Crisis will topple Putin and Medvedev, says opposition leader

By Michael Stott and Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Rising unemployment and economic crisis in Russia will force Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev from power by 2012, an opposition leader predicted on Tuesday.

"I believe this regime will not see 2012. It is probable it will not see out 2010. Things are unfolding too fast," Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion who has led a crusade against Kremlin policies, told Reuters in an interview.

"This structure will collapse."

Shortly after Kasparov spoke, Medvedev said the global financial crisis had spread to Russia's real economy and "every industry is affected in its own way." He said the many sectors that needed state aid would receive it.

Kasparov, who has just co-founded a new opposition movement called Solidarity, predicted big street protests when the crisis hits jobs, particularly those of military officers whom the government plans to sack as part of an army shake-up.

"In America and the U.K., governments are trying to solve the problems of the poor at the expense of the rich," Kasparov said in the interview in his Soviet-era Moscow flat.

"In Russia it is the other way round. So in Russia, the oligarchs are being saved ... and the businesses of Putin's friends are being saved, at the expense of Russian taxpayers."

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declined comment but noted that Kasparov had never won elected office and "unfortunately he has been unable to take any place at all in politics or on the margins of politics."