the Moscow Region. The results of elections in Dagestan, a republic in the Caucasus, in southern Russia, have been revised. And lastly, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, who is usually very loyal to the Kremlin, has ordered LDPR deputies in the parliament's lower house to walk out of the session as a protest against the actions of regional election commissions.
The Opponents' March in Nizhny Novgorod (and in St. Petersburg before that) was suppressed in a manner that showed that the people's right "to assemble peacefully, without weapons, hold rallies, mass meetings, marches and pickets," stipulated in Article 31 of the Constitution, is being trampled upon.
One more proof of this is the authorities' reaction to the SPS's protest. Taken together, this means that the authorities will not talk with the opposition, and that they have opted for enforcing its opinions and decisions.
The goal is clear: this informal, clan system of power should include a decorative element of democracy, such as a controlled bicameral parliament. Therefore, everything necessary will be done to introduce a bipartisan system. Police can now be viewed as part of the election system, as they have been ordered to prevent public demonstrations by groups that have no license for political activities, primarily public protests against election results, even if the fraud is glaringly obvious.
The Central Election Commission will become not simply a technical body, but a security agency as well. Its main goals will be to prevent undesirable parties from taking part in elections and to curtail public monitoring of elections, including by foreign observers.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
