The reading of the verdict to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev during several weeks was one of the central events in the political life of the country. This is because the sentence of the once richest and most powerful entrepreneur in the country should indicate the readiness of the state to cooperate with the business. Currently, ‘Khodorkovsky’s trial’ is one of the few power’s initiatives that is carried to the final.

One of the main aims of locking up the Yukos Chief was his isolation until the end of the election cycle of 2007-2008. Before his arrest, Khodorkovsky claimed that planned to take an active part in the elections in 2007-2008, which could become a serious problem for the elite of the Putin’s regime and their ‘successor’ project. This was the final argument at the attempt of the siloviki team to convince Vladimir Putin to put Khodorkovsky in jail. The task to isolate the Yukos Chief before the end of the power transition from Putin to a successor was complete solved by the verdict that had been read by May 31. Mikhail Khodorkovsky cannot be released earlier than 2008. He has the right to appeal for an early release only after he has spent half of his sentence.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in jail or free, is dangerous for the regime of Vladimir Putin. The only difference is that he can be controlled in the penitentiary. After the lockup, Khodorkovsky became the most effective potential leader of the rightist opposition to Vladimir Putin’s regime. He is a successful businessman, which attracts the pragmatic rightist electorate, his arrest makes nearly the main victim of the Vladimir Putin’s regime in the eyes of the remedial rightist electorate. At that, Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been coming out with political statements during his entire imprisonment. Practically, he is gradually presenting his political-ideological program.

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This move has a great positive potential. Practically, the party remained in the hands of Anatoly Chubais, whose protégé Leonid Gozman became deputy head of the party. However, the main result is the possible appearance of a real leader. One of the main aspects of the rightists’ crisis is the lack of the effective leaders. The ‘old’ leaders cannot account on a wide support from the electorate, as the Duma race in 2003 showed.

Since early 2005, there has been a large number of meetings and protest actions in Russia. The start was given by the protest movement against the compensation reform. After this, the meetings became one of the main instruments of pressure on the power.

The government had to make concessions after the unraveling of the big protest actions against the compensation reform. The preferential groups of population managed to achieve many demands and significant adjustment of the reform, which was the bright example of how mass actions can influence on the situation. As a result, a whole wave of meetings and protest actions was unleashed. Various mass action are taking place almost daily in the country these days.

The example of the ‘color revolution’ in the state of the former USSR makes the Russian power have a more careful approach to the protest actions. The power worries about the possible revolution tendencies; that is why it tries to minimize the mass discontent actions. The population has seen for the first time that public political actions can be effective. If earlier the power made few concessions, now that it is forced to react to such pressure tactics, it has to adjust its actions.

The increase of the mass actions’ number has led to the point when many of the population groups began to establish unions to promote their interests. This is taking place at the micro-level as well. The example of this can be the meeting held May 31 near the Healthcare and Social Development Ministry. The protestors, mainly the people that wait in line for a transplantation organ, the parents of the kids, who need transplantation, and the doctors, came out supporting transplantology. Earlier, almost every mass action was organized by various players in the political and economic field that benefited from them directly, now, however, the self-organization of small groups of people and the increase of the mass actions’ number show that the real institutions of the civil society are gradually being formed.

The preparations of the main political players for the next election cycle are ongoing in many directions. One of them is the creation of the mass media platform for the effective conduct of the agitation and propaganda strategy.

The control over the mass media channels is one of the main aspects of the political technologies that will be used in 2007-2008 during the next election cycle. By this moment, all the central TV channels are directly or indirectly ran by the technologists of the Presidential Administration responsible for the informational policy.

Television covers a wide auditorium compared to the print media. It allows one to use direct propaganda technologies, which provides for the high efficiency of the informational policy. At that, there are currently new tasks that require active work of the mass media with the auditorium. In the first place, this refers to the publishing houses oriented on the most intellectual part of the society.

The technologists of the Presidential Administration control the most mass papers, as Komsomolskaya Pravda for instance, but their presence in the market of the ‘quality print media’ is scarce. This is the reason of the active expansion of the structures of the non-siloviki part of the Presidential Administration into the newspapers market. The first aim is Izvestiya paper that was controlled by Prof-media Holding, affiliated with Chief of Interros Vladimir Potanin. On June 2, Gazprom-media Holding officially announced the purchase of Izvestiya paper.

Formally, Gazprom-media is the private company, but in fact it is controlled by the state, because the main shareholder is the state-run firm Gazprom. All the informational policy of Gazprom-media is controlled by the political grouping of the ‘jurists’.

Advancement of their version of the informational policy is for the technologists of the PA nearly the most effective weapon of the positional struggle. The important factor of the escalation of the fight for the mass media is that the siloviki part of the elite also begins to expand into the informational field. The first steps in this direction have already been made. The siloviki have created ‘their’ TV channel Zvezda, which should become all-federal in the future. Besides, there is a number of the print mass media, in which the publishing policy is closely related to the goals of the siloviki. The important characteristic of the siloviki’s informational policy is the production of big screen movies with relatively big budgets. This shows that so far, the siloviki has been staking on the single-use big-scale informational actions. The non-siloviki part of the elite, however, prefers planned ideological working on the population.