Putin must go

"Putin Must Go" (Russian: «Путин должен уйти») is a Russian website and public campaign organised for the collection of signatures to an open letter demanding the resignation of President (formerly Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin. The campaign was started on the Internet on 10 March 2010 by Russian opposition activists and several Russian artists.

The text of the petition, addressed to the "citizens of Russia", contains a sharply negative assessment of Vladimir Putin's activity. It says in part:

We state that the sociopolitical construction that is killing Russia and has now bound the citizens of our country has one architect, one custodian, and one guardian. His name is Vladimir Putin. We declare that no essential reforms can be carried out in Russia today as long as Putin controls real power in the country. [...] Ridding ourselves of Putinism is the first, obligatory step on the path to a new, free Russia.

The petition lists Putin's failed reforms ("everything that could be ruined has been ruined") and alleged crimes, such as the Second Chechen War and the Russian apartment bombings.

The petition also criticises the late president Boris Yeltsin and the circle of his advisers and relatives ("the Family"), who promoted Putin to the presidency in order to guarantee their own security. The petition calls the previous president Dmitry Medvedev "an obedient placeholder", "a modern Simeon Bekbulatovich".

The authors appeal to law enforcement and security agency officers not to stand against their nation and not to carry out criminal orders.

The actual author of the text was not named, but according to early sources it was a group headed by Garry Kasparov. Later Kasparov said about the work on the text of the petition:

A key role was played by the text itself, on which our group of authors worked almost two weeks. My main function was to gather comments and get approvals of the text from all the signatories — from Vladimir Bukovsky to Yury Mukhin. This work required meticulous selection of words and positioning semantic accents. It was not easy to formulate the main message of the petition. At first two variants were examined: "Putin must resign!" and "Down with Putin!". The first variant was brushed away, because it was a clear appeal to Medvedev; the second one smacked of Bolshevism. Two days before the launch of the project I came up with the phrase "Putin must go" (literally, "Putin, to the Exit!"), which suited everybody. Another delicate issue was the characterisation of the 1990s. When expressing negative sentiment toward that period, it was necessary not to overdo it and thus cause rejection from such people as, for example, Boris Nemtsov. Our collaboration turned out to be very successful, because we created a text, with which we managed to overcome the atomisation of society.

...
Wikipedia