Former chess champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov on Friday dismissed Russia's parliamentary elections this weekend as a farce that will push the country toward what he called a "single-party dictatorship."A day after he was released from five days in jail for a street protest, Kasparov said massive state support for President Vladimir Putin's party and growing pressure on dissenters will cast a mantle of illegitimacy over the Kremlin and will galvanize its opponents.
State authorities have used their levers of power in a push to ensure an overwhelming victory for the main pro-Kremlin party United Russia in Sunday's elections, which Putin has cast as a referendum on his policies.
He has suggested he could use the vote to claim a popular mandate to retain influence after March 2 presidential elections, in which he is barred by the constitution from seeking a third straight term.
Kasparov, one of Russia's most prominent opposition figures, said the result of the vote was already clear: It will bring "total domination by United Russia, with massive falsifications," he said. "Russia today does not correspond to even the most primitive idea of a democratic state," he told a news conference. Evoking the specter of Soviet-era Communist party rule, he called it "an authoritarian state with a very serious tendency toward single-party dictatorship."
