“The country is changing so rapidly that we can’t follow it. Who is next? Is it my under-age daughter or my disabled mother?” asks Marina Krylova from the city of Stavropol. She looks anxious for her son hardly beaten off the military medical examination where he was summoned despite the fact he has a “white chit”. Three days ago she had to come to Moscow to give a testimony in her capacity of an authorized representative for Mikhail Kasyanov at the last election campaign. And while she has been doing it, some car is constantly “on watch” near her house in Stavropol. 

The office of People’s Democratic Union continues to be “besieged” by law enforcement bodies. The head of Kasyanov’s campaigning staff Konstantin Merzlikin is convinced that a federal criminal case is going to be started against their activists about alleged falsification of signature raising results made during their “canceled” presidential campaign. The hope for justice delivered by the Prosecutor General’s Office was not justified as a runaround was received from there saying that according to the Act on the police, the employees of the enforcement bodies have the right to take investigative steps on the started criminal cases.   

Whilst near-politics Moscow people are reasoning about possible smoothing of the home policy due to the change of the president, 11 provinces are experiencing real screws tightening, and the pressure made on the activists from PDU is increasing.

Novaya Gazeta informed some time ago about complaints made by Kasyanov and his representatives to the Prosecutor General’s office about outrageous moral terror exercised by FSB and interior ministry against signature collectors.

7 March Kasyanov’s staff received a letter from G.Khokhrina, the deputy chief of the Head Department for Control and Monitoring of the Citizens Rights and Liberties. The letter pointed out that the complaints made by them did not “contain any information about particular violations of the standing legislature that could be grounding for interference by prosecution bodies”. The fact that students get summoned to examinations by police and are pressurized into renouncing or into shifting their non-existing guilt to their friends - all that doesn’t seem to make anyone concerned. In relation to that, Mr. Merzlikin from the Kasyanov’s campaigning staff quoted the legendary Andrei Vyshinsky “Prosecutor General’s Office is the sword of retribution of the justice”. And what about the shield? It just doesn’t exist!           

The number of those ready to tell to the press about their troubles during the election campaign is decreasing in the Kasyanov’s office. On 17 March there were 5 of them: two female students from Kaluga, a candidate from Ulyanovsk who was dismissed from the local election, a man from Tambov and the above mentioned lady whose son was caught in the street and brought to the military station restricted with handcuffs. The presidential campaign 2008 being in the past for the whole country, those people are still facing the troubles out of its consequences. As one of the FSB investigators explained during a conversation, “politics is an engine, and even if you get on it accidentally, it will drive you on anyway”.    

People at the Kasyanov’s staff are sure that an exampling criminal case is being concocted, and in their turn they are determined to go through all the court proceedings up to Strasbourg, so that the law enforcers get rebuffed. Who and where will arrive first? This is the only question without clear answer today. As for the rest, it’s absolutely clear that the case titled “state machinery versus undesired candidates for being heads of the state” has been started and it only might be stopped by the will of the top person here.