The fate that befalls critics who dare to stand up to Putin - Independent Online Edition (original) (raw)

A mayor from a far-flung city in northern Russia has become the latest politician to find out the hard way what it means to run for the Russian presidency in an unscripted bid to replace Vladimir Putin.

Alexander Donskoi, the mayor of Arkhangelsk, was arrested and dragged from his home in his underwear by masked men who broke down the door of his apartment. He was carried out, dressed only in a white sweatshirt and his underpants, with local media on hand to record his humiliation. He appeared in court yesterday, held inside a cage, to face corruption charges.

The local prosecutor said Mr Donskoi, 37, was being charged with using four million roubles (£77,000) from city coffers to pay for bodyguards to protect his family. He faces up to seven years in jail if prosecutors press charges of abuse of office.

Mr Donskoi, who suffers from high blood pressure, claims he has been the victim of officially sponsored dirty tricks since declaring his candidacy as an independent in October last year. He was charged in February with faking his university diploma and of illegal business activities in an escalating row with the Kremlin-appointed regional governor.

An aide, Eduard Gainutdinov, said Mr Donskoi was seized despite the protests of his doctors, who said his blood pressure was dangerously high.

In the latest round of the feud between Mr Donskoi and the governor, Nikolai Kiselyov, Mr Donskoi posted a video on a city hall website on 11 July showing a man resembling Mr Kiselyov purportedly accepting a bribe. Mr Kiselyov hit back with a statement saying the video was a fake and part of the "dirty" campaign linked to the run-up to the elections.

Mr Donskoi's family said yesterday that they suspected the mayor's arrest was "revenge" by the governor for the video.

Mr Donskoi is not the only candidate to suffer at the hands of the authorities for daring to deviate from the Kremlin's carefully scripted scenario for next year's presidential election, which is expected to produce a hand-picked ally of Mr Putin as the next president.

The most frequently mentioned names of contenders who could have Mr Putin's blessing are the hawkish former defence minister and now First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, and Dmitry Medvedev, also a Deputy Prime Minister.

Although Russian authorities have promised free and fair elections next March, opposition campaigners have faced intimidation and even criminal charges as democratic freedoms have been rolled back by the Kremlin.

Rallies held by the opposition leader Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion who is widely expected to be the candidate of the Other Russia alliance, have been broken up and his supporters beaten. The former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who broke ranks with Mr Putin to run, has accused the Kremlin of a smear campaign.

The most spectacular setback for a presidential contender came in the 2004 election, when the opposition politician Ivan Rybkin disappeared for five days during the election campaign while on a mission to meet the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov. After he reappeared in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, an incoherent Mr Rybkin explained on television that he had been visiting friends and had missed the newspaper headlines announcing that he was missing. He then abruptly ended his campaign.

It was later suggested that he had been the victim of a trap organised by the secret services and that he had been administered psychotropic drugs before being shown a compromising video of himself.