One Russia spokesman denies party ordered 'purge' of Novosibirsk branch

[Report by Svetlana Bocharova and Fedor Rumyantsev: "Exceptional Measure of Instruction"]

The biggest one-time cadre purge has taken place in the United Russia party. The Novosibirsk aktiv is expelling approximately 900 members from its ranks at once, "for loss of connection with the party." The renegades were brought to light in the course of an audit conducted for the federal leadership.

Having just become chairman of United Russia, Vladimir Putin announced that the party of power must be cleansed "of chance people." In a meeting with United Russia officials last year the president also said that there are timeservers in United Russia who joined the party for opportunistic reasons.

Two days after Putin's second warning United Russia reported the biggest one-time cadre purge in the party: Some 870 people may be dismissed from the Novosibirsk branch.

Aleksey Bespalikov, chairman of the party's Political Council and speaker of the oblast deputies' council, announced the upcoming purge of United Russia's Novosibirsk regional branch Thursday [ 17 April]. "We did not find them, they have ended their connection with the party and must be expelled," Bespalikov said, cited by Interfax.

People in Bespalikov's apparatus told Gazeta.ru that "elements that do not want to work" were brought to light in the course of an audit which started long before President Putin headed the party. "It was conducted in accordance with the party rules. After all, from time to time any party cleanses itself of elements that do not want to work," a source in the speaker's entourage told Gazeta.ru. "The president simply reminded certain comrades once again that they should not be in a great hurry for power. They must work first of all."

Novosibirsk media had reported earlier that the problem of "dead souls" was raised at the party's 15th regional conference in early April. It transpired that back in February 2008 United Russia's federal leadership had entrusted its regional branches with conducting an audit of their ranks. According to Bespalikov, in Novosibirsk Oblast, where there are 29,200 United Russia members, information about their members was provided by just over half the local branches - 24 out of 44. It was this documentation that contained information about 870 "dead souls."

However, people in the party's federal leadership maintain that they issued no tasking relating to party purges: "Nobody has planned any purges. Maybe it is a question of a check, which should not be confused with a purge. A check means ascertaining the correlation of the number of registered members with the actual people who are active party members. It can happen that someone has moved to a different place of residence and not notified it. So this is an ordinary check. There has been no instruction from the central leadership relating to a purge of the ranks, and people in the regional branch probably displayed personal initiative," Valeriy Ryazanskiy, member of the United Russia General Council Presidium, assured Gazeta.ru.

In any case, in Bespalikov's opinion, the expulsion of people who do not work for the good of the party will enhance the activeness of all the remaining party members, their "motivation."

At the same time United Russia's opponents do not really believe this. "If we recall how United Russia was created and how quite recently they were driving primarily budget-paid employees into it, it is not surprising that they got a membership of almost 30,000 people in Novosibirsk Oblast alone. It is an overblown structure.... To such an extent that they had already started to be reprimanded. So they have embarked on a purge of their ranks," Anatoliy Lokot, Communist State Duma deputy from Novosibirsk Oblast, believes. At the same time Gazeta.ru's interlocutor did not rule out the possibility that undesirable people will be purged from the party at the same time as the "dead souls": "We know from history that, on whatever pretexts purges are started, they always end in reprisals against undesirable people," the Communist warned.

Source: Gazeta.ru website, Moscow, in Russian 18 Apr 08

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