In Russia's Far East, alienated voters choose change over Putin

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Natasha Borisovna had supported Vladimir Putin since the beginning. She twice voted to send the former KGB agent to the Kremlin, seeing the man who initially became president in 2000 as the antidote to the tumult of the Boris Yeltsin era.

She voted for Mr. Putin's political party, United Russia, in successive elections to make sure he had parliamentary support as he worked from the Kremlin to stabilize a country that at times had seemed on the verge of falling apart. Four years ago, she even backed Mr. Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, for President, while Mr. Putin moved to the theoretically subordinate position of prime minister.

But when Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev announced at a United Russia convention this fall that they would switch jobs and Mr. Putin would return to the presidency (with Mr. Medvedev as his premier), Ms. Borisovna was offended. Mr. Putin and his party seemed to have forgotten who gave them their power, and on Sunday Ms. Borisovna decided to remind them by casting her ballot for a leftist opposition party called For a Just Russia.

She wasn't alone in voting for change. As Russians went to the polls Sunday to choose their next parliament, the hardest people to find here in Vladivostok, the capital of Russia's Far East, were those who said they supported United Russia.

Two weeks after Mr. Putin was booed during an appearance at a boxing match in Moscow – a city that has always seen resistance to an increasingly authoritarian Kremlin – the strongman's popularity seems to be waning even in the farthest-flung parts of Russia. That's a sea change in a part of the country where residents previously seemed willing to accept Mr. Putin's narrative that some freedoms needed to be sacrificed in the name of "stability."

Nationally, pre-election polls showed a sharp drop in United Russia's support between October and November, from over 60 per cent to just above half. If the plummet continued through election day, it might be enough threaten the party's eight-year hold on the country's parliament, the Duma, and send a cool message to Mr. Putin three months before Russians will have their say on his planned return to the presidency.

"We saw that when United Russia had a majority in the Duma they just did whatever they wanted. So I now want to stress the role of the opposition," said Ms. Borisovna, a 60-year-old retired teacher who gave only her first name and patronymic. "We are thankful [to Mr. Putin] We should give him credit for all of the economic development in Vladivostok… . But my perception of United Russia is that they have started to put pressure on the people. I don't like this. It is the way to despotism and dictatorship."

It was a widespread sentiment Sunday among voters in Vladivostok, a pretty city of steep hills that overlook the bobbing destroyers of Russia's Pacific Fleet. While cynicism about the process was high – few expected any party but United Russia would be declared the winner – voters said they hoped for at least some checks to be introduced on Mr. Putin's currently unrivalled power.

"I think United Russia will win, but I expect the opposition will have a strong presence in the Duma," said Pavel Zhuravlov, a 64-year-old retired engineer who, like Ms. Borisovna, voted for A Just Russia on Sunday after backing Mr. Putin's party in previous elections. "The opposition is rising because they have a position on how to solve our problems. All United Russia does is talk, talk, talk."

Nikolai Petrov, an expert on Russia's regions at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said the four years since the last Duma election have seen a rise in anti-Kremlin sentiment as Moscow, which took the credit for Russia's financial success in the first half of the last decade, unwillingly took the blame as the country was hit hard by the global economic crisis. Vladivostok and the Far East – seven time zones away from the capital – are among the regions that feel most alienated. "They feel like Moscow is not taking care of them. Which is why they are eager to support [right-wing firebrand Vladimir]Zhirinovsky or to vote against the party of power."

A question hanging over the election is whether – in a country where elections are viewed as a nuisance by authorities, and openly "managed" – that change in voter sentiment will be reflected in the official results due later Sunday.

Several prominent Russian news organizations, including The New Times and Kommersant newspapers, as well as Echo of Moscow radio, saw their websites crash under apparent denial-of-service attacks just before polling stations opened, leaving them unable to report on a growing number of complaints about alleged irregularities at polling stations around the country. The website of Golos, Russia's only independent election-monitoring group, has been under similar attack for several days.

In Vladivostok, a team conducting an exit poll for the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion was asked to leave a downtown voting station halfway through the day. At that point, the Communist Party was handily ahead, while United Russia was running third. "They [the Election Commission]were suspicious the information we collected would be used incorrectly," the pollster said.

Indeed some of Mr. Putin's opponents called for a mass boycott of the election, arguing the Kremlin's real critics had been barred from running (A Just Russia and the Communists are often accused of providing only token opposition, part of the façade of "managed democracy") and that the results couldn't be trusted anyway. Turnout in the Pacific region was down five points from the 2007 election to 43 per cent, and even lower in Vladivostok itself, the Interfax news agency reported.

That same distrust also ensured some came to the polling stations, if only to spoil their ballots in protest.

"I voted just to make sure my ballot is not used for other purposes," said a 63-year-old woman in a fur hat who refused to give her name. She raised her voice to make sure everyone in the polling station could hear her. "It's all rubbish."