The past week was an eventful one in Russian politics. On June 23, days after President Dmitri Medvedev told Britain’s Financial Times that he “would like the whole of political spectrum to be represented in our parliament,” the Ministry of Justice denied registration—and thus access to December’s parliamentary elections—to the Popular Freedom Party, a pro-democracy opposition bloc co-founded by the former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov. The decision came as no surprise: the Popular Freedom Party became the eighth political group to be rejected by the Russian authorities since 2007...

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