| Nashi rally |
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| CAMPBELL: It’s election time in Russia, and the Kremlin’s young guard is taking to the streets. | 00:10 |
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| This is Nashi, a government-funded support group for President Vladimir Putin. Critics denounce it as a kind of Russian Hitler-youth movement. They see themselves as patriots defending Russia from Western-backed enemies. | 00:16 |
| Masha grab at rally | NASHI MEMBERS chant: Estonian democracy is just for traitors, Estonian democracy is just for traitors. | 00:34 |
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| CAMPBELL: Masha Drokova is a Nashi kommisar committed to fighting the president’s foes. | 00:42 |
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| MASHA: People like Kasyanov, Kasparov are traitors. We consider these people to be traitors. | 00:50 |
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| We want Russia to be a sovereign democracy. And that is possible, from my point of view, only if Putin’s policy is continued. | 00:55 |
| Nashi summer camp. Girls dancing. Inter-cut dancing with military training | Music | 01:03 |
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| CAMPBELL: For the past three years, the Kremlin has groomed these young Russians as a vanguard against political challenge. At this summer camp, they were even given military training. | 01:11 |
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| Music | 01:21 |
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| CAMPBELL: Nashi was formed to counter pro-Western youth groups that helped overthrow regimes in neighbouring Ukraine and Georgia. | 01:28 |
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| Music | 01:36 |
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| CAMPBELL: With more than 100,000 members, Nashi provides a handy rent-a-crowd to disrupt opposition protests. | 01:40 |
| Putin at summer camp | Putin himself has given them lessons on how the West wants to take over Russia. | 01:50 |
| Putin
| PUTIN: To other countries, including us, they lay super claims, including to my mind insulting advice to our country and our people to change the Constitution. They have to change their brains but not our Constitution. | 01:55 |
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| I’ll tell you why! Because what they suggest is an obvious “rudiment” of colonial thinking. | 02:15 |
| Prostitute alley at camp | CAMPBELL: The few politicians daring to oppose Putin, like former Soviet chess champion Gary Kasparov, were denounced as prostitutes. | 02:22 |
| Nashi girl pointing to picture of Kasparov | NASHI GIRL: This is our colleague, an elite prostitute, Gary Kasparov, an international girl providing services to the president of the USA. | 02:32 |
| Kasparov showing office | CAMPBELL: Like all liberal critics, Kasparov is disparaged as a Western stooge. But if Washington is funding him, he’s not splashing the dollars on his Moscow headquarters. | 02:42 |
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| Kasparov might be running a shoe-string campaign, but he represents everything the Kremlin fears -- a pro-Western liberal aiming to topple the regime. KASPAROV: They recognise that we represent a real threat. Not because we can mobilise a lot of people. | 02:54 |
| Kasparov | The normal turnout at our events is three to four thousand people. But three to four thousand people in Moscow or St Petersburg is quite an impressive number. | 03:12 |
| Rally | In Moscow, you are most likely going to face an angry police and a regime that is using brutal force against the opposition. | 03:22 |
| Kasparov being arrested at rally | CAMPBELL: But Kasparov’s genius as a chess player is proving no match for Kremlin rules. When he tried to campaign for the presidency, the State’s pawns knocked him out of the game. Nashi attacked his every move, the government barred him from the airwaves, and in December police jailed him for five days for holding an unauthorised rally. | 03:34 |
| Kasparov | KASPAROV: Over the last 8 years Putin’s regime built up, slowly but steadily, all sorts of obstacles -- legal, quasi-legal, some say constitutional. I believe most of them are anti-constitutional, measures that are preventing an opposition candidate, a democratic candidate, to stand for the elections. | 03:57 |
| Kremlin | Music | 04:17 |
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| CAMPBELL: It’s perhaps not surprising that the Kremlin would be obsessed with Western influence and opposition. | 04:20 |
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| In Soviet times, Putin was a KGB spy, and he’s elevated many of his KGB colleagues to powerful positions. They’ve watched in horror as Western-backed parties swept to power in Ukraine and Georgia. Nearing the end of his final term, Putin is determined that won’t happen in Russia. | 04:26 |
| Putin | PUTIN: We have an opportunity to shape a stable power in the Russian Federation after the March 2008 election and not just a stable one but the power that will pursue the same policy course that was bringing positive results for the last eight years. | 04:49 |
| Putin announcing Medvedev’s candidacy | CAMPBELL: Putin has named a loyal protégé to succeed him. Dmitry Medvedev is just 42 and has no independent power base. Putin will be his Prime Minister and perhaps continue to be the real power in Russia. | 05:14 |
| Kremlin | But it’s too simplistic to see this as just a battle between good, brave democrats and a nasty dictator. Russian politics is far more complex and murky. You see, there’s a genuine belief here that the West wants to keep Russia weak and one of its tools for doing that is demanding Western-style democracy. | 05:32 |
| Poverty shots | Music | 05:54 |
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| CAMPBELL: The reforms the West imposed here in the 90s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, came close to destroying Russia. | 06:02 |
| Yeltsin | Boris Yeltsin presided over a chaotic regime with a grid-locked parliament and a hostile media controlled by corrupt tycoons. | 06:10 |
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| Businessmen posing as liberals stole billions from the sell-off of public assets. Ordinary Russians lost everything. | 06:21 |
| Church bells. Epiphany ceremony in ice | Many see Putin as the saviour of Russia. | 06:42 |
| Markov getting into water | Sergei Markov is a long-time friend of both Putin and Medvedev. He’s patriotic and devout, braving freezing temperatures to mark the Orthodox celebration of the baptism of Christ. | 06:46 |
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| MARKOV: Putin move Russia from chaos and anarchy to the normal life. | 07:03 |
| Markov | And that’s why most of the people think Putin make more for democracy, rather than create problems for democracy. | 07:11 |
| Markov in Duma | In December, Markov was elected to parliament as a member of the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia. The election marked the end of any real opposition in the Duma, save for a tame communist rump. Impossibly high party quotas and Kremlin-controlled media ensured not a single liberal was elected. | 07:21 |
| Priest. Super: | FATHER VSEVELOD: The liberal opposition only exists in the Western media. I’m very much surprised if more than one per cent of the population supports them. They totally failed. | 07:44 |
| Church service. Vsevelod in church
| CAMPBELL: The Orthodox Church has welcomed the liberals’ demise. It always saw their model of Western-style democracy as alien to Russian tradition, preferring the Tsarist model of Kremlin dictate under its spiritual guidance. Father Vsevelod is the spokesman for the Moscow Patriarch. | 08:06 |
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| FATHER VSEVELOD: If a society is divided along the commercial interest or political convictions, | 08:42 |
| Vsevelod | it’s illness. It’s not a creative conflict and we always opt for unity of the society. | 08:50 |
| Montage of rich Russia | Music | 09:04 |
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| CAMPBELL: Moscow today seems a world away from the turmoil of the Yeltsin era. | 09:20 |
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| Music | 09:25 |
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| CAMPBELL: Thanks largely to the oil boom, the capital is awash with money, development and opportunity. | 09:34 |
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| Music | 09:40 |
| Masha combs hair/ in café | CAMPBELL: At 18, Masha Drokova from Nashi is too young to remember communism. But she does remember the ‘90s when her parents struggled to raise her. | 09:44 |
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| MASHA: I reckon that people really live better, | 09:59 |
| Masha | better than eight years ago when they failed to get their salaries for one and a half years, when there was a war in Chechnya, when our country was in a humiliating situation. | 10:04 |
| City shots, development. Luxury brands | CAMPBELL: But how much has really changed? Most development is still geared to the super-rich. Putin has jailed or exiled tycoons who challenged him politically. Others have been allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. Corruption is still endemic. The oil wealth has barely trickled down to ordinary Russians. | 10:18 |
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| MARKOV: It’s very big gap between rich and poor people. It’s one of our problems and we are looking at how we can solve this problem. | 10:44 |
| Markov | Putin improve situation dramatically. That’s why he’s so popular. But he’s not a god. He couldn’t solve all the problems. | 10:54 |
| Rural village | Music | 11:02 |
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| CAMPBELL: And Moscow is not Russia. To see how the provinces are faring, we drove two hours from the capital to the wasteland of rural Russia. | 11:12 |
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| The village of Kholtobino is typical of thousands of settlements across the world’s largest country. It’s dying, with young people leaving for the cities and old people struggling to survive. | 11:25 |
| Vladimir shovelling snow | Vladimir Lastovkin has lived here since he was discharged from the army in 1971 and has little reason to be thankful to any politician. | 11:43 |
| Vladimir | VLADIMIR: It is tough, certainly tough to live, especially for agriculture. No help to expect, we rely just on ourselves. CAMPBELL: Who are you going to vote for? VLADIMIR: We have voted for Putin. Everyone voted for Putin. CAMPBELL: For Putin? But he won’t be president? VLADIMIR: That is clear. I meant, this time for Medvedev. CAMPBELL: Why? VLADIMIR: He seems to be Putin’s successor. And as we say, there seems to be no one better, when you watch TV. | 11:55 |
| Pushing truck | CAMPBELL: It’s the same across most of Russia. People’s only knowledge of politics comes from State-controlled TV. They’re not necessarily happy with Putin, but things aren’t as bad as they were and they can’t see any alternatives. | 12:32 |
| People in village | When I used to come to places like this in the ‘90s, there was a sense of utter desperation. People weren’t getting their wages, they were waiting months for their pension, everyone was living hand to mouth. Now life is still grindingly hard, but there’s at least a sense of stability, that the days of rapid and turbulent change are over, and that they can live with the devil they know. | 12:53 |
| Kasyanov entering radio station | That makes it impossible for opposition figures to make a mark. Mikhail Kasyanov is the latest to take up where Gary Kasparov left off, launching a campaign as a liberal presidential candidate. | 13:20 |
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| But the only place he can be heard is a small Moscow radio station, Echo Moskvy, one of the last broadcasters that hasn’t been taken over by the Kremlin. | 13:34 |
| Kasyanov in studio | KASYANOV: We have an illegitimate parliament. And if we have an illegitimate president you realise in what sort of country we shall find ourselves. CAMPBELL: Kasyanov was Putin’s Prime Minister for four years, before falling foul of the KGB factions. But even he can’t get onto Russian TV. | 1345 |
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| KASYANOV: We don’t have any access to any nationwide channel. | 14:05 |
| Kasyanov | Kremlin controls all national television. And there is a very strong procedure and list of names prohibited to mention, not to stop them giving their message, but just to even mention their names. | 14:08 |
| Kasyanov on street | CAMPBELL: To qualify as an independent candidate, Kasyanov had to collect two million signatures. He assured me he had met this seemingly impossible requirement. | 14:29 |
| Campbell walks with Kasyanov | KASYANOV: Everything will be submitted in compliance with the law . Certainly, all the documents required are prepared in a most thorough way, in a best way. and we shall soon start our debate with the authorities. CAMPBELL: So there’ll be a real election? KASYANOV: We shall see. | 14:40 |
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| CAMPBELL: But a few days later, the Electoral Commission knocked him out of the race, claiming thousands of his signatures were forged. | 15:03 |
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| The Kremlin tolerates two opposition parties -- the Communists and the so-called Liberal Democrats -- but neither pose any challenge. | 15:13 |
| Zhirinovsky in strip club | The Liberal Democrat leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is famous for frequenting strip clubs and threatening to invade Alaska. | 15:24 |
| Zhirinovsky in office | He remains an icon of political incorrectness. | 15:35 |
| Rapid montage. Photos of Zhirinovsky | He also claims to be politically independent. | 15:43 |
| Zhirinovsky | ZHIRINOVSKY: We have never supported either Gorbachev, or Yeltsin or Putin. Neither are we going to support Medvedev. | 15:47 |
| Zhirinovsky shows photos | But his voting record looks remarkably like a Kremlin lackey’s. KASPAROV: Zhirinovsky is by the way a very smart, very savvy politician who made a lot of money by selling his political services to the regime. | 15:55 |
| Kasparov | But in every crucial event, he sided with the regime, whether it was Yeltsin or Putin. | 16:08 |
| Putin enters Duma/ With Medvedev | And so there’ll be an election of sorts in March, an appearance of competition, a semblance of democracy, and a certain winner. | 16:15 |
| Medvedev at forum | State television portrays Dmitry Medvedev as a kind of Putin-lite. | 16:24 |
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| His emphasis is more on helping the poor than fighting the West. | 16:30 |
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| MEDVEDEV speech: The major thing for the progress of our country is to continue quiet, stable development. | 16:34 |
| Putin | CAMPBELL: Friends describe him as well, rather like Putin. | 16:42 |
| Medvedev | He is same generation as Putin, as me, by the way, | 16:47 |
| Markov | and our favourite cultural preferences is Beatles, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and so on. He’s very sporty. | 16:52 |
| Putin and Medvedev | CAMPBELL: The most noticeable difference is that he was never in the KGB. MARKOV: After Putin became the president the big generation of former KGB officers come to the power. After Medvedev becomes the president big generation of technocrats and lawyers will come to the official positions. | 17:03 |
| Markov | CAMPBELL: So Russia could become more liberal? MARKOV: Russia will become more liberal, not because Medvedev but because we have result of Putin’s stabilisation and now can move from stabilisation to more liberal development. | 17:25 |
| Kremlin shots/ Traffic | Music | 17:43 |
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| CAMPBELL: On March 2nd 130 million Russians will be urged to do their duty and vote. | 17:53 |
| Putin and Medvedev | But in this very Russian-style democracy, the only vote that really counts has already been cast. | 18:00 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Eric Campbell Camera: David Martin Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen | 18:10 |