As promised, I’m going to try to persuade you.
So, after every post calling on people to vote for the visa initiative, I started getting far more comments criticizing the Russian Public Initiative platform (ROI) than discussing the initiative itself.
The arguments can roughly be grouped as follows:
To begin with, let me remind you what ROI is.
In one of his programmatic campaign articles, Putin promised that if a draft law received the support of 100,000 verified citizen votes, it would be put to a vote in the State Duma.
As usual, he lied. It turned out to be not a “draft law” but an “initiative,” and instead of being put to a vote in the Duma, it gets sent to some strange government commission that for some reason decides what to do with it.
Even so, we’ve used vote collection on ROI before, and I’m urging people to use it now as well. Here’s why:
Look, you have to understand: there is no magic button. It would be naive to suggest that if we collect 100,000 votes, our bill will automatically become law. Let’s be clear about one simple thing: through ROI, we are introducing bills on behalf of the opposition. The authorities do not like these laws and do not want to pass them. Even if we had a 40% faction in the State Duma, these bills still would not be adopted. Here are the initiatives that have already reached 100,000 votes:
a ban on officials buying expensive foreign cars; an end to internet censorship; broadening the definition of “self-defense”; abolishing increased duties on online purchases; a ban on flashing blue lights on officials’ cars
It’s obvious that all of these initiatives are largely unacceptable to the authorities, and two of them—internet censorship and customs duties—were supported amid public outrage over the passage of the relevant laws. So to those who say, “We already voted and nothing was passed,” please take a more realistic view of the effort required to achieve what we want.
The laws we need have to be fought for, and collecting signatures on ROI is the first step in that direction.
As someone who has long and regularly worked on introducing draft laws, I can tell you firmly that, for all its flaws, this method of legislative initiative is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more effective than the traditional one.
We—I, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), RosPil, and others—work with many deputies and their aides, and we are always grateful to them for that. They help and submit our proposals. In 95% of cases, it ends with the proposal being rejected in committee and buried in complete silence. If it does make it to a vote, some guy at the podium mutters to an empty chamber: “Amendment No. 2674548 is recommended by the committee for rejection.” And that’s it. End of the legislative process.
Now look at our car initiative. several million people know about it, and 100,000 of them feel personally invested in it; tons of media outlets wrote about it, because reaching 100,000 created a real news hook; it was discussed in government, and the government even said it would partially satisfy it; now Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front (ONF, a pro-Kremlin political movement) is trying to steal the initiative and comically scolding officials for such purchases. We don’t mind, because what matters to us is results, not appearances; Medvedev’s decision to ban officials from purchasing foreign-made cars, for all its stupidity and hypocrisy, is a direct consequence of our initiative.
Did we get what we wanted? Maybe 10 percent of it. But I can say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of opposition initiatives introduced into the State Duma through the traditional route achieved far less.
Here’s another similar example: our “people’s deputy” campaign and the initiative on transparency in housing and utility tariffs. In procedural terms, it was similar to ROI—a direct legislative initiative by the public.
We hadn’t even gotten to collecting signatures before City Hall went into overdrive, mobilizing all its resources and all its people to torpedo the initiative. A record number of media outlets and government ministers showed up for the Moscow City Duma session on it. Moscow City Duma speaker Platonov ran to Echo of Moscow 134 times and wrote a whole pile of posts. In the end, through outright lawlessness, they rejected it, but it became a whole saga—whereas an ordinary bill introduced by a Moscow City Duma deputy gets shelved so quickly and quietly that even he doesn’t hear it happen.
In other words, collecting signatures for an initiative is a whole process—far from easy, but one that generates incomparably more public resonance than a bill introduced through the traditional route.
I’ll say even more: if I were a State Duma deputy right now, I would still push key bills through ROI and similar systems. Because the political weight is completely different. It’s one thing to vote against a deputy or a faction, and quite another to vote against 100,000 citizens.
Discussion. Look, even with the visa initiative. Anton Nosik (a well-known Russian blogger and media figure), for example, doesn’t like it, and he’s already written four posts about it. Each one is read by tens of thousands of people. They argue, discuss, look for arguments. Some are persuaded, some aren’t. But the process itself is very good: debate about real problems involving not just experts, but huge numbers of people.
Fraud. This is a serious issue, of course. We’ve caught ROI doing this before. And in the most recent elections to the “Public Chamber” (a state-affiliated consultative body), the manipulation was so open and obvious that no one doubts it anymore: the numbers can be tweaked, and most likely they are being tweaked. So where someone else needs to collect 100,000, we’ll have to collect 150,000—or maybe 300,000. That’s frustrating and demoralizing, but then again, it’s the same in elections, the same in the media, the same everywhere in Russia. The authorities cheat. So we’ll collect 300,000 instead of 100,000, and remember that our goal is not just to gather votes, but also to campaign and popularize the initiative.
(the most important thing) By putting forward initiatives and collecting signatures for them, we are shaping an image of the future. We are constantly accused of the same things: you propose nothing; you yourselves have no idea what comes afterward; you cannot articulate what kind of Russia you want.
In fact, we know perfectly well, and through the bills people support we are even answering formally: this is the kind of Russia we want.
Even taking into account the tiny number of initiatives that have already been supported (see point 1), it is clear that in our future Russia there will be no internet censorship, there will be fewer trade restrictions and more opportunities for e-commerce, officials will not spend our money on luxury items, everyone will have equal rights on the roads, and the right to self-defense will be inviolable.
Of course, this is not enough to fully define the image of a future Russia, but its characteristic features are already coming into view. And we like that future Russia very much. Voters will like it too.
And the best part is that this is not just the thinking of Alexei Navalny or the program of the Progress Party—it is the documented view of hundreds of thousands of people. It is something you can write down on paper, roll into a tube, and smack any United Russia member in the face with at any debate.
(equally important) By collecting signatures for bills and initiatives, we are giving shape to our WE. But who are we? What is our common ground? That we go to rallies together? My answer to that question is: we are those who support a European path of development for Russia. And any normal voter will ask at that point: more specifically?
Initiatives and bills are exactly what makes it more specific. Because our WE is actually quite complex. Since I’ve already mentioned Nosik, let’s keep using him as an example. He doesn’t like the visa initiative. But on all five of the other initiatives that have already been supported, we would be completely aligned. That gives us an understanding that he is unquestionably inside our WE, and an understanding of what he will vote for and what he won’t. What kind of coalition government he would support and what kind he would not (regardless of personalities, based on the package of initiatives). And how far we can broaden the coalition without losing the support of a hypothetical Nosik—otherwise he’ll go looking for a WE that feels more comfortable to him.
And the same applies to everyone and everything. What matters now is creating public advocacy groups around clear, concrete initiatives, so that later we do not end up as one of those groups that says, “We’re for everything good, but nothing specific unites us.”
Let’s treat collecting signatures on ROI not simply as collecting signatures, but as building an active column—not a fifth column—of 100,000 people. That is an enormous force. Of course, working with it is very difficult, but still. There should be as many such columns as possible, even if the same people overlap between them.
Supporting draft laws is an important element of political struggle, and it becomes even more important under conditions where we are barred from elections, parties are denied registration, and criminal cases are opened against us.
Of course, it is only one element, and far from the most effective one—but why should we give it up?
So, that’s everything I wanted to say in defense of collecting signatures online. I hope I managed to persuade some of you.
One last thing: my organizational mistake was that we did not immediately start building a parallel database of people ready to support and sign initiatives. We collected 100,000 votes for the car initiative, but we don’t have those people’s email addresses.
With visas, we acted more correctly on this site: first you leave your email with us, and then you go to ROI. As a result, out of the 72,000 people who have already voted for the visa initiative, about 14,000 have left us their email addresses. I believe this database should be expanded to 300,000 participants, registered on the Gosuslugi state services portal and ready to take part in this work. Then we will be able to support the initiatives we need fairly quickly and force the government to give us some kind of response.
If you like this idea, leave your email here.
And of course, if you still haven’t voted for this basic measure used by civilized countries to combat excessive migration, then here are instructions on how to recover or obtain your password. Vote, and tell everyone: this is how I want things to be arranged in the future Russia.