Russia's Medvedev raps ruling party over elections

By Gleb Bryanski

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - President Dmitry Medvedev scolded leaders of Russia's ruling party on Saturday for "bad political habits" and ordered them to win future elections fairly.

In his sharpest criticism so far of United Russia, which dominates Russian political life, Medvedev told the party's annual congress in St Petersburg that some regional branches had failed to allow voters to express their will.

"Elections which are intended to be ... a competition of ideas and programmes, are sometimes turned into affairs in which democratic procedures are confused with administrative ones," the president said in a brief opening speech.

"We need to learn to win -- all of us, in fact -- we need to learn to win in open contests," Medvedev told more than 600 party delegates in a session broadcast live on state television. His remarks were greeted with polite applause.

But outside the congress hall, police detained 13 members of the National Bolsheviks, a small, banned opposition political movement, as they attempted to deliver an appeal to Medvedev to dismiss Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's government.

"In our petition to Medvedev we promised support for his course of modernisation and as a first step we suggested he fire Putin from the post of prime minister and stop working with United Russia," St Petersburg National Bolshevik leader Andrei Dmitriyev told Reuters by telephone from a police station.

Police told the protesters they were being detained for crossing a pedestrian crossing illegally at a red light, a charge they denied.

United Russia, headed by Medvedev's mentor and Kremlin predecessor Vladimir Putin, crushed opposition parties in regional elections held across much of Russia in October.