TONY BLAIR, George Bush and other Western leaders should publicly criticise Russian democratic failings when they attend the G8 summit in St Petersburg next month, the Kremlin’s main opponent said yesterday.

Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Prime Minister and a candidate for the Russian presidency in 2008, said that he feared for the country’s democratic future unless the leaders of the world’s richest countries spoke out.

“Russia should be treated and judged as a normal democratic country,” Mr Kasyanov told The Times. “The implementation of our constitution is unacceptable, dangerous, wrong. For politicians of other countries no more polite language should be found to express this idea.”

Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, caused an uproar last month in Russia when he gave a speech in Lithuania castigating the Kremlin for backsliding on democracy and restricting the rights of its people.

Mr Kasyanov said: “What Cheney said was absolutely right. It was absolutely the wrong place and used the wrong format. It would be ideal (for G8 leaders to deliver the same message), not said as a lesson or in preaching manner, but to express disappointment.”

His remarks were in sharp contrast to those of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who told The Times at the weekend that it would be counter-productive for the West to meddle in Russian internal affairs during the summit.

In Western capitals there is alarm at the growing power of the Kremlin, the weakness of the Opposition and the diminishing rights of the individual, However, Russia’s democratic shortcomings have often taken a back seat to the importance of the country as a source of energy supplies to Western economies and as an ally in the fight against extremist Islam.

Mr Kasyanov, who traced Mr Putin’s “backsliding” on democracy to the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in September 2004, said that the real test would be the presidential elections in 2008.

Mr Putin is barred from standing for a third term, but Mr Kasyanov said that Kremlin insiders were putting pressure on him to stand anyway. “Certain circles in the new elite are eager for Putin to stand,” Mr Kasyanov said. “I do not think this is the main scenario. The President understands that this would be the beginning of another Cold War.”

Instead he predicted that a Kremlin candidate would be put forward with the full support of the State, including a monopoly of coverage in the state-controlled media, manipulation at the ballot box and intimidation of rivals.

Mr Kasyanov said that he already had very little access to television or newspapers. Even meetings at universities with students had been disrupted by bomb scares and threats to academic staff. He intends to get his message out on the internet and through campaigning across Russia but said that the key to a fair election would be the deployment of thousands of independent Russian and foreign election monitors.

Mr Kasyanov said that when he resigned from office two years ago he had intended to go into the private sector but that he had returned to public life because he feared that Russia’s future as a European, democratic state was under threat.

“I fear that if Russia stifles real democracy the country could be headed towards a revolution,” he said. “We had two of those in the last century. That was enough.”

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