In peacetime, I had many political projects: some of them were successful, some not so much,
but if I deserve a candy for my contribution to the political progress of Russia, then it will be for the awakening of municipal elections .
In 2012, when I was running for municipal deputy of the Shchukino district in Moscow,
the institution of local self-government in the capital was a heartbreaking sight.
The absolute majority, even among politically involved people,
had no idea at all about the existence of municipal councils in Moscow and deputies in them.
Regional councils traditionally had local middle-level bosses, such as school directors and heads of departments in a polyclinic,
and pensioners voted for them in an amount of up to 10% of the voter list.
No one saw in this at least some political plot.
It even helped the first time. When you go to the elections, which no one cares about, about which no one simply knows,
you can win them by printing a leaflet with text in the spirit of a Facebook post
and distributing it on your own in the vicinity of your own registration, which I actually did.
But the real success came in 2017.
Then we came up with the “municipal uber” idea and helped a thousand people all over Moscow to run,
a quarter of whom won the elections.
It was a great victory, both a political one, because everyone immediately paid attention to the dead institute, and a moral one –
the entire center of Moscow, all the nesting places of the highest bureaucrats,
all the elite residential complexes were taken by our candidates almost without a fight.
What is especially pleasant, we completely won the polling station where Putin voted by registration.
In this region, we received 12 mandates out of twelve.
In Tverskoy district where the Kremlin is located, we recieved 11 mandates out of 12 - only 1 went to United Russia
Since then, this has been talked about, since then the municipal agenda in large cities has come into focus,
and since then, being elected as a municipal deputy is the first and most understandable step for a young politician.
And for politically active population, voting for candidates from the bulletin,
even though the candidates are usually not perfect, is politically correct behaviour
This did not change the position of the councils themselves, the municipalities are still deprived of their powers:
they still distribute miserable pennies of budgets, do not influence appointments.
A municipal deputy is still a purely nominal position.
But nevertheless, people got the experience of participating in real elections, the experience of communicating with real voters,
and even the experience of winning, which quickly became contagious.
Municipal campaigns became a political school in a reality stripped of politics.
When we started all this, we received a lot of criticism.
They said noone needs these municipal deputies, noone needs discussions about whether to put a bench up or down.
These claims were wrong globally, but they were based on the right thesis:
from the very beginning of the 00s, the Russian authorities consistently killed and minimised local self-government institutions,
they deprived it of budgets and powers and turned it into a decorative appendix to the executive branch.
But 2022 has arrived. A new round of municipal elections has come in Moscow, and we see that the fear of the elected people,
of people who have their own, albeit tiny, but still legitimacy — this fear has not only developed because of the war,
it has become total.
Right now, those activists who are going to be elected or re-elected to the municipal councils of Moscow
are being persecuted in every possible way.
And they do it in a particularly cynical way: the police come to the deputy, take him to court, and there the judge,
barely restraining laughter, reads the protocol in which it is written:
in 2016, the deputy published extremist symbols on the social network.
After that, he is fined 1000 rubles.
This administrative article is written specifically for elections: those who received such a fine cannot run for a year.
And almost all current opposition deputies have already received such fines for the symbolism of Smart Voting (Navalny's election tool), for example, or something else.
And nearly every known local activist who is preparing to run for office.
It would seem that you are reporting on universal support and popular unity, on the unity of the people and the leader,
why would you care about those hundreds of municipal assemblies,
which allocate less money combined per year than the frail department of the city hall per month?
You don't give a damn about what they put on the path in the park?
But in fact they care a lot, and the further you go, the more they care.
Over the past 4 months, the plan for repressive legislation has been overfulfilled by 10 years in advance.
Now, any not quite enthusiastic attitude towards the authorities and its actions threatens any person with troubles,
ranging from a fine and loss of a job,
ending with a criminal sentence that exceeds the term of murder with aggravating circumstances.
Plus, for natural reasons, the law enforcement agencies in such circumstances begin to play
a significantly more inadequate role than before.
Now no one is safe and everyone is under the blow of repression, from ordinary citizens to rectors of major universities and generals.
Now it is not necessary to somehow openly and publicly oppose,
and serious troubles can follow from a loud conversation in a restaurant or a passport cover with the wrong coat of arms.
«Red lines» were purely imaginary before, but now they don't exist at all.
Constant news about new reasons to be imprisoned, constant news about new criminal cases –
this is how the Russian leadership replaces the absence of victorious news from the fronts, creating an atmosphere of general fear.
In this situation, sociology as an industry becomes meaningless.
The respondent hears any political question like this:
did you listen carefully to Skabeeva (russian propagandist) or do you want to be jailed for 15 years?
The percentage of refusal to answer, already prohibitively high, has gone beyond 95%.
It seems that this is very good for the authorities.
They are finally released from the oppression of public opinion, finally, their opponents are either abroad or in prison,
finally, any dissatisfaction and for any reason can be equated with betrayal.
State departments in principle love the state of emergency,
because it is an excuse to endlessly inflate their powers, staffing levels and budgets.
This is a reason to abolish the rights of citizens not individually, but in bulk.
This is a reason to increase your importance in the system and eliminate competitors.
A state of emergency is always a source of power and money.
But the state is not monolithic.
If the security forces are now really like children locked up at night in the confectionery department,
then there are still people who need to be provided with political power – there are people who need to hold elections.
Hold elections in a situation where they do not know anything about the voter at all.
In two months, millions of citizens across the country will find themselves in the silence and solitude of voting booths.
They will elect governors, legislative assemblies of regions, municipal deputies.
Millions of people whose lives have become noticeably worse, whose incomes have fallen significantly,
and some of them have been fired, someone whose acquaintance has not returned from the war –
they all felt that life has changed, and not for the better.
In this booth, no one sees them, there is no man in uniform behind.
The tick mark on the ballot is now the only chance to safely give the authorities the middle finger.
Do the majority want to show it or not? We do not know. And the election organizers don't know either.
After all, they completely cleaned up the public sphere, deprived themselves of sociology,
and now this incomprehensible citizen with incomprehensible thoughts in his head should be left alone with the ballot.
Moreover, it is quite obvious that the results of each election are now a matter of loyalty.
Moreover, the loyalty of not only a large mass of anonymous voters, but also the loyalty of the organizers.
What will the governor of the front-line Kursk region look like if pro-government candidates
completely fly past the city assembly of its capital?
What will the mayor of Moscow look like if the voter expresses his anti-war views at the polling station, voting against all?
And in such an hour of hard trials, when everyone should be like one clenched fist,
how will any boss who brought the protest result feel?
What will happen to those who made the scandal?
To whom did the Motherland give an order, but he did not comply?
How do all these civil administrators who are supposed to hold these elections feel now,
when on the one hand they have voters who noone knows what's in their hearts,
and on the other, a whole army of various security officials who are just waiting for the smell of bureaucratic blood?
After all, it is one thing, referring to closed opinion polls, to report to the top about how patriotism has begun to grow in our country.
Another is to ask Muscovites about their attitude to what is happening through elections.
It may turn out that the Moscow mayor's office allows political short-sightedness,
even criminal negligence, bordering on sabotage and betrayal in wartime.
Perhaps it's time to draw personnel conclusions.
After all, just a year after the municipal elections there will be elections for the mayor of Moscow, and a year and a half later –
presidential elections, and the situation will only get worse during this time.
And the point here is not in the composition of the municipal council of the Khoroshevsky district
and not in the installation of a playground near the house number 8 on Ostryakova Street.
The point here is whether you, Sergei Semyonovich, can hold elections quietly, without scandal and with an absolute victory.
Even if citizens feel a well-founded danger of random repressions,
then big bosses who really have many enemies and competitors, many who want to tear their political corpse apart,
they perfectly understand that now there are no untouchables, and anything can be perceived as disloyalty.
Hence the desire to clean up everything in the world at the distant approaches, before the unpredictable voter enters the booth.
Even municipal elections are being swept to zero, even Moscow municipal councils with completely curtailed powers.
Is there any good news in all this darkness?
Of course there is. The good news is that everyone realizes that it's not 2014.
No «Crimea No. 2» happened.
None of those who need to hold elections, who need to go to the voters –
none of them believe in the nonsense from TV and opinion polls.
War is unpopular and will not become more popular over time. The war only loses support every week – this is a political law.
The law, which was not invented in liberal democracies –
it worked in antiquity, it worked when everyone was at war, always and with everyone.
You can be a bloody cannibal, you can kill people for fun, history let's it go,
but if you unleashed a war, please win it quickly and triumphantly.
History does not forgive military losers.
Public opinion can be driven underground by repressions for some time, the public field can be cleared out –
this is the main advantage of non-free societies for their leadership.
But the trouble is that if you do not see public opinion, this does not mean that it does not exist.
In the Soviet Union of the 80s there was not even a hint of the Internet, albeit with a mass of blocked sites,
there was no hint of instant messengers or something like that, and to call a neighboring city you had to go to the post office.
Any copier equipment, every copier were under strict control and could not be in private hands.
And the war in Afghanistan was not even close in scale to the Ukrainian one and, moreover, went to distant lands.
Nevertheless, word of mouth worked – people transmitted information.
The war caused more and more horror, irritation, more and more influenced public opinion, which no one heard,
it did not exist publicly, but it was there. People knew about the crippled and killed,
they were afraid for relatives and friends, they did not understand why soldiers die every day.
Such sentiments have become far from the only, but a big nail in the coffin of the Soviet system.
People were ready to put up with terrible living conditions,
but the fear of dying in a distant and unnecessary war was personal for every family.
Today it is impossible to make any forecasts about the development of the situation,
but we can already clearly understand two things from the actions of the authorities:
firstly, we cannot move the war, we cannot forget about it.
The war continues to affect life and the perception of this life by citizens.
Secondly, the authorities themselves know the price of their support and are not ready to take even minimal risks.
To draw a line under what is happening today and draw a conclusion about the real amount of popular support,
it is enough to go back exactly nine years ago, to the summer of 2013.
Then Alexei Navalny, the main opponent of the current government, the real leader of the opposition,
could be admitted to the second most important after the presidential election – the election of the mayor of Moscow.
9 years ago, the elections in Moscow, of course, were not fair:
there was not even close talk of equal admission in the media or something like that.
But then the authorities practically did not interfere with street agitation,
and at the same time there was a really honest count of votes.
Without any electronic voting, albeit one step away from the second round, Sergei Sobyanin won,
and he won not against a stool, not against a nominal opponent, but against Alexei Navalny himself.
And now, 9 years later, when Navalny is in complete isolation. When all distinct opposition structures are crushed.
When opposition activity is de facto criminalized.
When there can be no coherent political campaign, no real candidates can be allowed, even for municipal elections.
Straws should be put everywhere, because absolutely everything can go wrong.
Not even in 2013, but back in 2017, municipal elections were held in Moscow,
well we can honestly say that they allowed everyone to run, they didn’t interfere with campaigning,
and in 2022 they chase every deputy in order to issue them an administrative letter for the events of six years ago in order not to allow them get on the ballot
If you are asked questions about how the Russian people feel about Putin and the war, then tell them about this path:
how self-confident the regime was 9 years ago, before any Crimea, by the way, how it relied on a lot of support,
and what the same regime has become now.
From the readiness to fight Navalny, to “hope nothing happens in the municipality of Chertanovo Severnoye.”
That's it.
See you tomorrow.