The Kremlin has been making pious statements about the upcoming State Duma elections – how they’ll be free and fair. We’re not so sure …

Yegor Savin, head of the Novosibirsk branch of PARNAS and Open Elections [a project of Open Russia] candidate for the upcoming State Duma elections, was detained in Novosibirsk’s Tolmachevo Airport on the morning of July 8 and searched at the scene by police.

“I flew into Novosibirsk in the morning, it was just after eight,” Yegor Savin told Open Russia. “I was approached by a staff member who said that a BOLO [Be On The Lookout] had been put out for me and then confiscated my passport. I asked him to show me this BOLO but he said it was classified. I was taken to the airport’s transit police office and interviewed by two uniformed officers and one in civilian clothing. They said they had evidence that I was transporting banned literature. They had a supervisor next door who kept telling them what to do. I told them I was a Duma candidate – they just didn’t get what was going on and kept running next door to confer with him. I didn’t have a lot of stuff with me – I’d gone away for just a day – so the search didn’t take much time.

“Their aim was to tire me out with all sorts of documents and explanations and thus make sure I wouldn’t have any time for the election campaign. So I’m not going to give them the time of day.”

This isn’t the first time Yegor Savin has been accused of possessing “banned literature.” On April 21, the Novosibirsk branch of PARNAS was searched in connection with the theft of equipment from a neighbouring office. According to Savin, police descended upon the PARNAS office together with journalists from the Life television channel. “I strongly suspected that what they found – leaflets featuring images of swastikas – had been deliberately planted in our office,” he says. “They found these leaflets so quickly, the entire search was over in ten minutes flat. […] It was a sort of “Young Extremist’s Handbook” – a little homemade book plus leaflets with swastikas. I explained to them that I’d never seen these leaflets before.”

And in St Petersburg …

Legislative Assembly candidates Daniil Ken and Sergei Kuzin were detained  in St Petersburg. They were taken to police station No. 20 without being offered any explanation for their detention. Nor did the police stand on ceremony with the arrestees, ripping Ken’s shirt as they took him away.

Ken and Kuzin were detained in the Vyborg District administration building, where, in protest against the authorities’ repeated refusals to greenlight “cubes” [campaign pickets], they were collecting signatures for nomination to the Legislative Assembly.

“They went to the administration because the city authorities had put them in an impossible position by constantly denying them the opportunity to hold campaign pickets,” says Open Elections project manager Timur Valeyev. “Denying this opportunity to candidates who have formally applied for nominaion is illegal.”

As the candidates made clear, officials justified their refusal to greenlight pre-election pickets in a highly vague fashion, saying that “public events precipitate social tensions and increase the emotional strain throughout society.” Daniel Ken and Sergey Kuzin regard the failure to greenlight the pickets as a criminal offence under Article 141 of the Criminal Code (“Obstruction of the exercise of electoral rights”).

Candidate information stands had been set up in the foyer of the administration building as a mark of protest, and campaign materials had begun to be distributed. Ken and Kuzin personally set about collecting signatures in support of their electoral registration; they chatted with visitors to the adiminstration building and collected complaints regarding officials’ poor performance.

“This is blatant and politically motivated censorship,” Sergei Kuzin says. “These officials are violating the public interest by denying citizens access to information about the election candidates. We have therefore taken the decision to hold meetings with residents in the Vyborg District adminstration building.”

We doubt that this will be the last of the obstacles the Kremlin is putting in the way of opposition candidates.

To be continued.