Pat Dollard | Young Americans

“And I want about 3500 people over here with the WE WANT VLAD banners…don’t forget to tell them to smile like they mean it.”

MOSCOW, Oct. 30 — A wave of demonstrations, billed as spontaneous public calls for Vladimir Putin to serve a third consecutive term as president, has swept across Russian cities in the last two weeks.

The rising clamor to change the constitution and allow Putin to remain as president shows many signs of at least tacit approval by the Kremlin. The demonstrations are being organized by United Russia, the party Putin has said he will lead in parliamentary elections in December, according to political analysts and documents published by the Communist Party. United Russia denies it is the organizer.

People have rallied in eight Russian cities, most recently Sunday in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. There, local police said 30,000 crowded the central square under the banners of a new organization called For Putin.

Opposition activists, calling the police estimate grossly inflated, said that fewer than 10,000 people showed up, most of them compelled to attend by local authorities. More rallies are planned in other cities in the coming weeks, according to members of the For Putin movement.

“We are expressing our solidarity with Vladimir Putin,” Novosibirsk’s chapter of the group said in a statement. “We believe that despite his decision to follow the constitution, he should have all the powers that will allow him to continue his activity as the leader of the country.”

In addition to the rallies, there is a growing chorus of appeals from friendly politicians and other public figures for Putin to stay. Four leading artists, including film director Nikita Mikhalkov and sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, published an open letter in the state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta this month calling for a third term.

“Respected Vladimir Vladimirovich!” read the letter, using the president’s patronymic middle name as a show of respect. We “would like to appeal to you and plead with you to stay in power for the next term. We are expressing the opinion of 65,000 artists, painters, sculptors, cinematographers, actors and representatives of the folk and decorative arts.”

The willingness of the four to invoke practically the entire artistic community of Russia drew derision and accusations of Soviet-style toadying from other artists. But it has added to suspicions that the Kremlin is cultivating a public outpouring of support from intellectuals as part of a strategy to justify any decision to maintain power.

Putin’s future has crowded out almost every other issue in the campaign leading up to December’s parliamentary elections, which increasingly look like a referendum on the presidency. United Russia’s rating has risen to 68 percent since Putin said this month that he would head the party’s ticket, according to opinion polls.

Full WaPo article by Peter Finn here.