The occasion for the conversation was the split in RPR-PARNAS: for almost three years the party was led by three co-chairs — Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Mikhail Kasyanov. On air, Sokolov recalled that Ryzhkov had announced his withdrawal from the party at the federal political council on Saturday, and cited his explanation: since last summer, according to Ryzhkov, the party had de facto abandoned the principle of consensus, and the last episode was the proposal by two co-chairs to remove the third. "The party is dead," Ryzhkov said, calling what happened "a hostile takeover by people who got a majority."
Belkovsky's version
Belkovsky offered his own explanation for the split: in his opinion, Kasyanov and Nemtsov had decided to make Alexei Navalny the party leader, since they themselves, as he put it, "could not carry the party" and had not developed a coherent strategy. Ryzhkov, according to the analyst, did not want Navalny to become the sole leader. Belkovsky described the point of the scheme as follows: give the party to Navalny and "then say: look how good we are, we have sacrificed our personal ambitions."
Answering the question of why Russian liberals are less effective than the Ukrainian opposition, Belkovsky spoke of the different "upbringing of peoples." He recalled that western Ukraine was not part of the USSR until 1939, and argued that the Ukrainian people as a whole do not perceive the president as a tsar. According to him, Yanukovych consistently "tested" society's patience — extending the lease of the Black Sea Fleet for 25 years, returning the old constitution with broad presidential powers, jailing Yulia Tymoshenko — and only the refusal to sign the association agreement with the European Union showed that the limit had been crossed.
The Olympics and Russian protest
Asked whether the Russian people could take to Tverskaya and Novy Arbat in two years, Belkovsky answered: "Probably." At the same time, he said that the psychological turning point that should have come had not come. He called the Sochi Olympics a chapter about Vladimir Putin in a single history textbook; according to him, focusing today on saving Russia from collapse and ending the Chechen war is no longer relevant. He called the Chechen war a political defeat for Russia, and Chechnya "an absolutely independent state" headed by Ramzan Kadyrov.
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