Stanislav Belkovsky is an odd duck.  As a career polittechnologist, he was hired way back in the day to produce a smear campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but then later flipped to criticize the trial, and then spent some time spreading rumors that Vladimir Putin was the richest man in the world ($41 billion!).  The reasons behind almost anything he says inspire the most lurid and counter-intuitive conspiracy theories, to the point that nobody really understands what he is up to.  Nevertheless, here goes a partial translation of a recent column he wrote on Slon.Ru addressing the recent proposal by Vladimir Putin for mandatory primaries, and criticizing the election strategies of various opposition factions (vote for no one, or vote for anyone besides United Russia).

On a side note, Vladimir Putin has now announced that all parties need to introduce primaries. The liberals were immediately thrown into hysteria: Oh, Putin wants to control all parties! Leave, citizens, get out! And thus the Kremlin will control all the parties – at the very least there will be no chance of some awkward figure from the opposition overcoming the Kremlin’s veto on the electoral list. And all of the fundamental electoral decisions of the opposition agree upon end up supporting the Kremlin, and not only at the highest level. So, to be fair there is no need of primaries if one wishes to increases control. Putin’s motivation is quite different: knowing that any of his sneezes can cause a storm in airwaves, the Prime Minister, somewhat discouraged by recent opinion polls, has decided to draw additional attention to the very word “primary” and the procedure under the All-Russia People’s Front.  And his plan has succeeded, thanks to the Liberals.

What has happened allows us, I hope, to discuss/critically analyse the behavioural strategy of the thinking citizen about the “elections” coming in December.