Igor Zotov, the leader of the Party of Pensioners, met with President Vladimir Putin and told the head of state that his organization was intending to change tack from more direct action to less confrontational steps.
"We have abandoned methods of strikes and meetings because we can achieve little with these methods," Zotov said. "We decided to work constructively with the authorities through negotiations."
The party leader said pensioners had enjoyed some success in discussing reforms of the communal sector by meeting with Regional Development Minister Vladimir Yakovlev and presenting their vision of the reform, which has so far seen rates for electricity and housing soar.
Pensioners also staged vocal protests in January against a reform replacing benefits in-kind with cash payments, which hit senior citizens used to enjoying free public transportation and medicines particularly hard.
Zotov said the party had 74 registered regional branches, was represented in 16 regional legislative assemblies and planned to expand its membership from current 136,000 members to 150,000 in September 2006.
"We believe that...we are the party of the future because all of us will eventually become pensioners," he said.
The Party of Pensioners was founded as a public political organization in 1997. It was reregistered as a political party on December 1, 2001 and has run in parliamentary elections twice. In 1999, the party received about 2% of the votes and just over 3% in 2003.
The ruling pro-Kremlin United Russia party leads the list of Russia's political parties with about a million members and the Communist Party says it has about 580,000 members.
