Last night I wrote on Twitter that in Kostroma they put up the first billboard of my life. Before that, we had never been given permission anywhere.
There were four of them in total—with official payment, a contract, approval of the design, and so on. I say “were” because that same night the billboards were taken down. Officially stolen: Kostroma City Hall told the advertising company that they were the ones who removed them, and that if anything like this happened again, the company would lose its license and the billboard structures would be cut down.
And each poster costs a lot more than 100 rubles (like the famous painting), isn’t hanging on a fence, and is very much not ownerless.
I learned this morning that the billboards had not even stayed up through the night, right after reading V. V. Putin’s statement to Italian journalists that we supposedly do not even have censorship on television.
Clearly, we made a mistake: we should have bought advertising on Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel), not billboards in Kostroma. There, they would have placed everything without any problem.
P.S. Residents of Kostroma, Kaluga, and Novosibirsk regions, don’t forget to register as voters to take part in the primaries to form the opposition’s election lists.