As troops, police patrol Moscow, Putin tries to put positive spin on party's election result

• Article by: MANSUR MIROVALEV , Associated Press 
• 

MOSCOW - Thousands of police and Interior Ministry troops patrolled central Moscow on Tuesday, an apparent attempt to deter any further protests a day after a rally against vote fraud and corruption caught Russian authorities by surprise.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, called his party's reduced number of seats in Sunday's parliamentary election an "inevitable" result of voters always being dissatisfied with the party in power. Putin also dismissed allegations of corruption among his United Russia party members, calling it a "cliche" that the party had to fight.
In neighboring Lithuania, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton again criticized the Russian election and urged that widespread reports of voting fraud be investigated.
United Russia party won slightly less than 50 percent of Sunday's vote, according to nearly complete preliminary results. Although that gives the party an absolute majority in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, it is a significant drop from the 2007 election when the party got a two-thirds majority, enough to change the constitution unchallenged.
Even that smaller majority is seen as questionable in the wake of numerous reports of voting fraud to inflate United Russia's total. Russian officials, however, have denied any significant vote violations.
Still, the election results reflected public fatigue with Putin's authoritarian streak and with official corruption in Russia, signaling that his return to the presidency in next March's election may not be as trouble-free as he expected.
Russia's beleaguered opposition has been energized by the vote. Late Monday, thousands marched in Moscow chanting "Russia without Putin!"
On Tuesday evening, hundreds of police cordoned off Triumphal Square, adjacent to the capital's main boulevard, after reports that anti-Putin demonstrators would try to gather there. Hundreds of young men, some wearing emblems of the Young Guards, United Russia's youth wing, also were seen at the square.
Police also cordoned off a monument to the 1905 Revolution, which also has been the site of demonstrations.
Police detained about 300 protesters in Moscow on Monday and 120 participants in a similar rally in St. Petersburg. One of the leaders, Ilya Yashin, who was among those arrested, was sentenced to 15 days in jail Tuesday for disobeying police.
Security forces already had been beefed up in the capital ahead of the election. Moscow police said 51,500 Interior Ministry forces were involved and it was all part of increased security for the election period.
Putin's comments Tuesday appeared aimed at saving face and discouraging the opposition from seeing United Russia as vulnerable.
"Yes, there were losses, but they were inevitable," Putin said. "They are inevitable for any political force, particularly for the one which has been carrying the burden of responsibility for the situation in the country."
Putin also addressed the popular characterization of United Russia as "the party of crooks and thieves," saying corruption was a widespread problem not limited to a single party.
"They say that the ruling party is associated with theft, with corruption, but it's a cliche related not to a certain political force, it's a cliche related to power," he said during a meeting with provincial officials.
"What's important, however, is how the ruling government is fighting these negative things," he said.
Clinton criticized the Russian vote for a second straight day, saying Tuesday that "Russian voters deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation."
Konstantin Kosachev, a senior United Russia member, described Clinton's statement as "one of the darkest pages in the Russian-U.S. relations" and warned Washington against supporting the opposition.
Russia's only independent election monitoring group, Golos, which is funded by U.S. and European grants, came under heavy official pressure ahead of Sunday's vote after Putin likened Russian recipients of foreign support to Judas. Golos' website was incapacitated by hackers on election day, and its director Lilya Shibanova and her deputy had their cell phone numbers, email and social media accounts hacked.
The Russian election even drew criticism from one of Putin's predecessors.
"There is no real democracy here and there won't be any, if the government is afraid of the people," former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
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Vladimir Isachenkov contributed to this report.

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