Irina Khakamada sipped tea with honey while contemplating why she has chosen the path of a "samurai" to become the only Russian liberal willing to lose face in a hopeless challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 14 elections.
The stylish 48-year-old of Japanese ancestry tapped on her cigarette, sighed and said her male colleagues in the liberal opposition whom she knew since the Soviet Union's collapse have turned out to be wimps.
All have bowed out of a fight against a president whose approval rating is higher than 70 percent.
But Khakamada said such a choice was defeatist and only went to prove that democracy in Russia has failed. And so she stepped in.
"Everyone asks me: Why am I calling myself a samurai? Well I think nothing in this country comes easy," she said.
"But some people had their egos crushed" in last month's parliamentary elections in which the liberals were obliterated from the scene.
Khakamada herself no longer holds her seat in parliament where she had been lobbying the interests of the struggling small business sector for a decade.
She has been forced to move her campaign headquarters into a building on the squalid industrial outskirts of Moscow where a staff of energetic teenagers chatter about their careers in theater above the booming beats of rock music while making photocopies.
Khakamada's voter approval rating is about 1 percent. But even this is not her main challenge.
Khakamada is actually waging a more intriguing and multi-front battle that is so characteristic of Russian politics. Her decision to break the liberals' boycott and step into the race drew immediate speculation that she was a Kremlin stooge. The Machiavellian logic was that Putin needed a candidate who is respected in the West for his inevitable victory to look legitimate, and that his administration has sought Khakamada out.
Khakamada ended this talk with typically dramatic flare: she launched her campaign by accusing Putin of covering up the truth about a November 2002 theater hostage-taking by Chechens in Moscow. 130 civilians were killed during a botched government rescue involving a poisonous gas.
The subject of why so many died has been taboo in mainstream Russian politics and only raised by struggling human rights groups -- until Khakamada came around.
"I took this risk on purpose. I wanted to prove that I am not a Kremlin agent," she said. "They know that my base of support is the independent, open-minded voter and the Kremlin tried to discredit me."
She certainly drew people's attention.
Sergei Mironov -- a presidential candidate who chairs the upper house of parliament and says he is running as a formality and actually backs Putin -- said Khakamada made the claims because "she is short of ideas."
The Moscow city government called the allegations "unethical and unacceptable."
But this is only a part of Khakamada's challenge.
The other is getting businesses to help an opposition candidate in an era when the only company to have done so openly -- the Yukos oil giant -- saw most of its executives either jailed or flee abroad from prosecution.
Khakamada is now being financed by one of the top Yukos shareholders.
But she said thatother executives are also quietly helping her cause.
"They try to do everything very cautiously because they know how dangerous this is for them," she said of her new financial backers, in a clear sign of how worried the business community remains about crossing paths with the Kremlin.
"But they say they will support me because we need to demonstrate to society that we are willing to fight."
Asked if her politically damaging links to Yukos frighten her, Khakamada said briskly: "Who cares? It is stupid to run without money."
But perhaps most intriguingly, Khakamada is not afraid to admit that the liberal post-Soviet Union movement -- after years of infighting -- is dead and must be rebuilt from scratch.
She said liberal reform architect Anatoly Chubais "discredited" the liberals by joining them in last month's parliamentary race.
"He is no longer effective," she said of a man who had been recognized in the West as the leading light of Russian reforms.
Instead Khakamada proudly presented herself as one of the new generation of Russian liberals who will rescue the movement by the time the next parliamentary elections roll around in 2007.
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