You're reading: Analysts say police statistics of Moscow rally turnouts false

MOSCOW - Two analysts argued that the Moscow city police authority published false turnout statistics on two big rallies on Saturday, underestimating the turnout at the opposition meeting and overestimating that at the loyalist one.

The police authority had said the "For Honest Elections" opposition rally on Bolotnaya Square, near the Kremlin, had brought together between 35,000 ad 36,000 people and that 138,000 had attended the rally of supporters of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Victory Park in the Poklonnaya Gora area in the west of the city.

"Even visually, there were more than 36,000 people on Bolotnaya Square, and I doubt there were 140,000 in Poklonnaya Gora," Igor Yurgens, chief executive of the Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR), told Interfax.

The other analyst, Sergei Markov concurred. "I think there were about 80,000 in both places," he told Interfax.

One of the organizers of the "For Honest Elections" rally, Vladimir Ryzhkov, told the meeting the event had brought together a minimum of 120,000 people, while Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told Putin by phone that about 190,000 were present at the pro-Putin event, dubbed as an "anti-Orange" rally in reference to the "Orange revolution" in Ukraine several years ago, which brought liberal president Viktor Yuschenko to power

Yurgens, in comments on the effect of previous demonstrations and rallies, argued that events of this kind might trigger public unrest in the run-up to the March 4 presidential election.

"If there is mounting confrontation, any cooperation between government and opposition brokered by [former finance minister Alexei] Kudrin, [Russian Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir] Lukin and other figures will be out of the question. And then we’ll have an exacerbated political situation in the run-up to the presidential election. In that case it’ll be hard to have a one-round election, a runoff will be needed in order to legitimatize Putin’s victory," Yurgens said.

He suggested that the office of vice president be re-instituted after the election. "I believe that it would be essential to restore the office of vice president in Russia. The vice president would oversee reforms of the upper and lower houses of parliament and a vertical reform of the judiciary, as is done all over the world," he said.

"It would be quite in order if, in case Putin wins, [incumbent President] Dmitry Medvedev took the office of vice president."

Markov praised the organizers of both events.

"Both rallies represent great success on the part of the organizers of each of them. It’s a response to those who say there is no civil society in Russia. Civil society does exist and has normal interaction with the government," he said.

He expressed confidence that Putin would win on March 4 because, he argued, there is a lot less anti-Putin sentiment in the provinces than in Moscow.

"At the moment a situation is taking shape where opposition sentiments are more a feature of the capital city than a feature of the provinces. This means Moscow is isolated from the rest of Russia because there there’s more support for Putin. I think he will be able to win in the first round with a vote of between 55% and 65%," Markov said.

However, "it can’t be ruled out that interested forces may try to play out in Moscow the Minsk scenario of 2010 or the Ukrainian scenario of 2004. An ‘Orange revolution’ is unlikely to materialize in Russia, but there may be attempts to put up something similar to those events," he said.