Khakamada Leads a Lonely Liberal Campaign (Guess People not happy with Oligarch rule)

Irina Khakamada is running for president but her campaign headquarters are not bustling. Phones aren't ringing off the hook and no one is barking instructions. This is no Clinton-style war room, yet this lone warrior still looks battle-weary.

She says she harbors no illusions of unseating President Vladimir Putin, but that's not the point. "We're fighting so that people raise their voices," she says, not fighting to win. "That costs less."

But it's not clear just who is raising their voices in support. Speculation that she is a mercenary front for the Kremlin or oligarch interests has made it difficult for her to forge alliances with her deeply divided fellow liberal politicians.

When her party, the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, failed to win seats in the State Duma on Dec. 7, and she herself lost an individual race, Khakamada blamed a failure to take firm policy stands in opposition to the Kremlin -- a mistake she seems determined not to repeat as she gears up for the March 14 vote, five weeks away.

Khakamada, 48, is a veteran, steely politician who has taken Putin to task for clamping down on press freedom and turning a blind eye to corrupt judges, among other damages to democracy.

"Internally, people can't formulate it, but they feel it, that there's a return of the Soviet regime," she says. "It may be in a new form, new names for it. We used to have the Politburo, now it's the presidential administration. There used to be the Supreme Soviet, now it's the State Duma."

In evident criticism of the state's case against oil company Yukos, she accuses top figures in the Kremlin and security services of neglecting national security while meddling in the economy.

"They say they are fighting a war on terror," she says, but instead they are fighting "for a redistribution of property in their own interests." In late January, she made the same argument to world leaders and businessmen gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Khakamada likes to describe herself as a bottle opener whose mission it is to release Russia's pent-up spirit, repressed inside by the cork of Putin's authoritarian regime.

Her SPS colleagues are said to refer to her as Lady Samurai, and she comes by the nickname honestly. Her father, Mutsuo, was a Japanese Communist who emigrated to the Soviet Union and met her mother, a teacher, in Khabarovsk, though Irina was born in Moscow.

She has a degree in economics from Moscow State University, having defended a thesis on the French economy in 1984; her business cards identify her as Dr. Irina M. Khakamada.

She taught economics during the perestroika years and in 1989, when restrictions on private business began to loosen, she started a cooperative that traded in computers.

For future oligarchs, cooperatives were forerunners to the firms that they used to get their foot in the door early and parlayed into fortunes.

But instead of going that route, she entered politics. Khakamada founded the Economic Freedom Party with her business partner, the mathematician-turned-democrat Konstantin Borovoi, in 1990. She was elected to Russia's first State Duma in 1993 from a northwest Moscow district and re-elected in 1995, this time from a different district, in the southeast.

She is also said to have considered a run for the presidency in 1996, when President Boris Yeltsin's chances for re-election looked feeble.

She left the Duma in 1997, having been appointed by Yeltsin, whom she had ultimately endorsed, as chairwoman of the State Committee for Small Business Support and Development.

In the 1999 elections, her party, the new Union of Right Forces, won party-list seats in the third Duma, while her personal popularity won her a seat from St. Petersburg. With this past December's losses, fate was reversed.

In VTsIOM's annual December poll of women of the year, Khakamada was outstripped by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, getting only 11 percent compared to Matviyenko's 21 percent, though Khakamada has won the title twice before.

Her web site biography indicates she likes literature, aerobics and classical music, but she keeps her private life very much under wraps. She mentions her 25-year-old son, Daniil, from her first marriage, and 6-year-old daughter, Masha, only to say she's a mother of two who has managed to raise a family while making a career in a man's world.

Khakamada dropped an attention-grabbing bombshell on Jan. 14, with an open letter accusing Putin of building "a society based on lies," in particular by hiding the truth about what happened during the Dubrovka hostage crisis.

SPS and Yabloko leaders, still undecided on whether distance or proximity to the Kremlin would better serve the goal of reinvigorating the country's democratic movement, were caught off guard, much as they had been by her late December decision to throw her hat into the ring. Her co-party leader Boris Nemtsov is said to have learned of her candidacy on the Internet.

Divided views on whether to endorse her, and her sharp line, only deepened a rift among liberal leaders, who were already split on whether to boycott the vote or encourage members to vote "against all."

Khakamada reportedly confided to friends that the letter's particularly biting language was meant to dispel the widespread belief that she had entered the race at the behest of the Kremlin, which needed her presence in the race to lend a veneer of democracy.

In choosing Dubrovka and the 1999 apartment bombings as her weapon, though, she sparked a different set of rumors: that her bid was being bankrolled by stigmatized oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has relentlessly attacked Putin along the same lines.

She categorically denies any relationship with Berezovsky, who, as she points out, is underwriting his own presidential hopeful, former Duma Speaker Ivan Rybkin, who went even further in criticizing the president in an open letter of his own, published in Kommersant on Monday. He accused Putin of leading a return to Stalinesque state-sponsored terror.

"Berezovsky doesn't interest me," she said, mildly disgusted with a question that has been asked infinite times. "I say what I think and what interests me."

With the exception of Berezovsky, and Leonid Nevzlin, a top Yukos shareholder and billionaire who announced his intention to support Khakamada's campaign, the country's most deep-pocketed figures have been eager to show loyalty to the Kremlin, and have opted to keep their heads down.

No sooner had Nevzlin, who lives in Israel, announced his support, than Russian officials issued an international warrant for his arrest. No money has been given, she angrily insists.

This week she declared a war chest of 1,673,000 rubles ($58,700) to the Central Elections Commission. What candidates publicly declare is widely assumed to be only a fraction of total spending, which is estimated in the millions of dollars.

One million rubles, she has said, came from her husband, Vladimir Sirotinsky -- her fourth -- who is vice president of the Institute for the Development of Entrepreneurship, and keeps a low profile.

"If you look at my campaign fund accounts, you'll see money from a few private individuals and my husband," she said.

She said television reports of Yukos funding are the Kremlin's black-PR attempt to discredit her in the eyes of voters and the latest proof that "all nationwide channels are controlled by the state."

In May 2001, in the wake of the takeover of NTV by state-controlled Gazprom, she was less concerned about press freedom, emphasizing that the West should focus its attention on supporting Russia's economic reforms.

"What, she just woke up one day in opposition to Putin?" said Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on the Russian presidency, saying Khakamada came to this new position out of political convenience more than conviction.

Khakamada responded to critics like Shevtsova, who chide her for running with an abundance of emotion and an absence of any concrete agenda, by posting on her web site, www.hakamada.ru, a blizzard of essays that lay out her stance on 27 issues from accession to the World Trade Organization (a priority) to teachers' salaries (new legislation is needed).

Khakamada, as an independent, had to submit 2 million signatures backing her bid. She collected 4 million, she said, though only 2.5 million -- the most trustworthy -- were submitted.

That way, even if 20 percent are rejected by the Central Elections Commission, her registration could still be approved when it rules on whether or not to approve the signatures, which it must do by Sunday.

She said she expects the commission to decide in her favor "as long as there is no political pressure."

And her hopes for March 14, if she gets placed on the ballot? "I don't want to give any numbers," Khakamada said flatly.

Igor Klyamkin, the head of the Liberal Mission Foundation, was more willing to hazard a forecast. "There's no way she could get more than 3 or 5 percent of the vote," he said.

Khakamada failed to get her party's endorsement at the SPS congress Jan. 24-25, a stinging defeat, though she won't admit it.

Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the liberal wing resents Khakamada for taking matters into her own hands while they remain "disarrayed, disenchanted, disillusioned and disconcerted."

Khakamada freely admits that her candidacy has done nothing to unite the democratic elite, but that doesn't bother her.

"My goal in this election campaign is not a dialogue with politicians but a dialogue with the people," she said from her office, which is located inside SPS party headquarters at Ploshchad Ilyicha -- "at least for now," her press secretary Konstantin Lazarev said.

Khakamada resigned as a party leader after the December defeat, though the congress named her to the 25-member political council.

Her detractors are many and her supporters are few, but she's tough enough to handle it, Lipman said. "Putin is unique as a politician who can't stand criticism. She's seasoned, she's used to it."

"I think she will start her own party, they all will," said former SPS deputy Konstantin Remchukov. "The real process of unification will begin only in 2006," ahead of the next Duma elections in 2007.

She claims that it is irrelevant to her whether she leads a future democratic movement, as long as there is one.

The triumph of nationalistic parties in the Duma elections has led some to doubt whether there is a liberal electorate out there to lead, but Khakamada says she's an optimist.

"The roots of liberalism exist," she said. "I want Russia to be developed as a European democratic country ... and if we do more than just talk, that can come about."

In Russia, liberal ideas "have always smelled like some kind of romanticism," Khakamada said philosophically, and liberalism has trouble competing against the energy of nationalistic-socialistic slogans.

"When you say that each person must take some responsibility," she said, "people hear: 'I must work.'" Meanwhile "authoritarianism promises them, 'We'll do everything for you and everything will be great.'"

Khakamada takes evident pride in being self-made. "I made my life from nothing," she said, drawing a contrast with Putin, who rose "through the government vertical."

A signed portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister known as "the Iron Lady," sits on her windowsill. On her desk, next to a pack of slim Vogue cigarettes and a basket of trail mix, stands a gold-plated statuette of Catherine the Great.

She said television reports of Yukos funding are the Kremlin's black-PR attempt to discredit her in the eyes of voters and the latest proof that "all nationwide channels are controlled by the state." ===

Real stupid:). This "allergations" was repeated by even Ren-TV! The independent of independents.
BTW to tell about obvious connections between oligarkhs and she is "black-PR attempt" now:). While ago she paraded in DUMA in defense of oligarkhs.
She thoght that russian public didn't see that? Now she got what deserved. Almost zero of votes.

In May 2001, in the wake of the takeover of NTV by state-controlled Gazprom, she was less concerned about press freedom, emphasizing that the West should focus its attention on supporting Russia's economic reforms. ==

Th eauthor of article have to know that Gazprom always was BIGGEST shareholder of NTV. NTV founders sold out themselves to GazProm long before 2001.
When they did it it wasn't "takeover". Now suddently it is.

I realy wonder WHAT they want to reach by writing so stupid articles? Maybe they cash on ignorance of western public?

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