In Novosibirsk, we have real, highly engaging political work in full swing.
Everything accomplished so far has been done with minimal funding or through the efforts of volunteers. We have real progress to show: primaries have been held, the candidate list has been finalized, and the election commission accepted 20 kilograms of legal documents on the first try.
We have rented a convenient ground-floor office in the city center. Signature gatherers are being trained every day. Handwriting experts and volunteer trainers have been hired. Across the city, signature-collection cubes are set up, and door-to-door canvassing is underway.
We opened an election account and started raising money. We have put together a full-fledged campaign headquarters. Normally, fundraising posts like this one—as you may have guessed—say how much has been received and how much has been spent. But thanks to the wonderful Sberbank (Russia’s largest state-owned bank; election accounts can only be opened there), which is either sabotaging us or is simply in complete disarray, we still have not been given online banking access, and we cannot even say how much has already been transferred to us in donations. As absurd as it sounds, Sber itself cannot tell us the balance on the account. For now, it’s been one endless fight with them.
Fortunately, some of you have already chipped in. We sent off a payment order for 320,000 rubles for leaflets with cautious hope—and it went through. So we have definitely raised at least 321,000 rubles.
In any case, our campaign is steadily approaching the point where we need to do things that simply cannot be done by volunteers alone. We have many volunteers, and they are wonderful, but they cannot print a full run of a campaign newspaper or produce leaflets and the panels for the signature-collection cubes by hand.
We all need to chip in. This is our common struggle, and if you cannot travel to Novosibirsk and work on the streets, then a small contribution to the election account would be an excellent way to help.
There is no such thing as a major election campaign without money—and Novosibirsk Region is a major election.
Please go here and support our common cause with your hard-earned rubles.