Russian President Vladimir Putin's leading opponent in next month's presidential elections has accused the Kremlin of orchestrating a vicious media onslaught which has compared him to Adolf Hitler, made lurid charges about his sex life, and said he is funded by some of the businessmen against whom his campaign is focused.
Sergei Glazyev, who is trying to create a social democratic alternative in Russia, has been targeted by three acidic personal attacks in the media.
"Dirty tricks are the Kremlin's only weapon," he told a group of British journalists. "The Kremlin bureaucracy's idea is to have total control of the political scene. They are afraid of competition. They don't want democracy. The Kremlin organized a tender between public relations companies to produce the best lies."
A Kremlin spokesman haughtily dismissed the allegations, saying Putin's high poll ratings showed Kremlin officials could not be involved.
The tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda accused Glazyev of being funded by the London-based tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Similar accusations appeared yesterday in another large-circulation paper, Moskovsky Komsomlets, calling his candidacy, which advocates higher taxes on big business, "the last hope of the oligarchs."
Glazyev has also been depicted with a Hitler moustache on the cover of the glossy magazine Kompromat, which devotes a 66-page special edition to a detailed character assassination, including wild slurs that he has fathered four children outside marriage.
Sergei Solokov, the editor of Kompromat, which regularly targets prominent Russians, denied having links with the Kremlin. "If we did, then perhaps we would not be in court quite so much," he said.
But he conceded that he had no plans to write about Putin or the other candidates before the election. An economist and former trade minister who broke with the neo-liberal consensus a decade ago, Glazyev joined the Communist party in the hope of transforming it into a social democratic force on the pattern of the rest of eastern Europe.
When the Communists, under their veteran leader, Gennady Zyuganov, declined, Glazyev left and turned to nationalist groups for allies with whom to create the new party Rodina (Motherland). It got a surprising 9 percent in the December elections.
Some Kremlin officials initially supported it as a device to take votes from the Communists and speed their long-term decline.
Glazyev conceded on Thursday that he had discussed Rodina's approach with Putin at a Kremlin meeting last autumn, but "speculation that it was born in the Kremlin is not true. We need to establish social democracy which will combine the European experience of the welfare state with Russian traditions," he said.
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