All morning today, the news has been running the same headline: "Yevgeny Roizman stripped of his post as head of Yekaterinburg." The correct headline, of course, should be: "The clowns from United Russia have nothing better to do".
Roizman ran in the city’s mayoral election, people voted for him in that mayoral race, and he won it in a serious, competitive contest, defeating the United Russia candidate.
And now, besides being mayor, he also serves as a reminder that the authorities do not, in fact, have any real 84% support. That in one of Russia’s largest cities, the Putin-Medvedev party was beaten by a candidate whom state TV (derisively called the “zombie box” in Russian) attacked as viciously as it could.
That memory is apparently so painful that they simply had to engage in this petty fraud and forbid Roizman from calling himself the "head of Yekaterinburg"—which required abolishing the office altogether, even though it was introduced in the city some 250 years ago (which says a lot about all their talk of “traditional values” and history).
Apparently, there are no more important or urgent issues to deal with.
Take note that something truly unprecedented happened recently: the city of Yekaterinburg was stripped of its authority to approve rallies and marches. The regional United Russia branch pushed such a law through its first reading, and under it Yekaterinburg would become the first city in Russia whose authorities are deprived of the power to authorize even a children’s parade, let alone political demonstrations.
From now on, only Governor Kuivashev will be able to handle that—and he doesn’t even have a higher-education diploma. And he became governor only because he is related either to Sobyanin or to Rakovа. No other accomplishments can be credited to him.
All in all, I feel sorry for Yevgeny and for Sverdlovsk Region, where power has been seized not just by crooks, but by crooks who are both aggressive and stupid.
On the other hand, I have no doubt that the city’s residents will continue to call Roizman what he should be called: the head of the city of Yekaterinburg.
P.S.
Right after this post was published, news came in that Governor Kuivashev had vetoed his own law:
Idiocy and stupidity at taxpayers’ expense. He would do better to pull all the complaints from RosZhKH for Sverdlovsk Region and sit down to sort through them.