As Political Protests Grip Russia, New Candidates Emerge

Vladimir Putin has already served three terms as president of Russia.  He couldn’t legally serve a fourth consecutive after his last term ended in 2008, so he groomed a successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who became the new president. Medvedev appointed Putin as prime minister, and many analysts say Putin actually maintains most of the governmental power.

Then in September, Medvedev announced that their political party, United Russia, would support Putin as the candidate in the next March’s presidential elections. That means that, if Putin wins, he has a shot at ruling Russia for longer than any leader since Joseph Stalin's 30-year tenure as head of the Soviet Union's Communist Party, ending in 1953.

Russians take to the streets

	Protestors took to the streets after videos of ballot stuffing and erasable pens in voting booth surfaced.

Russians appeared to accept Putin’s unofficial hold on power until this month’s elections for representatives to the Duma, Russia’s equivalent of America’s Congress. Images and reports of voter fraud sent thousands into the streets shouting “Russia without Putin!”

Investigations ordered

	Russian authorities should annul the parliamentary vote results and hold a new election, the ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has urged, as popular indignation grows over alleged election fraud.

Former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, who led Russia and the other Eastern European countries that comprised Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, has called for new elections and an end to fraud.

"Literally by the day, the number of Russians who do not believe that the declared election results were honest is increasing," Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax.

Putin, meanwhile, blamed the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for inciting the protests.  “Straight away, the secretary of state assessed the elections as dishonest and unfair. She set the tone for some of our personalities inside the country,” he told the press.

Under pressure from Clinton and others, Medvedev has ordered an investigation into the allegations of fraud and abuse. 

New candidates cropping up to oppose Putin

	Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov is a Russian billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the American basketball team, the New Jersey Nets. Prokhorov is the third richest man from Russia and the 39th richest man in the world according to the 2010 Forbes list.

Now that the Russian election results have been called into question, several opposition candidates are announcing their bids to run against Putin for president in upcoming elections. Russian billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team, has said he will run, as has Russia’s former finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin.

Both men were ejected from the inner circles of Russian government, known as the Kremlin, earlier this year for opposing Putin and Medvedev’s ideas.

Prokhorov and Kudrin’s entrance into the presidential race marks the first real challenge posed to Putin’s bid for president from an opposing party. Although Putin was largely expected to win another term in office in elections next March, the recent protests have placed his victory and his party’s power into question.

Analyst Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute told the NewsHour that the next few months are critical for Russia.  “Either you truly turn from a soft authoritarian regime to truly repressive measures -- you have thousands of people in the street, you can't control them, all sorts of things may lead to violence -- or you retreat,”  Aron explained. “And, in that case, you look weak, and nobody knows where that retreat will end. So this is something, this is the dilemma that Putin and his advisers, I'm sure, even as we speak, are trying to avoid.”