- By Andy Heil
Non-Denial Denial? Communist Grudinin Says Swiss Bank Accounts Part Of 'Information Dump'
Candidate Pabel Grudinin has posted a statement on Facebook responding to a finding aired by the Central Election Commission that the Communist Party nominee had 13 Swiss bank accounts, not two, as previously believed, at the time he was nominated. Commission member Nikolai Levichev, speaking on March 5, reportedly said the accounts contained the equivalent of around $974,000, including "more than 174 ounces of gold."
The topic emerged when the Election Commission confirmed it had verified "with all audit bodies" the financial information submitted by seven of the eight candidates -- Grudinin being the odd man out.
In his Facebook rebuttal, Grudinin described himself as a victim of an "information dump."
"Don't you think it's a little weird that you can open 11 or 13 accounts? I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow they say they found an Amber Room and Ivan the Terrible's library at my dacha!" Grudinin said in references to the famously ornate chamber that was gifted to Tsar Peter the Great and eventually lost when the Nazis looted what is now Kaliningrad, and the so-called Golden Library, or Lost Library, of Tsar Ivan IV.
Our Current Time TV colleagues have more on the accusation and the dismissal by Grudinin, who is polling second, very well behind Putin.
But here it is in the candidate's own words:
Quite The Claim
Russian liberal political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky has claimed -- without providing evidence -- that an unnamed colleague "involved in Russian political life" had told him that the Kremlin paid journalist Ksenia Sobchak $2 million to run.
"This was an initiative of the presidential administration to somehow reduce tensions and to convince the Russian public that the election is transparent," Piontkovsky said in appearance on a Ukrainian Internet television program. "They have placed their money on Sobchak, who agreed to represent the views of [opposition politician Aleksei] Navalny in the election."
Navalny was barred from the election because of a felony conviction that is widely viewed as politically motivated, and he has been calling for a boycott of the vote. Analysts believe the Kremlin is concerned that low turnout and a perceived lack of competition could undermine the process's legitimacy.
Piontkovsky, a longtime Putin critic, also commented on a recent televised debate in which nationalist stalwart and fellow candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky called Sobchak a "whore" and she, in return, threw a glassful of water at him.
"They are both clowns, but with different functions," Piontkovsky said. "Sobchak's function is to represent the so-called liberal opposition in Russia and demonstrate to the West that the election is supposedly honest and transparent and that anyone can participate. Zhirinovsky has also been used by the Kremlin during elections over the last 20 years to represent the nationalist part of the political spectrum. We also have communists, just as we have so-called liberals like Sobchak."
From the beginning of Sobchak's surprise candidacy, there has been speculation that the Kremlin encouraged her to run to increase interest in the election.
But hearsay is unlikely to further the case.
- By Carl Schreck
Film on Crimea to air on eve of election
Russian election laws ban campaigning the day prior to the poll, but President Putin may get a last-minute boost among his base on the eve of the March 18 election from a film on state television about Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.
The planned March 17 airing of the drama, titled Crimea, on state-run Channel One television was announced March 5. The film, whose director is the president of the Russian Defense Ministry's media holding Krasnaya Zvezda, offers a pro-Russian version of the 2014 land grab that triggered Western sanctions targeting Moscow.
RFE/RL wrote about the film after its September 2017 premiere:
The public reception of Russia's new "Crimea" movie blockbuster about its invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula is being hotly contested, with Kremlin-tied media suggesting it's a box-office hit and independent media and review sites calling it a flop playing in empty cinemas.
Backed by Russia's Defense Ministry, the movie premiered to fanfare in the annexed territory on September 27, but had an inauspicious start amid accusations that hackers had infiltrated a popular Russian movie website to inflate Crimea's public review ratings.
This year's presidential election is set to be held on the official four-year anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea. As our report in the film noted in October:
In Russia, the annexation was greeted largely with jubilation, while the audacity of the military maneuver has been touted by authorities as evidence of Russia's triumphant return to "great power" status from post-Soviet mediocrity -- a longstanding Kremlin goal during Putin's 18-year rule.
And Current Time TV wrote about the state TV decision, too:
- By Mike Eckel
Yavlinsky's Latest Campaign Video Takes On...
...mortgage rates, with a subtle dig against Navalny and his “duck” supporters.
Putin singled out mortgage lending as a point of pride in his recent state-of-the-nation address, saying only 4,000 mortgages were issued in 2001 and nearly a million last year (at under 10 percent on ruble-denominated mortgages, on average, for the first time ever), but also saying they need to "become accessible to the majority of Russian families, working people and young professionals."
- By Mike Eckel
As Election Аpproaches, Аpathy Question At The Fore
The real question about the March 18 election is not who will win but how many voters will turn out. There already is ample anecdotal evidence pointing to voter apathy about an election regarded by many, inside and outside Russia, as scripted.
Elena Solovyova, a journalist for a news and opinion website in the northern Komi region, writes that in her region the apathy is readily apparent: “There is a risk that the symbolic majority is going to lose faith in the president, and if the time comes when there is a need to relieve the president of his legitimacy, his election campaign will be a good place to start looking for evidence."
More On Petersburg Snow Protest
As we reported earlier today (below), a group of youths in St. Petersburg got hauled in by the police this weekend for writing the words "Against Putin" in the snow on one of the city's frozen waterways.
Although the authorities held the youths for hours, they were unable to come up with a law that they had violated and were forced to send them away without charges.
Now, however, Roskomnadzor state media watchdog is demanding that media take down images of the slogan, saying that otherwise they would face charges of illegal campaigning. Although the authorities oppose the image of the words "Against Putin," they have not complained about the use of the phrase in the accompanying articles.
Federation Council Warns Of Foreign Interference
The Federation Council's Commission on Countering Foreign Interference in the Affairs of the Russian Federation has issued a report claiming that the campaign to boycott the March 18 presidential election is being financed from abroad.
"The commission has received information from reliable sources about an increase in the flow of outside money to support those who have come to be called the nonsystem opposition, including Russian supporters of the tactic of 'boycotting the election,' which is being propagandized by foreign propaganda sources," the report claims, according to Interfax.
The report emphasizes that in some cases the "target of influence" may not even realize he or she is being manipulated and that the "foreign curators" may not even be in contact with them.
The reports lists several forms of alleged foreign attempts to influence Russian domestic events, including "the attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia by the regime of [Mikheil] Saakashvili in 2008 to the imposition of one-sided and illegal economic measures (which began long before the officially declaration of Russian sanctions by the United States and the European Union under the pretext of the 2014 Ukrainian political crisis)."
Sobchak Denounces Stalin
Journalist and presidential candidate Ksenya Sobchak has released a video to mark the 65th anniversary of the death of Josef Stalin in which she expresses bewilderment that six of the eight people running for president in Russia this year praise the dictator.
The clip is slickly produced and filmed in Moscow's GULAG museum, where Sobchak walks among torture devices and ominous portraits of Stalin as she denounces him. Sobchak says Stalin is a "dark stain" on Russian history and the only way to "get rid of him is by speaking the truth."
She calls for the removal of Stalin's grave from Red Square and for a law equating glorifying him with justifying Nazism. She says that politicians who praise Stalin as an "excellent manager" should be forced to work as tour guides in the GULAG museum rather than leading the country into the future.